APS students with alcohol up almost 400%

In the Journal this morning, link, we read that the number of students in possession of alcohol has gone up 377%.

Not to worry though, the increase isn't due to the fact that more students are in possession of alcohol, but rather;

"Police say much of the increase is due to better reporting."

This has been APS' excuse for rising rates of all kinds of behavior, for at least a decade.

Which begs a question; how much better can one get at reporting? It is after all a fairly simple process; you find a kid with alcohol, you report it.

But APS has problems with reporting. A recent audit by the Council of the Great City Schools, revealed that APS administrators "routinely falsified" crime statistics to make their schools look better. In September, 2009, the Journal reported that the APS was no longer compiling crime statistics at all, link.

Once, when I was on the team negotiating the teacher contract, we were arguing that we had a right to know the truth about student misconduct in our schools. Then AHS Principal Tom Savage said;

"If I told the truth about what was going on in my school, the realtors in my neighborhood would have my neck."

A few days later, then Supt Peter Horoscak told me;

You can't just tell the truth, you don't know how someone might try to use it."

I can think of at least one way that the truth might be used; to solve a problem. You cannot solve a problem while at the same time denying its existence.

This is why the APS makes so little progress in solving
important problems; they don't know there are problems
because, they're still trying to figure out how to report them.

According the Journal report;

The top schools for alcohol-related incidents in 2009 were West Mesa ..., Rio Grande ..., and Cibola and Del Norte... The data do not include Manzano and La Cueva, (for which no data is compiled at all).