NYC-Feature Story

Prisoners in Our School
Why are kids treated like criminals while trying to get an education?

By Donald Moore

Today I can’t bring my cell phone. I shouldn’t wear boots. And I definitely shouldn’t bring scissors with me.

During my junior year of high school, that’s what I had to remind myself two days a week. During the day, I went to Brooklyn Technical HS, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. There, school rules weren’t strictly enforced. Kids used cell phones in between classes, wore hats in the hallways and brought glass bottles to school.

But on Mondays and Wednesdays, once classes ended, I walked to evening classes at George Westinghouse Career and Tech HS to catch up on credits. It’s a mere 10-minute walk from Brooklyn Tech, but the two schools couldn’t be more different.

Line for the Metal Detectors

When I got to Westinghouse, the first thing I’d always see was a line of kids waiting outside. Every day, it continues deep inside the school until it reaches the cafeteria, where students must go through metal detectors stationed in the cafeteria.

We have to empty all change from our pockets. And we all know the other rules: keys must go into a plastic bin. Belts must be removed. No glass bottles allowed. If a security guard finds a cell phone during a search, it’s confiscated. Most kids, including me, leave cell phones at home. Others resort to hiding them beneath trash bags outside and hoping they’re not taken.

About 900 kids pass through the school doors, but there are only two metal detectors—one for males, one for females. People frequently find themselves still stuck in line 20 minutes after classes have started.

Why, I asked myself nightly, was I forced to submit to these conditions just to go to class? Did I somehow become more dangerous during the few blocks I walked between Tech and Westinghouse? And what kind of a city requires its kids to endure this type of treatment to get an education?

I set out to find answers to these questions and ended up outraged.

More Like Prison

For the past decade, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and Department of Education (DOE) have joined forces to create a school environment that feels more like a prison than a place to learn.

In September 1998, the DOE transferred all responsibility regarding safety in public schools to the NYPD.

Overnight, the schools’ main security force—school safety agents—became controlled by the police department instead of the schools. School safety agents could now arrest students in school. Schools deemed particularly unsafe got assigned armed police officers. And more than 80 high schools implemented permanent metal detectors, which students must pass through every day to gain entrance, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

Yet as my experience shows, not all schools are created equal. All too frequently, looking at the racial demographics and income levels of a school’s student body can help predict which schools have the elaborate security measures that make them most resemble prisons.

Race, Income Matters

At Brooklyn Tech, where I didn’t have to undergo metal detector scans and searches, 72% of the students are Asian or white, according to the DOE website. At Westinghouse, where there were metal detectors and often police officers scattered around the school, the DOE website reports that 94% of students are black or Hispanic.

The socioeconomic divide is also large. A common way to determine the poverty level of a student body is to see what percentage of students receive free lunch. The more students who receive free lunch, the poorer the school.

At Tech, which doesn’t have metal detectors, 23% of students receive free lunch, according to insideschools.org, an independent online guide to New York City public schools. At Westinghouse, with the detectors, the website reports that 62% of students qualify for free lunch.

The NYCLU has found that the differences between these two schools are part of a citywide trend. Blacks and Latinos together make up over 70% of the city’s public high school population, according to the DOE. Yet at schools with permanent metal detectors, the NYCLU found that blacks and Latinos make up over 80% of the population. And while poor students make up 51% of the total student population, the NYCLU reported that they make up 60% of the student population at schools with permanent metal detectors.

“If you are black or Latino, you are most likely going to a school with a metal detector,” said Chloe Dugger, field organizer for the NYCLU’s Police Accountability Project.

More Likely to Get Arrested

And with all that security, black and Latino kids are also far more likely to get in trouble with the law while trying to earn a diploma. In many schools with high security measures, Dugger said, “it is very likely that if you have a food fight, you will be suspended and arrested.”

The police surveillance at schools, said Dugger, is “moving students, particularly students of color, out of the school system and towards the criminal justice system.”

It doesn’t help that school safety agents (SSAs) appear to be poorly trained, and sometimes abusive toward students. The NYCLU report is filled with accounts of improper behavior by SSAs, ranging from verbal teasing to physical assault.

Making Schools Safer?

Several students have accused agents of sexual harassment, alleging that male SSAs often inappropriately grope female students during metal detectors scans and searches. (The very act of a male SSA searching a female is against SSA regulations.) And in a survey included in the NYCLU report, 53% of students reported that officers have spoken in a way that made them feel uncomfortable.

From April 2006 to December 15, 2006, NYPD personnel confiscated a total of 17,351 items during metal detector searches. Of all those items, the NYPD classified only about 20 objects as weapons, according to the NYCLU report.

I was hoping to hear what the police had to say. But after repeated phone and email requests over several weeks, the NYPD didn’t respond to my questions.

Treated Like a Criminal

As a black teen who has experienced what it’s like to be treated like a criminal while trying to get an education, I know how discouraging the police presence is in schools. Every night that I had to remove my belt, or empty my pockets into a bin, or have a guard check the inside of my bag, I felt worse about myself and cared less about passing a class, which is what I was there to do.

A taxpayer-funded system that unfairly targets young minorities and the poor, making them feel more marginalized than they already are, should be reformed—immediately. Students should not have to feel like prisoners in a place where they go to learn.