New York City public schools will be locking their front doors under a new security initiative that will begin rolling out in May, in response to school shootings around the country.
Schools Chancellor David Banks said the rollout would begin with elementary schools in May and continue across the school system over the next several months. Doors will also be outfitted with camera systems and buzzers looked after by school safety agents under a hotly debated $43 million contract approved by the Panel for Education Policy in February.
“That is a different level of safety. That's not the daily issues that we're looking at, but that is meant to prevent the mass tragedies that we've been seeing all too often across the nation,” Banks said on Friday during the Adams administration’s weekly safety briefing. “And we're going to do everything we can to prevent something like that from happening.”
Banks first floated the idea last May, days after a gunman in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 elementary schoolchildren and two adults. Officials eventually said the shooter entered the school through an unlocked door that could only be secured from the outside. In a more recent school shooting, the gunman in Nashville, Tennessee, gained access to the building by opening fire on its glass doors.
New York’s policy has been to keep the main doors of its public schools unlocked in case of emergencies, with other exterior doors locked.
“I've heard from leaders all across the city who have said we've been saying this for years: You have to lock the front door. Now, this front door will still be manned,” Banks said. “ … If there's a young person who's in some level of distress, that school safety agent at the front door is going to see that, and they're going to respond to that.”
During the contract vote in February, some panel members said they were ill-equipped with information for assessing the effectiveness of the new initiative, though they were outshone by members in favor of pushing it through. Mayor Eric Adams included the initiative in his preliminary budget this year.
