Rallying before a City Council hearing today on a more than year-old school safety proposal, advocates renewed their call for a law that would force the city to issue quarterly reports on school violence.
Introduced in 2008 by Robert Jackson, chairman of the City Council education committee, the School Safety Act has the support of 33 of the Council’s 50 members as well as advocacy groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union. Lost amid the debate over term limits last year, the act has seen little movement in the Council.
The act would require the Department of Education and Police Department to report arrests, suspensions, and expulsion data on a quarterly basis, along with a demographic breakdown of the students involved in school incidents.
Critics of police presence in schools have long complained that the 5,000 school safety agents in the city’s public schools are too aggressive with students and get involved in disciplinary cases better handled by school administrators.
At the rally today, several students spoke about the alleged abuse they had experienced from school safety agents.
Adama Wint, a 17 year-old who attends a Young Adult Borough Center in the Bronx, said safety agents in her school regularly make sexual comments to female students.
“They talk about what we have on and how appealing we are to them,” Wint said. “It’s a little bit out of hand.”
Jeffrey Paulino, an eleventh grade student at the Community High School for Social Justice in the Bronx, said a school safety agent hit his head with a flashlight and then tried to choke him. Paulino said he blacked out and was taken to the local police precinct where, he alleged, he had to beg for officers to call an ambulance.
“They treated me like an animal,” Paulino, 17, said, adding that the subsequent court dates had pulled him out of class and prevented him from participating in after-school activities.
Last week, the city settled a lawsuit over alleged abuse of a Queens high schoolstudent by a school safety agent.