NYC schools to ramp up safety protocols for new academic year

The New York City Department of Education is ramping up safety protocols for the new school year, The Post has learned.

The new measures range from new technology to more school safety staffers — and come after violence in the Big Apple put schools on lockdown in the spring.

“We’ve met with triple digit numbers of vendors around different safety enhancements and applications that they recommend that we use to fortify our safety in our schools,” Mark Rampersant, security director at the DOE, told parents this week.

Rampersant, at the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, introduced an internal application for real-time emergency notifications between principals and parents.

“We heard from parents around notification, and timeframe by which you get notified by your schools when something like a lockdown, shelter-in-place or an evacuation transpires,” he said. “We heard you when you said principals need to do a better job of making notification.”

The application also allows Schools Chancellor David Banks to contact families, and can be used for weather emergencies like snow days.

The DOE is also introducing a prototype so the public schools can lock their front doors, while giving first responders access to the building in case of emergency.

City officials began to seriously consider bolting the main entryways after a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 students and two teachers this spring.

“We believe that we have a prototype that we are introducing to our schools as we write new policy regarding what it looks like to actually lock the front doors,” Rampersant said.

The DOE is also investing in personnel, including $9 million in federal stimulus funds to put volunteer violence interrupters from local nonprofits on the city’s payroll.

“We thought fitting, why would we not employ these folks and bring them into our schools to help us ensure the safety and security for our students, staff and our visitors?” said Rampersant.

Meanwhile, a second class of school safety agents under the Adams administration will graduate later this month, adding 200 staffers in time for reopening. After that, another 250 will go into the academy for 17 weeks of training, he said.

Greg Floyd, the president of Teamsters Local 237, which represents the city’s school safety agents, estimated the current class is closer to 175 agents — and does little to add more hands on deck systemwide.

“I’m sure about 175 may have retired since the school year ended,” said Floyd, who gets retiree reports on a 2-3 month delay. “You go through the math with people who don’t know the math — and it’s good that you have another class — but you don’t say how many people retired.”

Floyd gauged that there is still a 2,000-agent shortage, compared to the workforce’s numbers pre-pandemic and the height of the movement to defund police.

He added that all agents were required to take active shooter trainings in the wake of the Texas mass school shooting.

“That’s new,” Floyd said. “But what they really need is help now — not for an active shooter. They need help for everyday weapon prevention.”

Thousands of weapons were recovered in the public schools last school year, which Banks attributed to students’ concerns about their safety on their way to and from the school buildings.

Floyd also questioned the timing of the announcements and not yet looping in the school safety agents, with the first day of school just around the corner.

“All I hear is ‘we’re looking at,’ ‘we’re looking at.’ But I don’t see the results of ‘looking at,’ and school’s going to start,” he said.

The Department of Education will have more to share soon, officials said, adding that schools and families will be the first to know about new protocols.

https://nypost.com/2022/08/12/nyc-schools-to-ramp-up-safety-protocols-for-new-school-year/

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Welcome to college — let the indoctrination begin!

It’s August, meaning millions of bright-eyed, fresh-faced kids are heading off to college to be indoctrinated.

At Northwestern University, the process begins with the student newspaper’s guide to activist groups. The Daily Northwestern’s Orientation Issue, handed out to incoming freshmen for free, helpfully lists seven groups new Wildcats might want to join. Just seven.

There’s NU Community Not Cops, which calls for the abolition of the campus police department. Students Organizing for Labor Rights, which has students pushing campus employees to unionize. NU Dissenters, which calls for the university to divest from any “war profiteers” including Boeing and Lockheed Martin. And Fossil Free NU, which “fights for climate and environmental justice, based in anti-racist and abolitionist praxis.”

Or you could tap a keg with a group dedicated to destroying Israel.

The Students for Justice in Palestine “raise awareness for violence committed against Palestinian people by Israeli forces” — skipping, we imagine, the constant rocket and terrorist attacks against Israel. SJP brags that it got 60 students to walk out of a speech by Andrew Yang, because why listen to anyone with whom you disagree? They boycotted Sabra, because why let any Israeli company do business?

In November of last year, Community Not Cops, Students for Justice in Palestine, NU Dissenters and Fossil Free NU “stormed” the field during a football game in protest (considering Northwestern went 1-8 in the Big Ten, they were probably happy for the break). What does Fossil Free NU have to do with Israel? The group “sees environmental justice work as tied to other forms of resistance.”

Sadly, Northwestern is indicative of what’s going on at many universities, which are awash in “intersectional” progressive dogma. You must believe in the Green New Deal, and defunding the police, and Palestinians’ “right to return” — code for the end of Israel as a Jewish state — and you must believe them all, no exceptions. Each gets an uncritical hearing in the student press. Anyone else gets shouted down or protested.

No surprise, then, that universities are producing the sort of young, white, illiberal, censorious urban voters whose voting bloc elects the Squad and drags the Democratic Party even further left.

So: Welcome, class of ’26. We have just one piece of advice. The most important thing to learn in college is how to think for yourself.

https://nypost.com/2022/08/12/college-indoctrination-at-northwestern-university/

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Colleges, Parents Fight in Court Over Tuition Charged During Pandemic Closures

Colleges and universities faced a barrage of lawsuits in the peak pandemic days of 2020 after schools shut down their campuses and moved classes online while charging students their usual tuition rates.

Two years later, the Covid-19 tuition wars are building toward a decisive phase.

A number of courts have issued rulings that provided a boost to students and parents seeking refunds, including last week in a case against a small private university in California. That decision followed a recent federal appeals court ruling that allowed claims to proceed against Loyola University Chicago. But those rulings stand in tension with other decisions for schools that said students don’t have valid claims. Pending cases from higher-level courts could bring more clarity.

The cases could turn on what specific promises schools made to students about in-person education—and whether students suffered any harm in the switch to remote classes, said Benjamin J. Hinks, a Boston-area employment and higher-education lawyer who has followed the litigation.

“We’re definitely seeing a trend towards plaintiff-friendly rulings at the pretrial stages,” Mr. Hinks said. “However, these are hard-fought cases, and the fight is not over for universities.”

Most of the cases revolve around the academic spring semester of 2020, when emergency quarantine measures in the period before vaccines forced the country’s higher-education industry to suspend in-person classes and close their physical campuses, barring access to laboratories, dormitories, libraries, student centers and athletic facilities.

At many schools, academia’s temporary move to virtual learning didn’t come with any discounts to tuition or student service fees. But it left a trail of hundreds of lawsuits in federal and state courts demanding restitution.

Legally, the battle isn’t so much about whether an online learning experience is inferior. Judges aren’t supposed to make judgments about academic quality under long-held doctrine insulating schools from lawsuits alleging “educational malpractice.”

Plaintiffs have argued that schools were contractually obligated to deliver an in-person education and unfairly kept all their money.

“Universities are wonderful places, but students are paying a lot of money. They paid for in-person access to campus, in-person education and all the amenities promised to them when they signed up, and they didn’t get that,” said Ellen Noteware, an attorney representing the plaintiffs suing Loyola.

“People just didn’t get the experience they thought they were paying for,” she said.

The litigation has turned on complex interpretations of state contract law and questions about what exactly colleges and universities promised students when they enrolled.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/colleges-parents-fight-in-court-over-tuition-charged-during-pandemic-closures-11659865504

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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