Adeline Seise in her Bronx apartment with her twin sons Gabriel, right, and Alejandro.
By MICHAEL WINERIP
Published: April 8, 2012
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During the 2010-11 school year, Adeline Seise's son Gabriel, a second grader, repeatedly disrupted classes at Public School 67 in the Bronx.
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On Sept. 29, according to a school report, Gabriel told his teacher he was going to beat up a classmate. While the teacher was trying to calm him, Gabriel, who was 10 at the time, spotted the boy and pushed him from behind. The boy whipped Gabriel in the face with a sweater, scratching him under the eye. Gabriel was enraged, and when the teacher tried to stop him, he tripped her. Security guards restrained him and school officials called Emergency Medical Services, which transported Gabriel to St. Barnabas Hospital's emergency room, where he was evaluated by a psychiatrist.
Gabriel did not need to be admitted to the hospital, the psychiatrist wrote; he was cleared to return to school the next day.
This happened several times that year. Once, according to a school report, Gabriel became so enraged, "he grabbed desks, chairs, books and plastic bins and threw them throughout the room."
A few days after the Sept. 29 incident, the school's special education committee decided Gabriel — who has been given a diagnosis of attention deficit and oppositional defiant disorders — needed regular counseling.
He never got the counseling.
Typically, if disruptive children are going to attend a traditional public school, they are placed in a classroom with a 12-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio and assigned an aide.
Gabriel got neither. Instead, he was mainstreamed in a class of 25 that included 10 special education students and 2 teachers. Twice more that year, school officials called E.M.S. to take him to the hospital — once in restraints — and both times Gabriel was examined and returned to school the next day.
Then last summer, Ms. Seise filed a complaint with the Education Department . At an administrative hearing, P.S. 67's principal, Emily Grimball, was asked why Gabriel didn't get more extensive special education services. She answered that there wasn't enough money left in her budget.
"A lot of times it goes down to funding and what it is that the school is able to provide for the child," she testified.
In September, no doubt due in good part to Ms. Seise's administrative complaint, Gabriel received the extra services.
Since then, Ms. Grimball said, his behavior has improved considerably.
Gabriel has lots of company. For more than a decade, mental health and Education Department officials have worked to reduce referrals to E.M.S., which they see as an expensive and traumatizing response to problems that should be handled at the schools.
"Kids who make verbal and behavioral threats to themselves and other people very much need and deserve a same-day mental health evaluation," said Charles Soulé, a psychologist in pediatric psychiatry at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. "But most New York City school kids don't have access at the schools, where it's better done."
Dr. Soulé, who is the co-chairman of the New York City School-Based Mental Health Committee, said there had been some progress. In 1999, when he started working on this issue, 75 schools had mental health services. Today, according to the Education Department, 319 of the 1,700 schools have such services.
After news media coverage in 2004 highlighted the problem, the department appointed a full-time administrator to oversee mental health care. "The D.O.E. understands the need and is committed to improving, but the issue is resources," Dr. Soulé said.
In the last few years, care appears to have deteriorated. Dr. Soulé said the number of schools with services had fallen by 10 percent. Marge Feinberg, a department spokeswoman, said cuts were due in part to a reduction in state financing.
It's likely that there are thousands of mental health cases referred to emergency rooms each year. In 2009-10, there were 868 E.M.S. calls for suicidal ideation alone, according to school officials. That would not include children like Gabriel who are menacing to others.
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