A few extreme cases have recently fueled the cause, including when 13-year-old Alexa Gonzalez was arrested in February just for writing on her desk. Another instance was in 2008, when 5-year-old Dennis Rivera threw a violent tantrum and was then handcuffed and taken to a psychiatric hospital.
The act would provide information regarding arrests, expulsions, and suspensions by NYPD school safety agents and increase transparency regarding the disciplinary actions taking place in the city's public schools.
“SSA will make sure that the city provides a safe and secure learning environment for all school children by promoting transparency in the way that discipline is administered at schools and the way that schools are being policed,” said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
Quinn lauded the students who worked to lobby for the legislation calling them very professional and focused.
Under the legislation, which was introduced by the chairman of the Educational Committee Robert Jackson, both the NYPD and Department of Education (DOE) will need to submit reports to the City Council regarding all disciplinary actions taken by school safety agents including suspensions, arrests, and summonses. The report will also include details about the students, including ethnicity, gender, grade level, age, and any special program the student may be in, including English language learning or special education programs.
According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the act would also allow complaints regarding misconduct of safety agents to fall within the Civilian Complaint Review Board, ensuring students and parents are able to contest a disciplinary action. They cite 2,670 complaints were made, between 2002 and 2007, against these safety agents despite the low numbers of students and parents who have knowledge of how to file a complaint against an agent.
NYCLU claims that the country’s reliance of “overpolicing and overly harsh disciplinary policies are criminalizing, rather than educating” children, claiming that oftentimes suspensions are used as a “quick fix” to disciplinary problems.
“In my community and other low-income communities of color throughout the city, students are often put on the jail track instead of the college track,” said Jaritza Geigel, youth leader for Make the Road New York.
Quinn thanked the NYPD and the DOE for coming to the table early and working to make the bill logistically enforceable. She said this is not a bill against the departments; rather it is a collaborative effort to ensure students are kept safe.
“The vast majority of them are doing important work keeping school children safe, but any system with this many human beings may have bad apples who do occasionally the wrong thing,” said Quinn.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced in May that, since 2002, crime in schools has decreased by 31 percent. Also in May, the NYPD introduced an Assault on School Safety Officers Program to combat assaults on school officers, who are the victims of over 30 percent of assaults in schools.
According to the NYPD, there are 5,100 school safety agents in the city spread over 1,600 public schools overseeing 1.1 million students.
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