New York City parents formed the NYC School Safety Coalition after Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to put the Education Department in charge of the school safety agents instead of the NYPD.
De Blasio did not make the decision based on qualifications or safety. It has all to do with the “protests against racist police violence” last summer.
The parents made their voices louder “after authorities recovered five guns in two days at schools.” School safety agents recovered the guns in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
The city has seen a major increase in school guns in the past three years:
Between July 1 and October 17 of this year, before the recent rash of gun seizures, three firearms were recovered in city schools, compared to one each during the same period in 2019 and 2018, according to NYPD statistics. The five guns found this week bring this school year’s total to eight.
Mona Davids, a member of the coalition, criticized de Blasio and “woke politicians” for putting their children in danger:
MONA DAVIDS: No, I am certainly not a person of privilege, and those individuals do not speak for the majority of parents here in New York City. We want our children to be kept safe. Those individuals, woke politicians and others, are not speaking for us. Many of them do not even live in our communities. So as far as we’re concerned, we know what’s in the best interest of our children and the best interest is school safety agents remaining under the purview of the NYPD. And as a matter of fact, we need more school safety agents because we have a shortage of almost 1,500 school safety agents. That’s number one.Number two, there is a false narrative out there that our school safety agents, 70 percent of whom are Black and Hispanic mothers, heads of households, are police. That is not correct. Unlike other cities and states outside of New York City, our school safety agents are civil servants. They take a civil service exam. So yes, they go through 17 weeks of training at the police academy, but they are civil servants. So it boggles my mind why these politicians and other so-called progressive groups think it’s OK to jeopardize the safety of our children by trying to eliminate the position of school safety agents. Who is going to stop a stabbing and slashing, who is going to find loaded weapons? Not a guidance counselor. Not a teacher. Not the principal. Our school safety agents, and they have proven themselves.
But those woke politicians and parents have been pushing the city to either make the Education Department supervise the agents or get rid of them. They want the schools to use the funds to pay for “social workers and counselors, arguing that police presence disproportionately harms students of color.”
De Blasio promised to implement the plan by June 2022. He will be out of office by then so the new mayor would have to sort out all the details and deal with the growing pains.
Some doubt former police captain Eric Adams, who will likely become the next mayor, will finish de Blasio’s plan or scrap all the safety agents:
“A new mayor might not want to do any of it,” said NeQuan McLean, president of the local parent council in Brooklyn’s District 16, who supports the transition. McLean’s Bedford-Stuyvesant council held a town hall meeting on the issue in April where education department officials offered few details about how the transition would work.There’s good reason to suspect Adams, a former police captain, might be skeptical of de Blasio’s transition plan. During the campaign, he argued against removing school safety agents and pushed back against calls for sweeping reform of the school safety division, though he said there should not be a “police culture” in schools. (Spokespeople for the Adams campaign didn’t respond to questions about whether he would move forward with the transition of the school safety division to the education department.)
Those who want to keep the agents do not think the education department does not have the resources to handle the school safety division and pointed out its bad track record supervising school safety.
Polls show that students, teachers, and staff like having the agents. The positive polls include schools with a large black population.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY