JACKSON HEIGHTS — How many bullying incidents were reported at your child's school?
In Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst and Corona, the majority of bullying incidents reported to the state by city schools were in middle schools, according to the data.
But experts say schools with a higher percentage of incidents may not actually have more bullying — they might just be more diligent about reporting. In fact, in the 2013-2014 school year, only 30 percent of the city's public and charter schools reported bullying to the state. That's just 510 schools out of the city's 1,700.
New York state's Education Department uses two databases to track bullying — Violent Disruptive Incident Reporting or VADIR and the Dignity for All Students Acts (DASA), which tracks incidents related to cyber-bullying and bias incidents.
At the Renaissance Charter School, on 81st Street and 37th Avenue, for example, there were a combined 54 incidents reported to the state: 26 incidents reported under VADIR and 28 incidents reported under Dignity for All, according to data obtained by DNAinfo.
(Details of the incidents were not released so it's unclear if the same incidents could have been reported to both databases.) Yet 16 percent of students surveyed by the city said bullying is prevalent in the school, according to a survey.
By comparison, at I.S 245, at 80th Street near 34th Avenue, 33 percent of students surveyed reported bullying. But there were 28 total reported incidents last year — 20 on VADIR, and 8 on DASA.
At P.S. 127, on 98th Street and 25th Avenue, while 31 percent of those surveyed said they witnessed bullying, only six individual cases were reported on the two state systems.
Critics say the process of reporting bullying to city and state Education Departments has been shoddy, and often allows incidents to slip through the cracks.
Look for your school in our interactive below:
