New York Daily News

Call to keep ed. guards with NYPD

- BY MICHAEL ELSEN-ROONEY

The union leader representi­ng more than 5,000 school safety officers blasted growing calls to transfer control of school security from the NYPD to the city Education Department, warning it’ll lead to “disastrous results.”

In a letter Tuesday to city lawmakers, Gregory Floyd (inset), the president of Teamsters Local 237, said the strategy failed more than two decades ago.

“I witnessed the disastrous results of the Board of Education being responsibl­e for school safety prior to 1998, and I understand that taking away school safety responsibi­lities from the NYPD is not an advisable change,” Floyd wrote.

The warning came in response to City Council Speaker Corey Johnson’s pledge to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget, in part by shifting some responsibi­lities away from the agency. Sources told the Daily News that could include school safety. A spokesman for Johnson’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Councilmen

Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn) and Donovan Richards (DQueens) on Monday called for the controvers­ial transfer of control of school safety from the NYPD to the Education Department — which oversaw school security until 1998 — echoing similar demands from education workers who want officers retrained and held directly accountabl­e to school officials.

Floyd criticized city lawmakers for not consulting with union officials before making the proposal, accusing the pols of “pandering and political opportunis­m.”

The union honcho argued the school safety division “already better achieves the goals of many police reform advocates” than the rest of the NYPD. “Seventy percent of school safety agents are black and Latina women; the vast majority live in the neighborho­ods in which they work; and they do not carry firearms or chemical agents,” he wrote.

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