Marcus Alston thought he was fiddling with a bottle of his friend’s perfume when he unleashed pepper spray on the floor of his high school Spanish class. It didn’t seem serious to Alston, now a junior at Manhattan’s Pace High School, and he admitted responsibility. But officials said in a letter that Alston “was in possession of a dangerous chemical,” classified as a weapon in the discipline code. The incident last school year resulted in a month-long suspension in one of the city’s 34 suspension centers, where students are sent for suspensions longer than five days. To Alston, it felt like jail. “Learning in that place is not a thing because of the chaos happening,” he said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has made reducing suspensions a pillar of his education agenda, and overall suspension rates have plummeted since he took office. Yet lengthier out-of-school suspensions, disproportionately issued to students of color, have fallen much less sharply. And while advocates have called attention to lengthy punishments, what happens inside the suspension centers themselves is largely shielded from the public and faces little scrutiny. Known as “Alternate Learning Centers,” they are not included in the city’s school quality reports, meaning there is virtually no public information about their safety, attendance, or students’ performance.
According to more than a dozen interviews with students, center staff, and advocates, the suspension centers are dull at best and chaotic at worst, sometimes derailing students academically and failing to address the problems that landed them out-of-school suspensions in the first place. Academic expectations are often low; in some cases, students say they spent their days filling out worksheets that have little to do with the coursework from their original schools, watched movies, or slept. Lots of students don’t show up at all.
Still, officials and advocates say the conditions have improved in recent years. The suspension centers typically boast small class sizes and better access to guidance counselors and social workers than traditional public schools provide. Some students have even requested to stay longer than their suspensions require. However, it’s impossible to say how common that experience is or generally how effective the centers are, because the education department releases little information about them. Officials declined requests for Chalkbeat to visit any of the suspension centers and did not produce any data showing what happens to students once they leave. “We don’t know all that much about them,” said Danny Dromm, a city councilman and former education committee chairman who has introduced legislation that would require the department to release statistics about the centers.
From the moment he arrived at his assigned suspension center, Alston said things felt different from Pace (which declined to comment on his case). Staffers at the Battery Park suspension center confiscated his hoodie, which he was normally allowed to wear at school, patted him down, and searched his bag.
Things didn’t improve from there. Although staffers at the suspension center asked what classes Alston was taking, they placed him in a basic algebra course even though he was taking geometry. And it wasn’t long before Alston, who identifies as bisexual, says he was bullied.
“Some kids are saying, ‘I knock faggots out,’ or were calling my friends that,” he said, adding that staff members rarely intervened. “You’re definitely singled out if you’re different. You didn’t know if you were going to be safe.”
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