New York Legislature’s Demands Seen Putting School Safety at Risk

The mayor’s plans to increase school safety, announced in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, could be hampered by new requirements imposed by the state legislature.The state senate on Thursday passed a bill requiring New York City to reduce all academic class sizes to 25 students or fewer by 2027, a measure that the city’s education department insists would compel it to reallocate a significant portion of its budget for years to come. In a statement, Chancellor David Banks said the bill would cause “large cuts” to “critical school safety programs” if implemented. He urged the legislature to reconsider the class size limits or to fund the initiative out of Albany’s budget.Mr. Banks called the class size cap a “massive unfunded mandate from the state.”To meet the requirements by 2027, the city would need to increase spending on teachers, supplies, and even “capital costs to build more schools and classroom seats” — for a total sum that Mr. Banks estimates could end up north of a billion dollars.The tense exchange between Empire State Plaza and Tweed Courthouse follows the Adams administration’s pledge to double down on school safety measures, in the wake of the Texas school shooting that took 19 lives.Twenty guns have been found in public schools this academic year — a 300 percent increase from the previous year — in addition to more than 5,000 sharp potential weapons confiscated by school safety agents.At a press conference last week, Mayor Adams and Mr. Banks shared proposals for increasing the safety of schools across the city, including locking school doors and installing metal or gun detectors in school entrances. Currently, fewer than 100 public schools in the city have metal detectors, and a large-scale installation project would be a multimillion-dollar endeavor.The mayor and chancellor also emphasized the importance of school safety agents. “The mayor is committed to ensuring that we have the requisite number of school safety agents that we need,” Mr. Banks said.Teamsters Local 237, which represents the agents, has been warning of an officer shortage for more than a year. A union representative estimates that the force has shrunk by about 2,000 agents over the past two years, to 3,000 agents.Mr. Adams has proposed increasing the size of the force in his version of the city budget, which is being debated by City Council.Funding for school safety agent salaries and training, however, comes from the NYPD, so the new bill is unlikely to affect these hires even as the city channels education funds toward implementing smaller class sizes.The class size bill also stipulates that the class size reduction plan must be approved by both the teachers and principals unions. The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Michael Mulgrew, criticized the chancellor for “threate[ing] to cut back on safety and social and health programs.”The legislature, meanwhile, might have its own solution to the problem of school safety: more assistant principals. An unrelated bill, introduced to the assembly’s education committee in early May, seeks to increase the minimum number of assistant principals in each New York City public school. The bill claims that such an increase is necessary “to ensure the safety and security of all students and school staff and personnel,” particularly when principals are off campus.Both bills seem to have a common outcome: increasing the size and power of the teachers and principals unions.

New York Legislature’s Demands Seen Putting School Safety at Risk

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