The number of city public schools deemed dangerous by the state has more than doubled since last year to 25 — including one school that renamed itself the “Peace Academy” last summer.
The spike in designations accompanied a 5 percent increase in the number of crimes committed in public schools during the 2011-12 school year.
Violent incidents were largely concentrated in the city’s perennially problematic middle schools, with 19 of the 25 flagged schools serving the middle grades.
Among the 14 newly added schools was the former Knowledge and Power Preparatory VII middle school in Brooklyn, which apparently chose the wrong summer to be dubbed the “Peace Academy.”
The turbulent Clinton Hill school — where enrollment is just 117 students this year — has had four principals in less than six years and was recently hit with its second F rating in as many years.
READ THE FULL EDUCATION DEPARTMENT REPORT (PDF)
“The kids just want to fight,” said seventh-grader Joshua Rivera, 12. “You see kids arguing, fighting, and the teachers break it up but the kids want to keep fighting.”
Other students said the school has calmed down a bit since current Principal Lisa Reiter was appointed in 2011.
She did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
Ten other schools that were labeled dangerous in 2011 stayed on the naughty list, as did the lone school to be designated for three years running — the University Neighborhood Middle School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
City DOE officials said they petitioned to get the B-rated school off the list, but they were denied.
They also took issue with some of the characterizations of incidents by state officials — such as labeling butt-slapping horseplay as a sex offense or considering a stink bomb a weapon.
They emphasized that crime has dropped significantly in schools over the past decade.
However, Of the city’s 25 unsafe schools, nearly one-third were opened by the Bloomberg administration since 2005 to replace failing middle schools.
Only one high school — Bronx Career and College Prep HS, which opened in Foxhurst in 2009 — was deemed persistently dangerous.
The state identified 12 city schools as persistently dangerous last year.
Only eight schools in the rest of New York state were flagged as dangerous this year, down from 10 last year.