Junior high school girls selling sexual favors for $1.
Kids bringing guns and butcher knives to class.
Gangs and violence rampant in public schools throughout the city.
School safety agents say they’ve seen it all. They’re the first line of defense for our most vulnerable schoolkids. New York parents rely on them to keep our schools safe, especially in the wake of the massacre of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Conn., last year.
But an explosive class-action lawsuit contends that the city’s 5,000 school safety agents are underpaid, overworked and unprepared for the dangers they face each day.
And the dangers are alarming.
New, eye-popping court papers connected to the suit reveal horrid conditions that students — and agents — must endure.
“It’s like Newtown is happening every day in the schools, but in slow motion,” said James Linsey, an attorney for Teamsters Local 237, which represents the safety agents. “It’s incredible what people don’t know.”
A sample of the agents’ testimony paints a vivid picture:
– At DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, agents keep a locker stuffed with confiscated weapons in the dean’s office, school safety agent Deserie Wilson testified. A butcher knife, homemade slings and an improvised bat are among the weapons Wilson and her fellow un-armed agents collected from students.
“Dealing with the unsafe environment — that was the most problematic part for me, because your main objective is that you want to go home uninjured,” Wilson said. “If you have all of this stuff going on, there is always a chance that you can become a victim.”
– At Junior High School 190 in Queens, the gangs were so powerful that one female student was compelled to have sex with 17 boys, sometimes at school, and become a member, safety agent Rosemary Scott testified. Safety agents and school staffers were unable to stop the humiliating process that left the girl under the control of the Bloods, a gang that terrorized the school, Scott said.
“She’s part of the gang, and the only way to get out is if they beat her up bad,” Scott said. “That’s her family now.”
– School safety agent De Andrea Jordan plucked a gun off a second-grader at Wave Preparatory Elementary School in Queens last month without incident.
“From my understanding, his brother put it in the bag and . . . the kid came to school and alerted his mom about it and she came to school to get it,” Jordan said.
– Girls from Intermediate School 172 in Harlem sold oral sex for a dollar — and a classmate was their pimp, school safety agent Shakima Jones-Washington testified in October.
Agents and school staffers knew about it, but were unable to stop it, Jones-Washington said. Agents are unable to make arrests themselves. Officials closed IS 172 in 2009; Jones-Washington now works at a different school.
The city’s school safety agents are employees of the NYPD and get much of the same training as police officers, but they do not carry weapons or wear bulletproof vests.
Their starting pay is about $31,000, union officials said, and no matter how many years they remain on the job, their base salaries never exceed $35,000.
Local 237 President Greg Floyd and a group of agents filed the $35 million class-action lawsuit against the city in 2010 because the agents — 70% of whom are women — earn $7,000 less annually than their largely male counterparts working in hospitals and shelters.
“Equal pay is a human right,” Floyd said. “The way the agents are being treated is illegal and unfair.”
A Law Department spokeswoman said the city is “taking a very careful look” at the case.
Meanwhile, testimony in the lawsuit reveals that many of the city’s public schools are pits of violence and depravity beyond the control of the adults in charge.
One of the suit’s plaintiffs, veteran agent Patricia Williams, said that with equal pay and better equipment, the agents could increase school safety.
“We should have bulletproof vests, and we should be paid fairly,” said Williams, who works as many as five hours of overtime each day to make ends meet.
“Under the circumstances, it’s very difficult for us to do our jobs. And what happened in Connecticut could happen anywhere.”
Education officials couldn’t comment on details due to the litigation, but noted that major crime is down by 49 percent since 2002.
bchapman@nydailynews.com
