Andrea of Dignity in Schools on policing, surveillance, and AI concerns

Hello, I'm Andrea from Dignity in Schools New York.

Public schools should be places where students feel safe and supported to learn, yet excessive policing and surveillance continue to undermine student safety and well-being.

While we appreciate Mayor Mamdani's executive budget's proposed reductions to school policing, we are deeply concerned by proposed cuts to restorative justice, the mental health continuum, and immigrant family outreach.

It is a missed opportunity not to reinvest the savings from school policing into protecting and baselining critical services.

The executive budget also fails to address schools'continued reliance on metal detectors, scanning, and surveillance systems that create barriers to learning and disproportionately impact black and immigrant students.

Investigations have found that while 33% of high school students go through metal detectors, 48% are black high schoolers, which contribute to the fact that

in New York City, black students make up less than 20% of the enrollment, but accounted for 45% of superintendent suspensions and 52% of police interventions.

Therefore, we are concerned by growing calls to expand school policing, scanning, and surveillance in the name of safety despite clear evidence of their disparate impacts.

Schools are also increasingly adopting AI technologies that raise serious concerns about student privacy, data security, and surveillance.

Many AI-powered educational tools collect extensive information about students.

AI practices are particularly concerning for immigrant families at a time when federal immigration policies are expanding AI-driven surveillance and data sharing systems.

Families have little transparency into how student data is collected, stored, or shared, and these practices risk undermining student privacy protections under educational law 2D.

Rather than investing in tech that monitors students, schools should invest in human relationships and support systems that help students thrive.

We call on the city to stop buying student surveillance and scanning equipment and create a plan to use those funds to institute a student support staff ratio of no greater than 1 to 100,

freeze hiring for school safety agents, and eliminate vacant positions, generating $90 million in annual savings and using that savings to expand school-based restorative justice, mental health access,

including $80 million to hire school climate coordinators in 500 schools, and enact a two-year moratorium on the use of AI.

Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony.

Thank you.

I need a row.

You ready?

Okay.

Okay, you'll go after the Zoom.

And Dr.

Kalidis Salas.