At the same time, the court pointed out that educators were not without options when dealing with potentially dangerous students.
For instance, the court noted that educators may use any of a variety of procedures when responding to dangerous students, such as study carrels, time-outs, detention, restriction of privileges, or suspensions for up to 10 days.
As a result, some high schools that were first told that they could transfer up to 40 of their most disruptive and dangerous students to the program have now been told that they can remove just three students each.
The two cases came as City Hall and the Department of Education scrambled this week to correct problems with the school suspension process that have caused long delays this year in removing dangerous students from the schools.
"We've screwed up," Mr. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program, offering an unusually blunt mea culpa for the city's failure to move quickly to suspend dangerous students and provide them with timely hearings.
He has also promoted legislation to immunize teachers who take disciplinary action against unruly or dangerous students from lawsuits and has pledged that, as president, he would require perpetually dangerous schools to make arrangements for students who wanted to transfer to safer learning environments.
A36 NEW YORK/REGION B1-12 Delays in Hearings Leave Violent Students in School High school principals and deans say the city's system for suspending violent students is in disarray, sometimes resulting in three-week delays before dangerous students can be removed from a school.
On the program, Mr. Bloomberg referred to an article in The New York Times yesterday that found the city's system for suspending violent students in disarray, leading to delays of up to three weeks in removing dangerous students from the schools.
The unusual show of unity between city officials and the unions came three days after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in his weekly radio program, bluntly accepted personal responsibility for problems in the school disciplinary process that have resulted in a failure by the city to quickly suspend dangerous students, provide them with timely hearings and remove them from schools.
Putting aside months of feuding, the Bloomberg administration and the unions for teachers and principals joined forces yesterday on the issue of violence in the public schools, vowing to use a number of strategies, including the swift removal of the most dangerous students, to make schools safer.
