At the first of what may be several hearings on the City Council’s School Safety Action Plan, Local 237 members spoke extensively about the rising level of violence in city schools, injuries to school safety agents, who do not get line-of-duty pay, and a lack of communication between city agencies that keep track of school crimes.

At the hearing Jan. 28, which focused on implementing the Council’s safety plan launched in December, Council Speaker Gifford Miller joined Council Member Eva Moskowitz, who chairs the Committee on Education, and Council Member Peter F. Vallone Jr., who chairs the Committee on Public Safety, to hear testimonies from Local 237 members as well as the New York Police Department, the Department of Education, and the United Federation of Teachers.

Local 237’s Citywide Director Gregory Floyd led the union’s testimony, noting that the 4,000 school safety agents represented by the union are charged with protecting more than one million city students and school staff. “They are crucial to the solution,” said Floyd, “yet the work of school safety agents is under-appreciated and under-compensated.” School safety agents receive the lowest wages of any peace officers in the city, said Floyd, explaining how poor pay contributes to the 10 percent annual attrition rate as hundreds of trained agents leave public schools each year for better paying jobs.

Floyd called for better equipment and promotion opportunities, and emphasized the need for improved compensation, especially for line-of-duty injuries. “The NYPD makes us go through a grievance procedure, therefore a line-of-duty injury means that the person is not paid until the grievance is resolved,” said Floyd, explaining how demoralizing it is for peace officers to use their own sick and vacation time to recover from on-the-job injuries.


Confusing Data

The issue that dominated the hearing was the lack of clear information regarding the number of crimes committed in schools. There appears to be no sharing of information among the NYPD, DOE and UFT, and much confusion exists over gathering such critical information.

“Statistics are a huge issue,” said Patricia Stryker, Local 237’s director of political action and legislation, pointing out that “our members were intimidated by their supervisors not to fill out the union’s incident reports.”

Both DOE Chancellor Joel I. Klein and NYPD Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly drew grins from the audience when they acknowledged, after prodding by the Council, that they don’t have the technology to monitor the level of crime in schools, although they persisted in saying that serious school crimes fell 23 percent since 1998 when the NYPD took over school safety.

The critical question that Local 237 has been asking all along, was posed by Speaker Miller: “Who’s in charge of school safety agents?” Commissioner Kelly responded that the NYPD is in charge, while admitting that criminal incident reports are often written on scraps of paper. Meanwhile, non-criminal incidents are supposedly recorded by the DOE. But, according to several teachers who testified, principals often discourage them from reporting troublemakers who should be suspended.


Caught in the Middle

“There are two masters here,” noted Miller, observing that school safety agents are caught in the middle. “It’s all about coordination,” said Kelly, who sidestepped Miller’s next question: “Was an analysis made of the need for more school safety agents?” Kelly answered that a new class of 270 SSAs will be graduating Feb. 23, adding that “we’re looking into upgrading SSAs perhaps to civil service.” These measures may address the high SSA attrition rate, but Kelly is clearly not addressing the need for more school safety agents. Local 237 members who attended the hearing said later that it sounded like business as usual. Supporting Local 237’s testimony, UFT President Randi Weingarten repeated the need “to get full coverage for safety agents who are injured on the job, and to make this a job people would want.” She also noted the confusion surrounding incident reports. “When a teacher is hurt, the UFT collects the data,” said Weingarten, adding that the UFT mistakenly thought that the DOE and the NYPD kept track of all other school safety incidents in “only one report.”

While the hearing aired immediate concerns, permanent solutions are nowhere in sight. Still, a few concrete commitments were stated: Commissioner Kelly promised to “initiate monthly information to the DOE,” and Speaker Miller vowed to sponsor a bill mandating that incident reports be required by law. Chancellor Klein announced the opening this month of five suspension centers, and Council Member Vallone promised to keep on top of suspension issues.