Around 300 vacant school safety agent positions were removed from the New York City mayor’s preliminary budget, according to a reported published on March 14 by the city’s Independent Budget Office, a city agency providing nonpartisan budget information.
There are currently 4,100 school safety agents with an additional 250 school safety agents starting in April, according to the mayor’s office. But the current budget for school safety agents, $356 million, is at its lowest in several years.
“After two years of over-budgeting, the school safety agent budget has been reduced to be more in line with recent spending and now reflects the decline in headcount over the past two years,” the IBO report states.
The decline of school safety agents is a result of “attrition, as well as restrictions put on city hiring early in the pandemic,” according to the IBO report. The budget slash is also “part of the city’s cost saving measures.”
It’s not the first time that school safety agents were reduced in the mayor’s budget. Around 832 vacant positions were cut beginning last February, for similar reasons explaining the current cuts.
The mayor’s preliminary budget this January had a proposed elimination of 282 vacant positions, in order to save $10 million. The pre-pandemic budget in 2019 for school safety agents was $395 million — almost $40 million more than the current budget.
Currently, the DOE pays for school safety agents through an “intra-city transfer to NYPD.” School safety agents, who are hired by the NYPD and wear NYPD uniforms, are not technically police officers. The agents do not carry weapons and provide security in public school buildings. Their jobs also include responding to student behavioral or safety incidents.
School safety agents earn a starting salary around $35,000, which increases to roughly $50,200 after seven years of service, according to the NYPD. Meanwhile, supervisors earn around $65,700 annually.
Meanwhile, fringe benefits are paid by the DOE through the citywide budget. The NYPD covers the costs for the uniformed school safety supervisors.
Some students whom amNewYork Metro spoke with stressed the importance of school safety agents as not merely peace officers, but instituting a sense of safety within the school community.
Cyania Augustin, a junior at Bard High School Early College and secretary of her school’s Black Student Union, said her school could use one more full-time school safety agent, and that she doesn’t see school safety agents as NYPD officers. She’s noticed that “their main focus is just making sure that everybody in the building is safe all times.”
“I feel like most kids feel like they in danger on a floor where there’s no safe school safety (agent) or admin,” Augustin said. “So instead of funding cops to come here and do all the extra stuff we don’t need, I feel if we simply just had more school safety (agents), schools would be a lot more safe and comfortable for students.”
Augustin has a close relationship with one of the two school safety agents at her school, whom she calls “Ms. Mosley.”
“We’ve just got really close because we’re both African American,” Augustin said. “A lot of our conversations are culture based, so our talks will be centered around that.”
There were over 4,000 reports filed by school safety agents during the fourth quarter of 2022. There were 40 incidents involving school safety agent injuries over the course of three months late last year before Christmas break, according to NYPD.
In that same period, there were 30 complaints filed against school safety agents, most being use of force.
Some parents have expressed their desires to the city’s education department for heightened school security.
“We hear from parents on a daily basis,” said Mark Rampersant, DOE security director, at a recent PEP meeting. “They want the doors locked, they want more school safety agents, the young people want scanners in schools.”
Rather than austere cuts to schools, Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a CUNY medical lecturer and committee member of the NYC Black Lives Matter at School, said she’d rather see investments in more school counselors.
“We would like to see as a true investment in restorative justice practices in schools that are healing-centered,” Salas-Ramirez said.
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