The new budget proposal from Mayor Adams may have put the final nail in the coffin of a long-stalled plan to transfer control of the city’s school safety agents from the NYPD to the Education Department.
Budget documents show that 5,290 school safety positions that were slated to move from the NYPD to the DOE by next year are now scheduled to remain under the NYPD through at least 2026.
The change “reflects a reversal” of Mayor de Blasio’s 2020 commitment to shift the service to the DOE, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.
The planned school safety transfer — originally agreed to during tense 2020 budget negotiations at the height of the city’s racial justice protests — has been running on fumes for years.
Despite initially touting the move as part of a major effort to cut the NYPD’s budget and reduce police presence in the city, de Blasio slow-walked its implementation — arguing the city needed two years to finalize the details and that the shift could only be completed by summer 2022, when he was already out of office.
De Blasio admitted last fall that he’d never supported the idea in the first place.
Adams, meanwhile, indicated on the campaign trail that he didn’t back the idea, and has doubled down on his support of school safety agents.
The transfer was still scheduled to proceed next fiscal year, at least on paper.
But Adams’s budget proposal on Feb. 16 — which didn’t include any public acknowledgment of the reversal — would quash the transfer for good.
Gregory Floyd, the president of Teamsters Local 237, the union representing school safety agents, who has vehemently opposed the transfer from the start, said “the proposed movement of School Safety Agents from NYPD supervision to the DOE was the mayor’s decision. We think he’s made the right one.”
But advocates who supported the transfer say it deserved a chance — and that scrubbing it without discussion doesn’t do justice to an idea that generated significant public interest.
“When Mayor de Blasio made the move of shifting school safety to the DOE, that was subject to a very intense public debate,” said Johanna Miller, the Director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “So to switch it back like it’s just a clerical move without any discussion at all is cutting out the people who are going to be most impacted by this decision and ignoring the people most impacted by this outcome.”
Miller said the planned transfer took “a step toward acknowledging that educators should have the final say in how schools operate.”
The final budget is negotiated between the mayor and City Council, and Miller urged the council to take up the school safety issue. City Council Education Chair Rita Joseph (D-Brooklyn) declined to comment on the shift.
The role of school safety officers has come under scrutiny again as city schools see an uptick in weapons seizures — including more guns confiscated this school year than in years past.
The safety agent force has also shrunk considerably — from more than 5,000 in summer 2020 to its current 3,600 due to high attrition and hiring challenges, according to schools Chancellor David Banks.
As part of a separate budget effort to eliminate vacant positions from the city’s balance sheet, Adams proposed permanently reducing the budgeted school safety headcount by 560 positions.
Even with that drop, the school safety force has roughly 1,000 vacant positions the NYPD is looking to fill, Banks said.
Adams and the city Education Department didn’t respond to questions about the reversal.
