TESTIMONY OF:

Anna Arkin-Gallagher – Supervising Attorney and Policy Counsel, Education Practice

BROOKLYN DEFENDER SERVICES

Presented before the New York City Council Committee on Education

Hearing on Schools and Public Safety

February 19, 2021

My name is Anna Arkin-Gallagher. I am a Supervising Attorney and Policy Counsel in the Education Practice at Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS). BDS provides innovative, multi- disciplinary, and client-centered criminal, family, and immigration defense, as well as civil legal services for over 30,000 people in Brooklyn every year. We thank the City Council Committee on Education and Chair Treyger for holding this important hearing on school safety.

BDS is fortunate to have the support of the City Council to supplement the services we provide as a public defender office in Brooklyn. Through specialized units of the office, we provide extensive wrap-around services that meet the needs of traditionally under-served clients in a comprehensive way. This includes helping young people and their families navigate the public education bureaucracy during and after contact with the criminal legal and family court systems.

BDS’s Adolescent Representation Team works to eliminate contact and involvement within the criminal legal system for court-involved youth aged 21 and under. Our specialized attorneys, social workers, and youth advocates provide legal representation, advocacy, and social services in youth proceedings in Brooklyn’s Criminal Court, Supreme Court and Family Court, collaborating across BDS’s practices to provide comprehensive support on behalf of youth and guidance to their families. Our Education Unit delivers legal representation and informal

advocacy to our school-age clients and to parents of children in New York City schools. Many of the people we serve are involved in the criminal legal system or in Family Court proceedings. In addition, a significant number of the students we work with qualify as “over-age and under-credited” and have been retained at least one grade. More than half of the students we work with are classified as students with disabilities. As an interdisciplinary legal and social work team, we work to improve our clients’ access to education, and a significant portion of our advocacy relates to special education, school discipline, reentry, and alternative pathways to graduation.

Background

BDS commends the City Council for its continued attention to policing and discipline practices in our city’s schools. We believe that all our City’s schools – especially those that have historically presented with the highest rates of suspension, calls to EMS, and arrests – must implement reforms related to their handling of student misbehavior and treatment of students in emotional distress. These reforms can and should draw on restorative justice practices, collaborative problem-solving, and other innovations that facilitate holistic engagement with instances of conflict and misbehavior while minimizing schools’ reliance on the police. And they should be grounded in the recognition that children should never be placed in handcuffs or otherwise traumatized by their schools as a consequence of disciplinary issues.

BDS shares the Council’s desire to ensure that schools are safe places where all students have the ability to learn and grow. However, we strongly believe that police presence in schools – whether those officers fall under the purview of the NYPD or the DOE – often has the effect of undermining school safety and negatively affects school climate. School safety agents frequently escalate school conflicts, instead of deescalating situations and making the school environment safer for all. We believe that improving school climate will come not simply from moving school safety agents back under DOE control and continuing to pour money into punitive responses to student misbehavior, but rather by increasing funding, training and support for educators, restorative justice coordinators, and school-based mental health clinicians.

Int. No. 2188

We support Int. 2188 and the mandate both to limit the use of handcuffs and other restraints for students in emotional crisis, and to ensure that mental health staff are involved in decisions about how to respond to students experiencing emotional distress.

As a general matter, BDS believes that handcuffs and other mechanical restraints have no place in schools—students are children, and we have seen time and time again that handcuffs and other restraints are used disproportionately on children of color (and on Black students in particular).¹ Restraining students in handcuffs is traumatizing, and fails to address the root causes of a student’s emotional distress. Despite the negative effects the handcuffing students have in schools, the practice is nevertheless widespread. While most police interactions in schools do not result in the use of handcuffs or other restraints, recent data still show that in New York City

Schools over a thousand students are restrained each year.² Thus, while we would prefer that the bill contain an absolute prohibition on handcuffing students, we welcome that this bill attempts to limit the use of these interventions only to prevent “imminent serious physical injury,” and only for the duration of time that a student presents a risk of serious physical injury to themselves or others.

We also appreciate that this bill seeks to strengthen the role of clinical school staff or the school’s crisis intervention team, and mandates that staff “employ all possible de-escalation techniques” before contacting outside police officers to come to the school, and that police officers inquire about the use of these techniques if this do arrive.

We are encouraged that this bill attempts to ensure that children are transported to hospitals for mental health evaluations only when a “clinically trained mental health professional” believes that such transport is appropriate. Far too often we have seen students – some as young as five – transported to hospitals in ambulances during moments of intense emotional distress,

including under circumstances in which there was no attempt made to deescalate the situation or consult with clinically trained staff. In one instance, a parent our office worked with received a call from her child’s school that her son – a first grader – had had an emotional outburst. The parent asked to talk to her child on the phone to calm him down, but school staff told her that he was too upset, and that he would instead be taken to the hospital. Two boroughs away when she received the call from the school, the parent raced to meet her young child at the hospital. When she arrived, he was calm – though understandably shaken by the experience – and after a brief evaluation was released from the hospital. In many cases, as in this one, once at the hospital, children are evaluated and promptly discharged. But the experience of being brought to a hospital, often without a parent, is traumatic for both students and their families, and can have long-lasting negative effects in how students experience school.

It is essential that school staff work to deescalate children in emotional crisis, and that school staff receive the training and support necessary to be able to do so effectively. When de- escalation fails, it is appropriate for clinically trained mental health professionals to be the people making determinations about whether hospital transport is truly necessary. This bill underscores the need for the City to ensure that all students attend schools with staff that are trained in crisis response and de-escalation, and who have the clinical knowledge to be able to respond to students in emotional distress. We know that many schools do not have these resources available. We are hopeful that this bill – along with the necessary investment in these supports – will limit law enforcement response to students in emotional crisis.

Though we support many aspects of this bill, we do have some concerns about the bill. First, the bill specifically assigns to the NYPD the responsibility of training police officers to respond to students in emotional crisis. We disagree that even more resources should be allocated to the NYPD for this training when the purpose of this bill is to limit the NYPD’s role in responding to students in emotional distress.

We are also concerned that the bill lacks any real measures for accountability. The bill includes a mechanism for reporting on the response to students in emotional crisis, and a reference to

“quality assurance checks,” but it remains unclear what will happen if school staff or precinct officers fail to respond appropriately to students in emotional crisis, or if precinct officers use handcuffs or other restraints on students who are not at risk of causing serious physical injury to themselves or others. We recommend adding robust accountability measures to include appropriate discipline for officers who fail to follow the mandates of the bill.

Int. 2211-2021

Stationing police officers in schools has not been shown to make schools safer, and research has shown that police presence and metal detectors can in fact significantly decrease a student’s perception of safety at school.³ School policing often targets common adolescent behavior, bringing young people into the criminal legal system, and making them more susceptible to future contact with the system. Criminal cases can lead to orders of protection that may bar students from school buildings. And these cases bring with them several other collateral consequences that can serve to derail a student’s education or future employment prospects.

Studies have shown that when students are arrested, they are less likely to graduate from high school, and have worse academic performance in school.⁴ And these outcomes are most acute for Black and Latinx students, who are more likely than white students to face harsh discipline and to have interactions with police at schools. In New York City, even as arrests in schools have fallen, during the 2019-20 school year, Black and Latinx students accounted for over 90% of school-based arrests, while representing just over two thirds of the DOE student population.⁵

Though it may seem on paper that moving school safety agents from the NYPD to the DOE takes the city a step closer to having police-free schools, we believe that the bill does not go far enough in reimagining what safe and supportive schools can look like. Our city’s schools must shift to a culture where school staff, not police officers or security personnel, take the lead in addressing and preventing student misbehavior, and do so in a nonpunitive way, that does not serve to further disconnect students from the schools they attend.

Other cities have begun the process of shrinking the size of school police forces and investing in other means of securing safe and supportive schools; New York should follow suit.⁶ Moving school safety agents back under DOE control, and changing the uniforms these officers wear, is insufficient to ensure that schools will not continue to take a punitive and law-enforcement-based approach to routine misbehavior. Int. 2211 does nothing to shrink the size of the school

safety division. The budget for school safety agents, whether it falls under the NYPD or the DOE, is enormous – nearly half a billion dollars – at a time when the DOE faces massive budget cuts in other areas.

Rather than continuing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into school policing, the City Council should instead take this opportunity to invest in mental health and other supports for schools that will increase the health and well-being of New York City’s children and communities. The last year in New York City schools has been unlike any other. During the last year, many students have experienced profound trauma – they have lost close family members and friends, have had their families experience job losses and other financial insecurities, and have been disconnected from friends and other support networks. Many students have struggled to navigate remote coursework while lacking the critical technology needed to participate,

and have found it difficult to attend school from home, where distractions abound. Most students have been out of school buildings for nearly a year; those attending in person have had to contend with buildings opening and closing.

When students return to school, the stress and trauma of the last twelve months may bring with them increased behavioral issues as students readjust to in-person learning. And so, whenever students return to school buildings in large numbers, it is essential that they are provided with the mental health supports to ensure their success in returning to school while processing the trauma of the last twelve months. We are especially concerned that without the

broad and equitable delivery of mental health supports for returning students, many families will be at increased risk for investigation by the Administration for Children’s Services, which can be traumatic for families in its own way.

We are encouraged that the Mayor’s Office has put forth a preliminary proposal to support increased mental health services to students in the communities most affected by the COVID- 19 pandemic. Careful program design and more funding, however, is needed to ensure that students have access to meaningful supports – not just surface-level interventions. We urge the City Council to expand financial investments to ensure our schools, and particularly our highest needs schools, have access to behavioral health consultants, on-site mental health clinicians, and mobile mental health response teams.

Clinically trained staff, including licensed clinical social workers, can play an important role, particularly working with youth who have experienced trauma, which is likely to be more

acute in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Guidance counselors can also serve a critical role supporting students and implementing guidance interventions as an alternative to punitive discipline. Restorative justice coordinators can help students and schools use restorative practices to address misconduct. Beyond supporting individual students, guidance and social work

staff along with restorative justice coordinators can also facilitate successful implementation of whole-school reforms and support all staff in the undertaking.

We appreciate the work that the City Council – and particularly Chair Treyger – has done to secure additional social workers for New York City schools over the past several years, and urge the Council to continue to invest in appropriately trained and supervised guidance counselors, licensed social workers, and restorative justice coordinators.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it is critical that we make serious strides towards recognizing that traumatizing children through the use of restraints and law enforcement presence in schools does not further public safety or the health and well-being of New York City’s children and communities. The City Council should take this opportunity to invest in solutions that do.

We thank you for the opportunity to submit testimony on this critically important topic. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at aarkingallagher@bds.org or (646) 971- 2719.

¹ Student Safety Act data shows that while over half of the children handcuffed by the NYPD in schools are Black, Black students represent just over 20% of New York City public school students. NYPD School Safety Data, https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/school-safety.page. See also Advocates for Children of New York, Children in Crisis: Police Response to Students in Emotional Distress (Nov. 2017), https://www.advocatesforchildren.org/sites/default/files/library/children_in_crisis.pdf.

² NYCLU, Student Safety Act Reporting (2019), https://www.nyclu.org/sites/default/files/ssa_2019_full_year.pdf.

³ Nathan James & Gail McCallion, School Resource Officers: Law Enforcement Officers in Schools, CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE (June 26, 2013); Matthew T. Theriot & John G. Orme, School Resource Officers and Students’ Feelings of Safety at School, 14 YOUTH VIOLENCE & JUV. JUSTICE 130-146 (2016).

⁴ Jason P. Nance, Students, Police, and the School-To-Prison Pipeline, 93 WASH. U. L. REV. 919 (2016).

⁵ Madina Touré, Report: Black, Latino Youths Still Getting Arrested at Disproportionate Rates in NYC, POLITICO (July 13, 2020), https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2020/07/13/report-black-latino-youths- still-getting-arrested-at-disproportionate-rates-in-nyc-1300084.

⁶ Jill Cowan, Shawn Hubler & Kate Taylor, Protesters Urged Defunding the Police, Schools in Big Cities are Doing It, N.Y. TIMES (Feb. 17, 2021).