OP-ED: IT’S TIME TO GET THE POLICE OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS.
Shaeleigh Severino is a paralegal, community advocate and candidate for City Council District 32 in Queens. She believes it is time to remove police officers from our city’s public schools.
Richmond Hill High School was on the verge of closing the second I walked through its doors. I was 13 years old and so excited to start high school; big ambitions, big ideas, bigger backpack. But due to budget cuts and mismanagement, I spent the next four years fighting, organizing, and advocating just to keep my school open.
There were so many things that Richmond Hill High didn’t have enough of — things like textbooks, computers, and teachers. One thing it did have more than enough of, though, was plenty of random appearances by the NYPD.
Officers would show up regularly — no warning, no explanation, no clear purpose. We were told they were there for our safety, but we never felt safer when they showed up looking lethal and bored. We felt small. We felt watched. We felt like we’d done something wrong.
The School-to-Prison pipeline is more than an idea or a cautionary tale, it is a fact of life pounded into our students the moment they walk into their school and see a metal detector in their path or an officer waiting to rip open their backpack. The message is clear: you are dangerous and cannot be trusted.
The issue of cops and “safety officers” in our city’s schools has been a divisive one for decades. In 1998, then-mayor Rudy Giuliani wrested control of school safety from the Department of Education and handed it to the NYPD, resulting in over 20 years of over-policed, under-resourced public education. But after this past summer’s protests against police brutality and a long-overdue racial justice reckoning, we’ve arrived at a boiling point.
Last June, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised a $1 billion cut to the NYPD budget by returning control of safety officers from the police department back to the DOE. Seven months later, not only has this transfer not occurred, but it was announced just last week that the NYPD is considering hiring nearly 475 new school safety agents at a cost of $20 million.
This is coming at a time when the city’s education budget is being slashed as a result of the pandemic, schools are struggling to return to in-person learning and many still lack essential needs, from social workers and psychologists to basics like textbooks and proper ventilation.
The NYPD currently employs over 5,000 police officers in our 1,800 public schools, making the school officer force alone the fifth-largest police unit in the entire country. Though some reforms have been made, many of these officers are authorized to frisk, detain or even arrest students.
By contrast, only 1,500 social workers are employed in schools across the city, an average of less than one per school.
What does it say about our values as a city that there are more than three times the number of people employed to punish and police our students than there are to listen to and educate them? How do we expect students to thrive in an environment that treats them with suspicion and distrust?
The problem is clear, as are the solutions.
If we are serious about ending the School-to-Prison pipeline, then we have to stop treating our schools like prisons. We have to stop handling students like criminals and we must stop spending more money on safety officers than we do on teachers, guidance counselors, and social workers.
Transferring control of school safety from the NYPD back to the DOE is a step in the right direction, but only a cosmetic one. We need top-to-bottom reform of how we keep our schools and our students safe, beginning with an immediate withdrawal of police from our schools.
We need to reapportion the money spent on these officers to hire more social workers, psychologists and guidance counselors, ensuring that every school in the city has at least two of these trained professionals on staff.
We need a dramatic investment in after-school programs, tutoring, mentorships, and student job opportunities. We need to add funding and resources for mental health, and put experts and health professionals in situations where they can defuse violent situations and help at-risk students. A police officer should never — NEVER — be the first to respond to a mental health emergency or a student in crisis. We need reformative practices in place to deal with violence and behavioral issues with sensitivity, attention and care.
And we need to enact real plans to integrate our schools. It should surprise no one that the schools with the highest police presence in our city are overwhelmingly Black and Brown. This imbalance is particularly felt here in District 32, home to the most segregated district in New York City. We have to prioritize new diversity targets, fund integration efforts, and reform our school admissions procedures. Every study available tells us that students thrive in diverse, integrated environments. We must make this a priority.
Most importantly, we have to make our schools, schools. We need to foster positive learning environments that ensure every New York City student has the opportunity to grow and to thrive.
Let’s end the pipeline. Let’s rewrite the narrative. Let’s reimagine our schools to be temples of learning, of community and of opportunity. When our students finally return to their classrooms after this long and difficult pandemic, let’s show them they are valued and trusted. Let’s show them they are loved and that they matter.
Let’s throw the doors wide open and never close them again.
