An advisory panel assembled by the de Blasio administration says the city should consider transferring school security from the NYPD to the Department of Education.
The School Diversity Advisory Group on Tuesday issued a wide range of recommendations aimed at trying to better integrate the city’s starkly divided schools — including one that seeks a wholesale review of security practices.
In its report, the panel called for city and school officials to “analyze the benefits and drawbacks of moving School Safety Agents to DOE supervision from NYPD supervision.”
It said it also wants City Hall to “assess the roles and responsibilities of school safety agents in school communities.”
The roughly 40-person panel is made up of mainly parents, academics and activists and includes close allies of Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza. It was formed more than a year ago.
Its suggestion on school safety immediately drew the ire of the NYPD agents’ union boss, Greg Floyd.
“This would be a step backwards,” Floyd said, adding that the former city Board of Education, now known as the DOE, had previously been responsible for school security — with dismal results.
“I was there,” Floyd said. “There was chaos in the schools. Now we want to go back to that?”
Floyd, who has previously sparred with City Hall over his claims that it routinely suppresses school crime stats, said moving control to the DOE would only limit transparency even more.
“You would not hear of crimes in city schools,” he said. “The public would never know what is going on. Every New Yorker should be concerned about this.”
But critics of the existing system argue that the NYPD agents create too much of a police-state feeling and target a disproportionate number of minority students.
Overall, excessively punitive school environments damage student outcomes, foster hostile climates, and unfairly target minorities, they say.
Proponents of the NYPD agents and stiffer punishments in general for students counter that learning is made near impossible if teachers and administrators aren’t given adequate tools to ensure classroom order.
The SDAG report also called on City Hall to “require all schools to monitor student discipline practices and develop a plan to reduce disparities in how students are disciplined.”
The safety- and discipline-related recommendations were only part of the long-anticipated study — helmed by de Blasio’s former top counsel, Maya Wiley — which demanded far greater urgency and tangible action in dismantling school segregation.
Carranza and de Blasio have backed a series of initiatives aimed at introducing more black and Hispanic kids into schools that are largely Asian and white.
Over the next five years, the advisory group said city schools should better reflect their surrounding communities in terms of everything from race and income to home language.
The study etched a dark rendering of the city’s divided schools and persistent racial flash points.
“Our city’s history is as complicated and troubled as that of our country,” the report stated. “The country is experiencing a deep division along racial lines.”
Uprooting school segregation in a city that’s 70 percent minority, the report said, would lift all students to unrealized academic heights.
“Decades of research has taught us that diverse, integrated schools offer academic and social benefits for all students,” the study stated.
The SDAG urged leaders to consider the damage wrought by academically competitive admissions to the city’s elite high schools, which critics claim are unfair toward certain minorities.
“We will continue to examine critical practices with troubling histories, like screened schools and gifted and talented programs,” the report said.
The panel also pushed for the elevation of diversity as a fundamental metric of school quality alongside traditional indicators like academics and attendance.
The group called for the installation of a “Chief Integration Officer” to ensure progress.
Noting that recent waves of gentrification have introduced more middle-class parents into public schools, the group argued that nine of the city’s 32 districts have sufficiently diverse demographics to make genuinely mixed neighborhood schools plausible.
The panel — which said it planned to release an additional report with more specifics by the end of the school year — also called for increasing diversity among teachers and requiring schools to report and monitor staff demographics.