Does that “word salad” come with window dressing?
Democratic mayoral candidate Maya Wiley’s plan to take $1 billion from the NYPD to provide what she calls “trauma-informed care” in city public schools won’t solve the surging crime problem — and may even make the halls of education more dangerous, critics say.
“Terminology like ‘trauma-informed’ — whatever that is — is not going to save a child’s life. Terminology is not going to keep children safe,” said Greg Floyd, head of the union that represents school safety agents.
“Where are the examples where all of these things she spouts actually work? She wants to experiment with other people’s kids, not hers.”
Mona Davids, founder of the NYC Parents Union, also blasted Wiley’s proposal as meaningless verbiage.
“It’s just word salad from Maya Wiley,” she said.
“It doesn’t mean anything. It makes absolutely no sense at all.”
Davids further compared the notion of “trauma-informed care” to the phrase “agent of the city” — which outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio used in a failed bid to keep his official emails private when they were sought by The Post and NY1 under the state Freedom of Information Law.
Wiley — a Columbia-trained lawyer who on Saturday won the endorsement of US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and on Monday got the nod from another far-left Democrat, US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — was de Blasio’s counsel at the time.
“She has no real plan to deal with what our communities are dealing with. Parents and families want to be safe, they want their children to be safe in schools,” Davids said.
“What is going on in our city with crime will be in schools. She is not representing the interests of our families or our communities.”
Wiley — whose sprawling, $2.7 million family home in Brooklyn is protected by a private security patrol — discussed her controversial plan to defund the NYPD at last month’s first debate among the Democratic mayoral contenders.
During a monologue that began with her saying, “I’ve been black all my life,” Wiley claimed that shifting money from the NYPD to the schools was a good idea “because when we do that, violence goes down and graduation rates go up.”
Wiley’s plan would also retrain the Department of Education’s roughly 5,000 school safety agents “in restorative and trauma-informed care practices,” according to her campaign.
Floyd, president of Teamsters Local 237, said the safety agents — 90 percent of whom are black or brown and 70 percent of whom are women — would likely instead be replaced by mainly white social workers and counselors.
“These people don’t matter to her,” he said. “If it’s up to her, she’ll have these women unemployed. Their families don’t matter to her.”
When asked for comment, Wiley’s campaign responded with a nearly 1,100-word Q&A that defines trauma-informed care and education as “a holistic approach to learning and development that will play a significant role in classrooms, curriculum, individualized student interventions, educator self-care, and how administrators and teachers approach behavior and discipline.”
In a section called “Evidence of outcomes?,” the statement says that “there is a wide range of research that confirms the impact of trauma on children’s learning and behavior at school” and claims “that receiving trauma-specific treatment can lead to improved school attendance and academic outcomes.”
The only statistics offered are the results of a 9th-grade ethnic studies program implemented in San Francisco in 2010.
“Over four years, this program was found to increase student attendance by 21%, increased GPA by 1.4 grade points, and increased credits earned by 23 credits,” it says.
There are no references to crime and the only mention of violence involves Wiley’s “Gun Violence Prevention plan,” which would divert “$18 million from the NYPD so that communities can direct dollars themselves to trauma informed care and afterschool programs for our youth.”
