Students and Educators to Testify on Extensive, Aggressive Police Presence in NYC Public Schools

Students and educators will join members of the Student Safety Coalition at a press conference tomorrow to discuss the over-policing of the city’s public schools. The students will describe the heavy-handed tactics they have endured at the hands of inadequately trained and poorly supervised NYPD personnel, including arrests for minor violations of school policy and intrusive searches of female students. Speakers will demand accountability and transparency of police practices in the schools and propose alternative approaches to address unchecked policing in schools.

Following the press conference, students will testify before the City Council at a hearing on school safety.

There are more than 5,000 school safety agents and at least 200 armed police officers assigned exclusively to New York City’s schools – a body that would be the fifth largest police force in the country and larger than that of city police departments in Washington DC, Detroit, Boston or Las Vegas. School police personnel are not directly supervised by school administrators and are often not adequately trained to work in an education setting, which means they often extend their authority beyond issues of safety. This burden weighs most heavily on the city’s most vulnerable children, who are disproportionately poor, Black and Latino.

WHAT:
News conference on over-policing of New York City public schools

WHERE:
Steps of City Hall

WHEN:
Wednesday, Oct. 10, 4 p.m.

WHO:
Quinn James, former high school student
Biko Edwards, high school student
Lepore Felice, Principal, Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports
Jamaal Bowman, Dean, Martin Luther King, Jr. HS of the Arts and Technology
Donna Lieberman, New York Civil Liberties Union
Sally Lee, Teachers Unite
Kim Sweet, Advocates for Children
Chase Madar, Make the Road New York
Liz Sullivan, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative

The Student Safety Coalition consists of the following organizations: Advocates for Children, Correctional Association, Make the Road New York, National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, New York Civil Liberties Union, Teachers Unite and the Urban Youth Collaborative.