![]() The Urban Academy opened in 1995 as the anchor among six alternative public schools-four high schools, a pre-kindergarten through eighth grade school and a program for autistic children-that operate as autonomous entities within the eighty-year-old building, now known as the Julia Richman Education Complex. She said, ‘This was my office.’ We asked her about the metal box and she said, ‘Oh, that was the place we locked the kids up in until the police came.’” Mack and Cook tore the cage down, too, and made the office into a large, open space for teachers’ desks and a common room for students. “A year or two after we’d been here, a woman came in who used to be the assistant principal for guidance. We didn’t know what it was,” Mack recalls. “We thought that it must have been a storage space and thought it was strange that there were no shelves for papers or boxes. Then there was the “cage,” an eight-by-twelve foot, floor-to-ceiling wire box that occupied part of the old guidance counselor office. The scanners are such a political decision.” If they want to get a gun in, they can push it through a window. We have thirteen entrances to the building. “We have probably a hundred windows at ground level. Our feeling is the only way to have safe schools is to have the kids be willing to talk to you and to the security folks about the problems they anticipate,” Mack says. You couldn’t possibly have a welcoming school if you lined kids up to be searched. “We didn’t for a day walk through the things. It took six months to get permission from the city’s Board of Education and then Mack had the scanners torn down from the doorways. ![]() A dozen School Security Agents, as the school police are known in the Big Apple, used to search students every morning with both kinds of scanners. ![]() ![]() There were walk-through scanners, too, installed at entrances to the old Julia Richman High School, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “I took the hand-held metal detectors and locked them in a closet,” says Mack. Herb Mack recalls the first day he and Ann Cook, co-founders of the Urban Academy, came into the old building that now houses their alternative public high school. But are they making them safer? Is there a different way? The following adapted excerpt from “Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse,” by Annette Fuentes (Verso, May 2011) finds anecdotal reports and statistical evidence that tighter security does not always make for safer schools. More than 5,000 NYPD school safety agents patrol the hallways of New York City’s schools. ![]()
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