Where School Meets Prison
- 2020-07-07
- Urban Omnibus
Rockaway Park High School for Environmental Sustainability is in many ways a typical New York public high school. Like other small, co-located schools, it is only one part of a larger organism: Its 350 students share the halls, cafeteria, library, gymnasium, and sports fields of the Beach Channel Campus with six other schools, including an Outward Bound prep school, a charter school, and a school for youth temporarily involved with the legal system. A visitor to Beach Channel will find the halls filled with students, lockers, bulletin boards, and trophy cases. They will also find School Safety Agents, police officers, and physical security infrastructure — this is also typical.
In the past — or in schools with higher proportions of white students — a student acting out might garner an intervention by their principal, or a concerned teacher’s phone call to parents. But today, throughout the US, discipline in many schools has become a matter of law enforcement, rather than education. In New York, the majority of school guards — 5,000 School Safety Agents patrolling 2,300 public and private schools — are civilians employed by the School Safety Division of the NYPD; though unarmed, they can issue summonses and arrest and handcuff students. There are also roughly 200 armed, uniformed NYPD officers who are permanently stationed in schools and report to local precincts. But even in schools without permanently assigned cops, police officers working for local precincts may be summoned into the school at any point. For them, the school building is just another part of the beat.