Op-ed | School safety saves lives

I’ve always said that public safety is the prerequisite to prosperity in our city, and it has always been our administration’s North Star. We strive to ensure that all New Yorkers feel safe in their homes, on the streets, and in other public spaces — this includes in our schools where our young people spend much of their time.

Our students must be able to feel safe in school so they can focus on their studies, parents must feel that they are leaving their children in a secure environment, and our teachers and staff must feel confident that we are keeping them safe at work so they can focus on teaching our young ones.

That is why our administration is proud to announce this country’s first pilot program that directly integrates public schools with New York City’s 911 services. Through this new initiative, we will be able to save lives by providing rapid response in active shooter situations.

We have tested this program, and now, we are rolling it out to a total of 51 schools across the five boroughs during the 2025-2026 school year, starting with the Spring Creek campus in Brooklyn.

Our Emergency Alert System (EAS) can be activated from multiple fixed buttons and wireless lanyards within a school, and it is capable of initiating a 911 response in under 10 seconds without going through a switchboard. This school-activated EAS will also bypass the New York City 911 call flow and be routed directly to real-time dispatch.

At the same time, schools will provide audio and visual cues that notify students and faculty that New York City 911 has been alerted and that their school is on a hard lockdown.

In an ideal world, we would not need to be planning for how to respond in the case of a school shooting, but sadly, we do not live in an ideal world — and in our current reality, we must be proactive and ready for all possibilities, however shocking they may be.

Since we came into office nearly four years ago, our administration has already taken more than 24,300 illegal guns off our streets, and thanks to our proactive public safety efforts, shooting incidents and shooting victims are at their lowest levels in the city’s recorded history.

Shootings have also decreased by 55 percent and homicides have declined by 36.5 percent citywide compared to the same period before we came into office, and in October 2025, major crimes dropped by 6.5 percent.

New York City is and remains the safest big city in America, and our new EAS will build on our work to make sure our schools have the most secure line of defense possible as we protect our students, teachers, and school staff.