Chair Salaam questions OPHC on tracking school impact and incident response
Chair Salaam asks how OPHC tracks school impacts like bullying and hateful graffiti. Ramjatin explains OPHC receives monthly reports from NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force on schools with increased bias incidents, then proactively reaches out. He notes they also work beyond NYC public schools, including an imam training school.
That's really, really excellent.
Young people are often, unfortunately, exposed to hate right in their very own schools, one of the places that they should feel the safest.
So my question is, how does OPHC track the impacts of its work in schools, whether it be bullying, hateful graffiti, property damage?
Or hate-motivated violence, has any schools reported improvements as a result of the OPHC programming that has been conducted?
And also, has OPHC ever been contacted for guidance or education specifically in response to an incident at a school?
Yeah, thank you for that question.
So again, OPSC's work is not enforcement in nature.
We are preventative.
So we don't want anyone calling NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force in the first place.
But we do get our reports from the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force, who gives us a report quarterly, monthly, as I asked them to let me know which schools you are seeing increased.
Reported bias incidents happening on their premises.
And then we reach out to those schools and we say, hey, here's what we do, here's what we can do.
and help you to do this programming, and we go to the schools and we meet them.
This program has been successful as we have received a lot of incoming requests to go to the schools.
We have also gone beyond the New York City Public Schools.
This past year, we went to the largest imam training school in Hillside Avenue, where we educated.
All the students who were part of that school over there.
So we go beyond the New York City public schools, anywhere students are learning.
We want to be also teaching about hate, bias, and discrimination.
The good thing is that, listen, as I mentioned again, I am super excited about the administration's investment in our office because while these are all programs we tested out,
to see if they're working and what the impact is.
Now we have the real backing, we have the real funding and the commitment from this administration to make sure we expand this success across the city.
Thank you for that.