We the People: What price safety?

There is no price too high if it would assure that the life of an innocent person was made safe. However, society must move away from a blind acceptance that all spending must increase and that all spending for a good cause must be accepted without question.

In 1998, the NYPD assumed responsibility to protect New York City public schools through its School Safety Division. The 5,000 school safety agents cost the NYPD budget $244 million a year. This cost does not reflect the salaries of the teachers who patrol halls and bathrooms as “deans” in schools instead of teaching pupils.

The 2015-2016 DOE budget will total $27.6 billion and it includes $911.4 million for preschool special education services to non-DOE “contract” schools, $655.7 million for special education services provided at non-DOE “contract” schools, $64.6 million for yeshivas and parochial schools as well as $1.5 billion for charter schools. The DOE pays for many private school costs.
In public schools, dangerous or disruptive students cannot be prohibited from returning to their school or another school after committing an offense. This must change. There needs to be a method to keep these students who are the greatest danger to other students out of regular public schools and away from the students who want to learn.

We throw away money on security when it is used reactively and when there is no sensible protocol to separate dangerous or disruptive students from the regular student body. The Board of Education used to have “600” schools where specially supported personnel tried to teach those students not yet ready for regular public school education. That was proactive. Meanwhile, the threat of outside violence to schools after the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre is receding but the spending on school security continues to grow.

City Councilmember David Greenfield has pushed through legislation for the city to provide funds for security guards at all nonpublic schools. The goal is laudable but it takes more resources from public education and shifts it to private education. It also will not provide perfect security from a lunatic bent on mass violence.

A U.S. Education Department survey of schools around the country reflects that 65 percent of schools reported at least one violent incident during the 2013-2014 school year, which was a reduction from 74 percent in an earlier survey. By 2016, schools and universities will spend more than $1 billion for extra surveillance equipment, access-control equipment and mass notification technology in hopes of preventing an assault.

We need to keep weapons out of the hands of lunatics, and programs to take the instrumentalities of mass violence out of the hands of the mentally unstable and criminally disposed person would better address school safety. We can achieve the goal of greater school safety without making every school a prison and without providing every student a bodyguard.

Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio is prioritizing services for the city’s poorest and most vulnerable residents. His $78.3 billion spending plan includes $100 million for the homeless, $55 million for mental-health services and $409 million for universal pre-K. The universal pre-K program was not going to cost the city money but every program including the new private school security plan manages to be more costly than promised.

Mr. de Blasio pushed his Mandatory Inclusionary Housing plan with an estimated cost of $7.5 billion to encourage building or preserving 200,000 units of affordable housing without enough explanation to the people. All of the plans are wonderful but the proposed spending should unnerve fiscally-minded taxpayers in New York City.

The city could just demand higher property taxes and fees from developers who would have to pay it in the current “hot” market, and then use the revenue to subsidize affordable housing projects. There is no shortage of new construction throughout the city.

A simple plan would be better than this complicated one with a web of tax breaks and incentives. It seems that the majority of communities in the city will disapprove of the MIH plan. It is time to uncomplicate our education and social plans and the way we pay for them.