School districts across Illinois are failing to disclose thousands of drug, weapon and teacher assault incidents to the state as required by a long-standing state law created to give the public a clear picture of crime at neighborhood schools.
The statewide reporting system is deeply flawed, with lax oversight and no enforcement from the very state agencies that built it, a Tribune investigation found.
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A review of municipal records in the Chicago area shows that school districts often report crimes to local police, but not to the state. That extra step is mandated so the information can be compiled and made widely available to parents, residents and law enforcement. What has resulted is an incomplete and inconsistent school crime database that fails to deliver what was promised.
Some of the state’s largest high school districts, including Stevenson in Lake County, Hinsdale in DuPage, Maine 207 in Cook and Lincoln-Way 210 in Will, have not reported a single incident to the state’s database in at least six years, records show.
Yet during that time, local police have responded to more than 100 drug cases and other serious incidents at schools in those districts that should have been disclosed to the state.
Districts such as Naperville 203, New Trier and Lake County’s high school District 128 initially reported incidents to the state after the law took effect and then stopped, though crime did not: At District 128’s Vernon Hills High School, for example, local police logged at least 18 incidents involving marijuana, LSD and cocaine after the district stopped disclosing incidents to the state in spring 2007, records show.
The biggest hole in the state reporting system is Chicago Public Schools. The mammoth school system, with 675 schools and more than 400,000 students, has not reported a single incident to the school-crime database since its inception in March 2006.
Over that period, Chicago police have logged about 9,000 drug offenses on or around school grounds, including hard drugs like heroin, hallucinogens and crack cocaine. There were more than 1,200 infractions involving guns, according to Chicago police. And at least 20 teachers over the last five years have been beaten so severely by students on campus that they’ve missed months and sometimes years of work, district records show. Yet none of those cases was reported to the state as required.
Overall, only 40 percent of Illinois school districts have reported even one incident to the state’s database, records show, and only a handful of private schools have done so, though they are bound by the same law.
Lawmakers say that underreporting shields parents and residents from knowledge of serious crimes at schools and hampers efforts of state law enforcement, which can use the data to identify crime trends and get resources where they need to be.
“It’s very troublesome that we have reporting in a Swiss cheese fashion. We need this data in its entirety to be able to make the proper decisions to protect our children’s schools,” said longtime state Sen. Kirk Dillard, R-Hinsdale, one of the architects of the 1999 law that sought to produce a uniform crime report for K-12 campuses that would be available to the public.
“If there are crime issues or weapons issues occurring at schools, parents have a right to know what’s going on,” said state Sen. Susan Garrett, D-Lake Forest, who backed the law’s enactment. “Not only parents, but people in the community, elected officials. That information should never be shielded, because it might force a school to go in and address the situation.”
Garrett sponsored legislation this spring that would generally expand and strengthen the incident reporting law, but the measure did not get final approval. She conceded that even if it becomes law, enforcement could be an issue considering the flaws in the current system.
“I’m not sure whether schools have been reluctant to publish this kind of information or not, but if they have, those days are gone,” Garrett said. “It’s too important.”
Neither the Illinois State Police nor the Illinois State Board of Education, both of which are responsible for making school crime information public, has cracked down on districts that don’t report as required. Officials at both agencies said they don’t have the resources or the personnel to enforce the law.
The state’s School Incident Reporting System tracks incidents involving drugs, firearms and attacks on teachers and other school personnel. It releases the data, by district and private school, through the state education board’s website. About 15,000 incidents have been reported since the system debuted in 2006, but police records obtained by the Tribune from 20 municipalities, including Chicago, show thousands of additional cases that also should have been reported.
If properly handled, the system would be among the simplest ways for parents to find out what’s happening on their child’s campus. Several school district officials told the Tribune they send out alerts if a life-threatening situation occurs on campus. But they don’t routinely send home information about incidents such as illegal drugs at school unless those cases are considered a widespread threat to campus safety. District and school websites don’t point parents to the state’s database, and the state education board doesn’t make it easy to find. The website is: isbe.net/research/htmls/sch_incident.htm
In some cases, schools prefer to handle drug incidents in-house.
“We have had issues where we’ve had students with drugs, and…. we take care of it internally,” said Stacy Holland, spokeswoman for Will County’s Lincoln-Way Community High School District 210. “What we’re trying to do is help anybody 18 and under — we’re trying to help not put anything on a permanent record.”
School officials struggled to explain why their districts weren’t complying with the 13-year-old state law.
“We dropped the ball. … Nobody seems to have a good explanation,” said Jim Conrey, spokesman for Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire. “We are not trying to skirt the rules. We simply failed to do it. The bottom line is that we are going to be rectifying that.”
That sentiment was expressed by officials in several other districts, who said they’ll begin reporting and even go back to report older incidents now that they have been alerted by the Tribune.
In Naperville School District 203, officials initially reported about 50 incidents to the state — most of them related to marijuana on campuses — though police records show dozens more should have been disclosed.
District spokeswoman Susan Rice said in an email: “It isn’t clear why the reporting stopped.” She said staff turnover might have been to blame, adding that the district will begin reporting as required.
In Hinsdale, students were skeptical when told that no incidents have been reported by Hinsdale Township High School District 86.
“I don’t believe it. I have a feeling that there has to be at least one person” who’s committed a crime on campus, said a sophomore, who laughed at the idea that the school has been without incidents in six years. Students nearby agreed. Hinsdale Central has had at least two dozen drug incidents on campus since 2007, local police records show.
The school-crime reporting law was one piece of a larger school safety initiative launched by former Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan at a time when a rash of school shootings across the nation was stoking fears about violence on campuses. The law was passed by the General Assembly in May 1999, a month after the shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School shook the nation.
The law requires school administrators to report, first to local police, then to state police, all drug incidents, firearms on school grounds and attacks against teachers and other school personnel at public and private schools. State police are required to collect this data and turn it over to the Illinois State Board of Education, which is required to make the information available to the public.
In 2006, state police completed an arrangement with the board to implement the School Incident Reporting System, which enables school administrators to report crimes in greater detail directly to the state education agency, said state police spokeswoman Monique Bond.
The system is one piece in a mishmash of data-collection sites that offer conflicting information about crime in schools. For example, state police gather reports from local police about attacks against school personnel. State police numbers show 13,016 such attacks statewide from 2006 to 2009, the latest figures available. The School Incident Reporting System shows just 1,648 cases from March 2006 through early May 2012.
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Several school district officials pointed out the difficulty of dealing with the various state and federal agencies that require reports on crime. They often must complete multiple reports on similar types of information, such as violent incidents and suspensions or expulsions related to illegal drugs.
“We were under the impression we were following mandates — we’ve never gotten any notice from the state that there are any (reporting) delinquencies,” said Kelley Munch, communications coordinator for Kane County’s Geneva School District 304. As it turns out, the district wasn’t disclosing to the state’s School Incident Reporting System. Meanwhile, Geneva police, for example, have logged more than 50 illegal drug or alcohol-related incidents at Geneva Community High School since 2007, among other incidents.
Likewise, Maine 207 spokesman Dave Beery said: “We actually were not aware that we were not in compliance. To the best of my knowledge we have never been notified by ISBE or the regional (education) office that we were not in compliance.”
The district is now taking steps to rectify the situation, he said. “We do understand the importance of reporting,” Beery said.
State education board spokesman Matt Vanover acknowledged that districts aren’t regularly reporting.
“You have to understand we have 867 districts that have locally elected boards, and it’s the responsibility of those boards to make sure they’re in compliance,” Vanover said.
Despite concerns from lawmakers about alerting the public to crime on school grounds, many types of infractions are not subject to the reporting law. Assault and battery cases that involve only students, for example, do not have to be reported under the 1999 state law.
Jadine Chou, the top safety and security officer at Chicago Public Schools, said the district reports crime statistics to local police but acknowledged that CPS does not report directly to state police as required by law. Instead, Chou said, the district relies on local police to turn the data over to state police. Though crimes on school grounds are included in the data that Chicago police supply regularly to state police, the information does not tag incidents as school-related crime.
Chou, who joined CPS earlier this year, had no explanation of why the district had not been sending crime data to the state’s school crime database and was surprised to learn it was not in compliance with the law. She said the district is doing what it can to keep parents and the community informed.
“It is our goal to be as transparent as possible, keeping in mind that under some instances, we have to protect the privacy of all those involved,” Chou said. “We’re serious about that.”
Tribune reporter Erin Meyer contributed.