Despite an assertion that NYPD was considering a $20 million hiring spree of 475 new school safety agents amid a fiscal crisis by a city education official, City Hall and police leaders say there's been no official decision made.
Politico reported Thursday that Kenyatte Reid, executive director of the Department of Education's Office of Safety and Youth Development, said at a City Council hearing that he learned that NYPD is bringing in the two new classes.
“I am deeply concerned that our investment is in the wrong place," Reid testified Thursday at the Education Committee hearing, and added the funding could be better used for many other resources as the public school system is strained by the pandemic.
Reid’s news surprised several Councilmembers at the hearing, which focused on moving oversight of school safety agents from the NYPD to the DOE, a move that will take several years to finish. The decision came following a contentious budget battle last year.
The mere discussion of hiring more school safety agents reflects the city’s misplaced priorities when school communities desperately need resources to help their students during the pandemic, said Councilmember Mark Treyger who chairs the council’s Education Committee. “To hear that they're on the verge of considering hiring 475 school safety agents, when many of our schools can't even hire a school psychologist or a school social worker, it was outrageous,” Treyger said in a phone interview.
Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who has been an outspoken advocate of shifting funding from the NYPD to anti-violence initiatives and family and social services, said the new hires would be a “disingenuous” move after Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to reforming school security policies.
“Our schools have been over-policed for decades, which has exacerbated the school to prison pipeline and left students feeling more unsafe than ever,” said Jacob Tugendrajch, a spokesperson for Johnson told Gothamist in a statement. “That's why the City Council successfully fought to initiate a major transformation in our approach to policing and student wellness. It's mind-boggling and disingenuous that the Administration would look to build up NYPD's school safety force now while we are amid this process. We need to move forward, not backward.”
The funding for NYPD was a political flashpoint for de Blasio and the City Council after last summer's protests over police brutality. Several members of New York City Council, as well as some student advocates, called on de Blasio to transfer back to the DOE control of school safety, which was handed over to the NYPD in 1998, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.
But both City Hall and NYPD cautioned discussion of new school safety hires were still preliminary, with DOE Deputy Chancellor LaShawn Robinson saying during the hearing that “my team members are talking about the possibilities,” the Daily News reported.
“As Deputy Chancellor Robinson clarified during the hearing, no decisions have been made," said de Blasio’s spokesperson Avery Cohen in an email statement.
“The NYPD has been speaking with the Office of Management and Budget and the Mayor’s Office about replacing school safety agents that have been lost through attrition. No final decision has been made,” said Sergeant Jessica McRorie, a spokesperson for the NYPD, in an email statement.
School safety agents play a variety of roles: greeting and signing in visitors to school buildings, deploying metal detectors at some schools, responding to fights, and even issuing arrests. In many cases, they’re called to respond to student mental health crises. NYPD has about 5,000 school police in the city’s 1,800 public schools, making New York City’s public school officers by themselves one of the country’s biggest police forces.
“We have 5,500 school safety agents. But we have only about 1,500 or so social workers,” Treyger said. “And what does that tell you? We are failing to meet the safety needs of our kids, we're failing to meet the social emotional needs of our kids, and we need to broaden the conversation about safety.”
