100,000 NYC School Children Face Airport-Style Security Screening Every Day
Crime in the schools has dropped sharply but New York still requires students at more than 200 schools to take off their shoes and send their belongings through x-ray machines.
This story was co-published with WNYC.
On the coldest morning New York City has seen this winter, a stream of teenage students hit a bottleneck at the front of a Brooklyn school building. They shed their jackets, gloves and belts, shivering as they wait to pass through a metal detector and send their backpacks through an x-ray machine. School safety agents stand nearby, poised to step in if the alarm bleats.
It’s an everyday occurrence for more than 100,000 middle and high school students across the city.
On this morning, as on every school day, senior Justin Feldeo prepares to be pulled aside for separate screening by a hand wand. Feldeo is studying to be a firefighter and the boots he wears for class trigger the metal detectors.
Fifteen minutes after the formal start of the school day, students are still pouring in, even later for having to go through the machines.
Almost as many New York City students run the gauntlet of x-ray machines each day as pass through the scanners at busy Miami International Airport. And the procedure is numbingly similar. Students must remove belts, shoes, and sometimes bobby pins as the wait stretches as long as an hour.
A ProPublica survey found that the daily ritual is borne disproportionately by students of color; black and Hispanic students in high school are nearly three times more likely to walk through a metal detector than their white counterparts.
Nearly 21 years after a fearful city installed them at the front doors of more than 80 schools, there are growing questions about whether the security precautions do more 100,000 NYC School Children Face Airport-Style Security Screening Every Day - ProPublica: