New York City’s force of school safety agents, which currently has more than 1,000 unfilled positions, would be permanently reduced by 560 under a preliminary budget introduced by Mayor Adams Wednesday.
The city’s force of school safety officers — the largest such division in the country — employed more than 5,000 agents as of June 2020, but saw its numbers shrink to fewer than 4,000 by November 2021 because of high attrition and a hiring slowdown, according to a recent report by the state comptroller.
Now, under a cost-savings initiative proposed by Adams, the city will permanently remove 560 of those vacant positions from the city’s balance sheet, saving the city roughly $22 million per year starting in Fiscal Year 2023, according to budget projections.
The plan would not strip any currently employed safety agents of their jobs, but would reduce the number of agents the city seeks to hire.
The effort is part of a citywide effort to “right-size” the workforce by declining to fill vacant positions across a range of city agencies. More than 10,000 positions would be trimmed from the municipal workforce between fiscal years 2022 and 2023 under the plan.
The cut to the school safety force comes as schools across the city experienced an increase in weapons confiscated from students — many of them “personal protective devices” like pepper spray and Tasers that students say they carried to protect themselves on their commutes — during the first months of the school year.
There were also eight guns seized from students at school between July 1 and Oct. 24, 2021 — the most recent date through which the NYPD reported school weapons seizures — compared with one and two during the same periods in 2019 and 2018, respectively.
Some parents, advocates and union officials had been agitating for more safety agents and metal detectors in response to the rash of weapons seizures, arguing that the current number of safety agents in schools is insufficient.
“Parents throughout New York City are going to panic, because we have more guns, more incidents of crime, and more potential for violence in our schools,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a spokesman for Teamsters Local 237, the union representing school safety agents. “The public safety ought not to be putting NYC’s children at risk.”
Mona Davids, a parent and member of the NYC School Safety coalition, pointed to a recent incident at the Kennedy High School campus in the Bronx where a shortage of school safety agents allegedly caused long delays for kids trying to pass through metal detectors as an example of why more agents are needed.
“It’s unconscionable and tone deaf for Eric Adams to cut 560 school safety positions,” she said.
But critics of the school police force applauded the cut, arguing the division was already oversized and that even with the slashed headcount, it remains much larger than school police forces in other districts. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest, has fewer than 300 employees in its school police force for roughly 440,000 students.
“A reduction in the number of school police might mean fewer kids are entangled with the criminal legal system, which can saddle them with negative consequences for life,” said Johanna Miller, the director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Keneisha Buckley, a 17-year-old Queens high school student and member of Urban Youth Collaborative, a group that advocates for police-free schools, said the reduction didn’t go far enough — and suggested not filling any of the vacant positions.
“By only cutting like 500 of them, he ultimately gave the NYPD approval to go ahead and hire more cops,” she said. “I don’t believe any police should be in schools.”
Adams has committed to keeping a police presence in schools, but has suggested he might make some aesthetic changes, including changing the uniforms to make the agents look less like police and replacing traditional detectors with an unspecified weapon-detecting technology.
Neither the NYPD nor an Adams spokeswoman responded to requests for comment on the school safety reduction.
Though school safety officers are employed by the NYPD, the savings technically come out of the Education Department’s budget, which saw its spending trimmed by $1 billion in the new proposed budget compared with last year.
The preliminary budget also would phase out a policy to maintain funding for schools that see drops in enrollment. Under the new budget, schools that lose students will also receive reduced funding starting next year.
