A new law to reform school safety, as promised by the New York City Council, mandates the Department of Education (DOE) and the NYPD School Safety Division to be more transparent and accountable to the public.

Last month, the City Council overwhelmingly approved the package of three bills that were signed into law, including Intro. 266-A, which requires the DOE to make information about school crime and disruptive behavior available to the public; Intro. 322-A, which requires the DOE to report the number of school safety agents assigned to each school; and Intro. 150-A, which requires the DOE to install security cameras at schools.

With Council’s Public Safety Committee Chair Peter Vallone Jr., Education Chair Eva Moskowitz, Local 237 President Carl Haynes, Citywide Director and Trustee Gregory Floyd, and several school representatives standing beside him outside Manhattan’s Washington Irving High School on Nov. 10, Council Speaker Gifford Miller said:

“The first step in ensuring safety is giving parents the information they need to make decisions about where their children will be safe. Right now, parents are essentially left in the dark about the safety of their kids’ schools. That has to stop. And it will with this law.”

“Before this bill,” said Council Member Vallone, “you could find out the school lunch menu on the web, but not the amount of crimes in individual schools. Parents will now be able to make an informed choice about their child’s school.”

President Haynes, Floyd and several dozen Local 237 school safety agents have traveled to City Hall numerous times to testify at public hearings held jointly by the Public Safety and Education committees on the shortcomings of the city’s school safety system.

Haynes praised the City Council for focusing on the issue and “listening to the problems articulated by the people who try to do the best job they possibly can in the schools with inadequate equipment and support from administrators.” Haynes added that if the DOE and the Police Department “took the time to understand the job of school safety agents and the challenges they face every day in their effort to manage security we would not be here today and our schools would be a lot safer.”

He said that a big part of the problem with the current system “lies in the fact that the public does not know and has no way to find out how safe our schools really are because the DOE and the NYPD hide the information necessary to do a complete assessment. For years this union has been calling for consistent and reliable data on crime and incidents of assault in schools.”

Intro 266 requires the DOE and NYPD to make data on crime and disruptive behavior open and accessible to the public. Currently some data is available online, but is often convoluted and confusing. The legislation requires the information to be posted online and made available at the school and in an annual report card that schools are required by state law to send out. In addition, the data would list the number of major, non-major and criminal incidents. It would also include the name of each specific felony, and whether it was a crime against a person or against property.

Intro 322-A requires the NYPD to report on a quarterly basis to the City Council the number of school safety agents assigned to each school. This will provide a better sense of how they are allocating resources of school safety agents.

“The Department of Education must comprehensively assess the safety needs of each school in terms of both personnel and equipment, including security cameras,” said Council Member Moskowitz. “No plan for increasing school safety can be truly effective without this information.” She added: “Furthermore, it is every parent’s right to have accurate, up to date, and specific school safety data on school report cards. This legislation is a decisive victory for New York City’s parents and kids.”

Intro 150-A mandates that by the end of 2006, every school in New York City will be reviewed by the Department of Education to determine if a school should have a camera, and report to the City Council by the end of 2006, specifying which of its schools have cameras, which do not, and why.

Keeping Wrong People Out
“It is clear that cameras will prevent crimes,” asserted Council Member Vallone. “They help keep the right people in, keep the wrong people out, and may help prevent terrorism. This bill is a big first step towards my goal of putting cameras in every school in the city.”

Of the approximate 1,300 schools under the Department of Education’s authority, only 155 currently have cameras installed. Both the Department of Education and the NYPD have concluded that increasing the number of schools that have cameras would work towards reducing crime in schools.

Assistant Chief Gerald Nelson, commanding officer of the NYPD’s School Safety Division, agreed during a recent Public Safety Committee hearing that cameras are an excellent and effective deterrent to crime in schools. The DOE has allocated $120 million toward installing security cameras in up to 145 additional schools.