There have been dozens of articles about how hard it is to get your child into an elite New York City private school. This is an article about how hard it is to get the child home.

At least without having the youngster’s wallet, iPod, or cell phone stolen.

In elementary school, it’s easy. The parent or a household staffer picks the child up from school and walks him home. But once a child reaches a certain age, such escorts lose their appeal, and that’s when the trouble starts.

Extreme measures have been taken to protect the lone travelers. Parents and schools have constructed an elaborate network of safe streets and trails through the sidewalks of Manhattan. One parent devotes seven days a week to maintaining a Web site with detailed maps of the parent patrols, up-to-date incident reports, and safety tips. An Upper East Side private school, Dalton, has hired a cell phone-bearing, motorcycle-riding ex-cop as a security guard and posted red-vested parents and staff on the seven city blocks between the school and the subway.

The exact security threat that all these procedures are devoted to foiling is an amorphous one. Police say reports of incidents on the Upper West and Upper East sides are flat. On the Upper East Side, one police official said no muggings have been reported for many months. Dalton’s motorcycling security tsar, Bruce Bacon, said the last few years have been the safest of his career.

But parents and teenagers are living in fear in the wake of incidents that either happened to them or that they heard about. Parents insist there is a genuine threat, one so severe that they’re afraid to report incidents to the police or to be named in the press out of fear their children would be retaliated against.

“I’m petrified,” one Upper East Side mother said. “This isn’t a cute little neighborhood thing where, ‘Oh yeah, everyone gets beaten up.’ It’s horrifying.”

One mother said a teenager flashed a knife at her son and demanded his money as he emerged from an Upper East Side subway stop on his way home from middle school. The boy handed over his wallet and was not hurt.

Another mother said her son escaped a confrontation with a group of teenagers demanding he turn over his cell phone only when a friendly construction worker lifted him up and pulled him across the street.

In the fall, the student newspaper at Dalton, the Daltonian, reported on a wave of muggings at the middle school. Students said they now walk home in groups of friends to avoid being alone.

A Dalton freshman said the incidents were common when he was in middle school. Boys would be targeted as they walked from the school on East 89th Street to the school’s gym, on 87th Street. “It was generally anyone who wasn’t too big for them to handle,” the freshman said.

“The kids who played sports generally moved faster,” he added.

Dalton’s response is a case study. After hearing about incidents near the school’s gym, parents raised concerns, and the administrators’ response — quickly adding more security staff to the area — was swift, the president of the Parents Association, Casper Caldarola, said in an e-mail.

The school could also lean on a community safety net that has grown vastly more intricate in recent years. Security guards wear earpieces and carry walkie-talkies. They have relationships with store owners, public school heads, and police. They can also rely on the Schools Unite Network, or SUN, which regularly sends e-mails to the school with security updates.

An attorney and Upper West Side mother, Jill Greenbaum, started the network two years ago out of her apartment on Riverside Drive. It is an outgrowth of her Police Liaison Group, a nonprofit she founded in 1992 as a collaboration with local police that has since expanded all over Manhattan.

The idea of SUN is to take worried parents’ tendency to chat endlessly about crime — call it the mugging rumor mill — and catalyze it into a useful force. Ms. Greenbaum fields tips from parents, vets them with authorities, and then publishes a verified version alongside safety tips for how parents and children can avoid future incidents.

A February dispatch described a 3:20 p.m. confrontation on Central Park West between a 12-year-old boy on his way home from school and five teenagers. It ended when the boy handed over $5.

An attached “Reminder from School Safety” listed several ways to reduce the likelihood of becoming a victim. Students should keep electronics out of sight and should jump into doorman buildings if they feel threatened. They were also instructed to purchase new headsets for their iPods. “The white headsets are a dead giveaway that they are attached to an i-pod,” the e-mail said.

There are varying levels of membership. A school can subscribe to receive SUN’s public reports, but it can also become a member and sign a confidentiality agreement allowing it to receive information that reporters did not want to make public as well.

Private schools across Manhattan are the core founding members, but Ms. Greenbaum is running a drive to expand into public schools, partly with the help of New York City grants of about $3,000 that she said her group received at the direction of three City Council members.

Ms. Greenbaum has technological goals, too. To expand into neighborhoods such as East Harlem, she wants to roll out a program that would send SUN alerts through text messages and cell-phone calls. She also wants to go bilingual, adding voice alerts in Spanish.

Any visitor to the Web site can view and download another precious jewel: three detailed maps outlining the parent patrol routes of about 20 participating schools, color-coordinated by school, plus the locations and times of police crossing guards and safe corridors. A Collegiate School mother who serves on an advisory board of the Police Liaison Group, Debra McEneaney, devised the maps, Ms. Greenbaum said.

The network also offers programs to help the perpetrators of crime, usually youth themselves. After learning from community members and school officials about perpetual perpetrators, she said she searches for ways to help them, such as drug rehab or a mentoring program. She said the approach encourages some parents wary of reporting incidents to the police to at least talk to SUN. “Contrary to popular belief, nobody really wants to see kids incarcerated,” she said.

Schools have also contributed to the safety net.

At Dalton, the main architect is Mr. Bacon, the broad-shouldered security director who has ice-blue eyes, Scandinavian-blond hair, and a conspicuous chip in his front tooth.

Mr. Bacon said the Upper East Side has gotten safer since he started at Dalton 15 years ago.

“I had to kind of, like, clean up the streets,” Mr. Bacon said. “It took me three or four years to get it halfway decent.”

A motorcycle driver, he said he drew on his police experience and his nature. “I’m the type of person who’s not afraid to chase somebody and knock ’em down,” he said.

Mr. Bacon also works with his own students, whom he calls “my babies.” Every student receives his personal cell phone number upon entering middle school, as well as two annual seminars on what Mr. Bacon calls “street smarts.”

“Independent school kids are naive,” he said. “Public school kids are street smart.”

In the last few years, cooperation from leaders at nearby public schools has led to even more improvements. He said one notable dean at P.S. 169 on 88th Street, a special education middle school, has his staff escort children to the subway and then personally makes a daily 3 p.m. sweep of the neighborhood to ensure they have all cleared out. Dalton’s dismissal begins at 3:15 p.m.

Mr. Bacon also tries to alleviate parents’ fears by drenching the area surrounding Dalton with members of his security team — young men dressed in red Dalton fleeces, holding walkie-talkies — and working with the school’s Parents Association to coordinate volunteer parent patrols to stand vigil during dismissal. The parents also wear red, putting on vests provided by the Parents Association.

The result is a person on every block between Dalton and the 86th Street subway station.

“It’s an overkill,” Mr. Bacon said. “But you gotta make the parents feel safe.”