The NYPD recovered two guns from public school students on Thursday — making a total of five firearms found in city schools in the past two days.
School safety agents on Thursday found one of the guns in the backpack of a 17-year-old student at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens after the student showed the weapon to a classmate, according to police.
The other gun was found in the backpack of a 14-year-old student at Intermediate School 98 in the Bronx. A classmate told a parent the student was showing off a bright pink handgun on Wednesday. The parent alerted school officials — who found the loaded gun in the student’s backpack on Thursday, according to police.
The suspect “was a 14-year-old who was being all gangster,” a seventh grader at the school told the Daily News.
“It’s crazy,” said the student, who is also 14.
“The whole school was in lockdown,” the student recalled. “They told us there was a gun in the school. It lasted two periods. We couldn’t leave the class. They had us go to one side of the room.”
The discoveries come just a day after officials found three handguns at high schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn, two of which were loaded.
Two of the firearms were detected by metal detectors at Bronx high schools. Another was discovered in the waistband of a teenager during a fight at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, according to sources.
The sudden surge of guns just over a month in the school year is stoking fears about safety.
Sevika Singh Dhaliwal, the mother of a freshman at Martin Van Buren, said her daughter was terrified when classmates began talking about a student with a gun and the school went on lockdown.
“They all just hid in their classes and was told to be quiet,” Dhaliwal said, adding that her daughter heard police yelling in the hallway. When Dhaliwal arrived at the school to pick her daughter up, she saw a student in handcuffs asking nearby parents for help.
Dhaliwal said she still hasn’t heard directly from the school about the incident and fears for her daughter’s safety.
“Unacceptable,” she said. “The school needs to have a better security system. Our children’s lives matter. They are the future of this country.”
A group dubbed NYC School Safety Coalition, led by veteran parent organizer Mona Davids, is holding a rally in the Bronx Friday pushing for additional metal detector screenings and supporting the presence of police officers in schools.
DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer said “weapons have absolutely no place in our schools, and our outstanding School Safety Agents swiftly and safely recovered and immediately confiscated these items, ensuring that all students and staff are safe. All protocols were followed, and we are working closely with NYPD regarding follow-up actions.”
The scary discoveries come at a charged moment for safety in the nation’s largest school system. In June 2020, in the wake of the racial justice protests over the police killing of George Floyd, Mayor de Blasio committed to transferring the supervision of school safety agents from the NYPD to the Education Department. City officials have said that transition will be complete by 2022.
Some advocates and lawmakers have pushed the city to go even further by removing safety agents from schools altogether and diverting the funding to social workers and counselors, arguing that police presence disproportionately harms students of color.
Critics of those proposals have argued that school safety agents are necessary to prevent violence — and point to the firearm recoveries in recent days as proof.
“In all these violent incidents, School Safety Agents professionally responded to minimize the mayhem and save lives,” said Greg Floyd, the president of Teamsters Local 237, the union representing school safety agents. “What more will it take … to acknowledge that to help ensure safety in public schools, School Safety Agents are needed there?”
Floyd also blasted a city decision not to hire a new class of nearly 500 school safety agents, saying the number of active school safety agents has dropped from past highs of nearly 5,500 to closer to 4,000 — with an additional hundreds of agents leaving because they chose not to comply with the city’s vaccine mandate.
Christian Flores, a Brooklyn high school student, and leader of the Urban Youth Collaborative, a student-led group that’s pushed to remove police from schools, said the gun recoveries make him wonder “why a student might have a gun on them in the first place. Is there something in their community or outside of school that makes them feel unsafe?” He added that the “police in my school don’t make my classmates and I feel safe at all. We need mental health support.”
With Rocco Parascandola
