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As Principal Mark House greeted students at the John F. Kennedy campus in the Bronx last month, a student staggered toward him, face covered in blood.
Initially, House thought the 16-year-old had been in an accident and started escorting him to the on-site health clinic. But on the way there, the student collapsed. It turned out he had been stabbed.
In past years, school safety agents patrolled near the site of the attack, a stone’s throw from the school entrance. But no one was stationed outside that morning due to a significant decline in agents assigned to the complex.
The campus once had upwards of 20 school safety agents. Now it typically has 10 or fewer, House said. He believes the presence of an agent could have helped.
“It’s a question of prevention. If an adult is standing there in an NYPD uniform, there is a much lower probability that the violent incident happens,” said House, a veteran principal who leads Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy, one of seven schools serving a combined 2,400 students in Kingsbridge’s JFK campus.
A profound change has quietly taken root in the city’s school safety system in recent years, and the situation at the JFK campus vividly illustrates the fallout many school leaders fear it’s causing.
The number of school safety agents — unarmed but uniformed New York Police Department employees stationed at schools — has plunged from about 5,000 to 3,600 over the past five years, a roughly 28% drop, according to data from the Independent Budget Office and NYPD. K-12 enrollment shrunk by 11% during the same period.
The declines have been driven by various factors: high attrition during the pandemic fueled by the COVID vaccine mandate, slow hiring in recent years, and a $37,000 annual starting salary.
Large high school campuses like JFK that depend on safety agents to operate metal detectors have been hardest hit, as they often do not have enough staff to run the machines, making students late for class as they snake through long lines during arrival.
School leaders have raised alarms about the issue. Some campuses have seen their rosters of school safety agents cut by half or more in recent years, according to more than 120 school administrators and staffers who signed an open letter to NYPD and Education Department officials in November calling on the city to hire additional agents and replace broken scanners.
The shortage of agents makes it harder to keep campuses open on nights and weekends for extracurricular activities, since agents are often required to be on site, school leaders said. And there are rarely enough agents available to do perimeter patrols that used to be commonplace during arrival and dismissal.
Some principals said they don’t have enough excess school staff to help monitor those transitions, and even if they did, the staffers don’t have the training to respond to a violent incident.
At the JFK campus, city officials reacted to the stabbing by adding about five additional agents, House said. And while the student who was attacked is recovering, the incident left the community shaken.
“It’s devastating,” House said. “To have [a student] bleeding in your arms is pretty awful.”
Fears of a looming school safety crisis
While the ranks of safety agents shrunk during the pandemic, the number of weapons showing up at schoolhouse doors surged — with students often reporting that they’re trying to protect themselves on their commutes. That’s created a daunting safety challenge for many schools.
Some principals fear the decline in safety agents may snowball into a broader crisis.
Other educators and advocates, however, see the reduced police presence as a step in the right direction after warning for years about school police criminalizing minor misbehavior, particularly among Black and Latino children. On certain campuses, school leaders partner with community organizations whose staff help supervise dismissal and defuse conflicts rather than relying solely on safety agents.
“Politicians and school leaders have chosen to harden schools for over 40 years, and it just doesn’t work,” said Andrea Ortiz, from the Dignity in Schools coalition, which opposes NYPD and metal detectors in schools. Ortiz supports hiring more staff to help with safety during arrival and dismissal — though not NYPD employees.
But even as some school administrators are open to alternatives to safety agents, many are frustrated that there has not been a systemic response to the shortage.
Neither the Education Department nor the NYPD responded to the November letter about the lack of safety agents, said Michael Barakat, the principal of the Bronx High School for Law and Community Service, one of the letter’s authors.
“The fact that there’s been absolutely no response,” Barakat said, “is alarming.”
Education Department spokesperson Nicole Brownstein did not dispute that the agency had not responded to the letter, noting school safety agents are under the NYPD’s purview.
“We recognize that our city is facing a shortage of school safety agents, and we are continuing to work with our partners at NYPD School Safety to mitigate these issues,” she wrote in an email.
An NYPD spokesperson said the agency is “always ready and willing to recruit for the School Safety Division.” They did not cite any specific efforts to significantly increase the number of agents.
A decline years in the making
The city’s school safety division rivals the size of many other cities’ police forces and has long sparked fierce debate.
Critics note that safety agents often respond to crises better left to counselors. Others counter that large majorities of students, parents, and teachers believe the agents help keep schools safe, though students at predominantly Black campuses are less likely to agree.
Pressure to overhaul school policing reached a boiling point amid the racial justice protests of 2020. Facing calls from progressive lawmakers to reduce the NYPD’s budget, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio planned to move the roughly $400 million school safety division to the Education Department. But de Blasio slow-walked the transfer, and Mayor Eric Adams abandoned it.
In the meantime, the school safety force continued to shrink. Despite his supportive rhetoric, Adams has not taken significant action to restore the number of school safety agents to pre-pandemic levels — and even helped solidify its smaller size.
Hank Sheinkopf, a spokesperson for the school safety agents union, placed the blame for the shrinking numbers on elected officials who have pushed to limit the NYPD’s footprint in schools, including comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams.
Williams told Chalkbeat he wants a “just transition” to a new system that doesn’t include “letting go of the workforce.” Lander said in a statement that school safety agents’ wages are “far too low and there has not been enough investment into training or maintaining their workforce.”
One veteran school safety agent in the Bronx, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said “many people don’t want to join” the school safety division because of the pay. The NYPD’s recent move to loosen the eligibility requirements for police officers amid a shortage of cops might draw even more people away from the school safety division, the agent said.
NYPD officials announced a plan last year to hire 650 “assistant school safety agents,” a new position with a $33,000 starting salary open to high school graduates 18 and older. The NYPD didn’t respond to questions about the status of that initiative.
School entry wait times balloon
The shortage of school safety agents created a “perfect storm” this fall, said Evan Schwartz, principal of Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx. Without enough agents to operate the metal detectors, the building sometimes opened late.
“It just backs it up [with] students waiting outside,” Schwartz said, noting the delays eased several weeks into the school year. “If it’s raining, there’s not anywhere for them to be.”
Staffing issues can create additional safety risks by keeping kids clustered outside for longer in big groups.
At the Theodore Roosevelt Campus in the Bronx, which serves 2,500 students, there’s often a line around the block because at least one of the campus’ three scanners isn’t running, said Barakat.
Bashar Assaedi, a 14-year-old freshman at the Bronx Academy for Software Engineering, said it’s frustrating to get marked tardy when “you got to school on time, but metal detectors [that make you] take off your jackets, any keys, any watches, rings” cause delays.
Some educators and students, including Assaedi, would rather get rid of metal detectors altogether, arguing that caring relationships with staff are more effective deterrents against students using weapons in school.
But others, like Barakat, say the machines help keep students out of danger, and school staffers are not allowed to operate them.
Schools experiment with alternative approaches
The steep drop in school safety agents has left administrators confronting difficult questions about how to keep kids safe during arrival and dismissal, when conflicts are most likely to break out.
Some schools have seen promising results by tapping organizations that specialize in violence interruption, where community members are trained to de-escalate conflicts as an alternative to police intervention.
The Spring Creek Community School in Brooklyn’s East New York hired the group Elite Learners through the Education Department’s Project Pivot initiative, which brought community organizations into more than 300 schools for extra support at a cost of $14 million this year.
Elite’s employees typically fan out around the school’s exit and the surrounding blocks, clad in gray jackets with bright orange letters. In one recent instance, a group of men across the street wanted to fight several students, said officials at the Academy of Young Writers, one of the schools in the building. Elite staffers intervened and contacted the police.
“There’s definitely been a decrease in incidents outside of the school,” said Principal Tanisha Brown.
But partnerships like the one at the Spring Creek school are not yet widespread. Just 50 or so of the roughly 320 schools receiving Project Pivot funding are using it for “safe passages” programs, an Education Department spokesperson said.
House, the principal who recently responded to the stabbing, is open to other approaches to school safety. But he said that should be a long-term project that solicits community input, examines what other districts have done, and proposes a clear alternative.
Until that happens, House believes more safety agents are necessary.
Right now, “We’re still playing the ‘if’ game: ‘If we had had somebody here, would that have made a difference?’” House said. “In another year or two, we’re not going to be speculating. We’re going to be drawing straight lines.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.
Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.
