A lawsuit from 5,000 of NYC public school safety agents contends that that they are ill-prepared—and underpaid—to deal with the violence and other horrors they see every day. An attorney for the safety agents' union, Teamsters Local 237, tells the Daily News, "It’s like Newtown is happening every day in the schools, but in slow motion. It’s incredible what people don’t know."
The Daily News has some of the explosive allegations from the class action lawsuit:
At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, agents keep a locker stuffed with confiscated weapons in the dean’s office, school safety agent Deserie Wilson testified. A butcher knife, homemade slings and an improvised bat are among the weapons Wilson and her fellow un-armed agents collected from students...
At Junior High School 190 in Queens, the gangs were so powerful that one female student was compelled to have sex with 17 boys, sometimes at school, and become a member, safety agent Rosemary Scott testified. Safety agents and school staffers were unable to stop the humiliating process that left the girl under the control of the Bloods, a gang that terrorized the school, Scott said...
School safety agent De Andrea Jordan plucked a gun off a second-grader at Wave Preparatory Elementary School in Queens last month without incident... Girls from Intermediate School 172 in Harlem sold oral sex for a dollar — and a classmate was their pimp, school safety agent Shakima Jones-Washington testified in October.
The lawsuit points out that while school safety agents are part of the NYPD and get similar training, they don't have weapons or wear bulletproof vests. Also: "Their starting pay is about $31,000, union officials said, and no matter how many years they remain on the job, their base salaries never exceed $35,000... [Additionally] agents — 70% of whom are women — earn $7,000 less annually than their largely male counterparts working in hospitals and shelters."
The city Law Department said it was "taking a very careful look" at the lawsuit.
