NYC Schools To Ramp Up Security Until U.S. Deals With Guns: Mayor

NEW YORK, NY — New York City students will go through random security screenings and a refresher on how to handle violent threats after last week's massacre at a Florida high school, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday.

The city will soon deploy metal detectors at random in every middle and high school for at least a day, de Blasio said. The screenings could happen "at any school at any time" as a "deterrent" to violent threats, he said.

Every school will also run safety drills this month and next month to make sure students know what to do if there is a shooting, the mayor said.

"Those drills are going to become commonplace in our schools now, starting immediately, until the day that we as a nation address the underlying issue," de Blasio said during an unrelated news conference at City Hall.

The efforts to beef up security at city schools come a week after Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people and injuring more than a dozen.

The city Department of Education uses "targeted unnanounced scanning" at middle and high schools "when necessary," a department spokeswoman said. DOE policy allows for random screenings at those schools at any point during the school year.

The DOE sent a letter to school principals last week reminding them that they're required to run four yearly lockdown drills, in which students hide and stay quiet, and eight evacuation drills, in which everyone leaves the building.

Every school must run at least one lockdown drill by March 15, a DOE spokeswoman said.

Such drills helped keep students and staff safe at Stuyvesant High School during the Oct. 31 terrorist attack on the Hudson River Greenway, de Blasio said.

The Democratic mayor blamed the need for these drills on the Republican-controlled Congress's failure to enact stiffer federal gun control laws and the National Rifle Association's opposition to them. Stoneman Douglas High School students have aggressively pushed lawmakers to enact tougher gun laws since the shooting.

"If ever there’s an indication that there’s something wrong, it’s that we have to teach our young people to get ready for a mass shooting," the mayor said. "That is a fundamental policy mistake. That's not something that has to be."

Some 79 schools had metal detectors permanently in place in the 2015-16 school year, according to a DOE policy document. De Blasio acknowledged that some parents and teachers think they hurt "the effectiveness of the education" in those schools, but he said they're sometimes needed.

"There’s been a lot of desire to avoid it if it can be avoided, but we will always make the decision based on the security dynamics in the building and those will change over time," de Blasio said.

The screenings and drills are an addition to the city's already robust school safety efforts, which include the thousands of NYPD school safety agents dedicated to securing school buildings and law enforcement officials who regularly defuse threats, de Blasio said.

But students, parents and teachers have to play a role in school safety too, he said.

"Young people have to report what they see," de Blasio said. "And they could go to a trusted adult, they could go to a parent, they could go a teacher, they could go to police officer. Teachers, crossing guards — everyone is a part of this."

(Lead image: An NYPD School Safety car sits outside a Bronx school in 2009. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)