Cardozo High School has undergone a major change recently; the NYPD has designated the school a permanent scanning location, placing metal detectors on campus moving forward.
After the safety incident on Sept. 18, Cardozo was burdened with unexpected costs for temporary scanning throughout the school year. Despite being on campus almost every day since, the scanning was still designated as “random.” As emergency funds were not prepared for the expense of this magnitude, the school needed to redistribute the money to cover all the costs.
“We’ve done our best to have it affect students as little as possible, but with the amount of money being spent, it’s been impossible not to have it touch everything,” Cardozo’s Principal, Ms. Colby stated.
Ms. Bohlman, Assistant Principal of Organization, had explained what Cardozo specifically pays for when it comes to this change.
“Due to scanning, we have had to extend our day by opening the school day earlier and extending the day later, which means we need to add permits to have security staff in the building, have the custodians open the building earlier, and add staff to supervise the scanning station with administrators, teachers/deans, and/or school aides,” Ms. Bohlman explained.
Cardozo does not pay for the actual machines and metal detectors since the NYPD supplies them. However, they do have to cover the cost of the extra staff members who need to be present when students are being searched by the police officers. “
This means paying more per session to those workers,” Ms. Bohlman concluded.
The reallocation of funds mostly reduced the amount of overtime pay available to teachers, money to pay for substitute teachers, the hours to keep the library open, as well as funds for other extracurricular activities. Regents tutoring was also pushed back to start later than usual this year.
The DOE has provided no additional funds to assist Cardozo with the expenses. Principal Colby described the costs as being able to “hire an additional teacher for the amount spent on scanning.”
The reduction in overtime pay led to a decrease in tutoring hours allowed per teacher. Mr. Mitrano and Mr. Morreale, both social studies teachers, exemplified the frustration and upset shared with many teachers and students on the loss of time. Both teachers hold tutoring sessions together for the AP U.S. History exam, usually requiring large rooms like the cafeteria and auditoriums to fit all their students. They originally had been scheduled for 10 hours of tutoring, but after the budget allocation, they were only given five.
They fought to regain their five hours, and through their union representatives and support, four more hours were luckily found for them in the budget. However, the sudden change in hours still put them in jeopardy.
“It hindered the way we planned this year, and even though we lost one hour, it was a challenge to try to plan out what to review, when to review, so we did skip stuff,” Mr. Mitrano recapped.
Mr. Morreale highlighted the importance of tutoring hours, especially for AP students, noting that New York schools start a month behind compared to many other states in the country, but they all take the tests at the same time. He later detailed that there was not enough time to practice skills on how to answer AP questions, putting students at a disadvantage.
“We know no one is trying to take review hours from us. There are things that can’t be helped,” Mr. Morreale added. “But we’re always going to ask for it. However many we can get, we’re going to take them and use them.”
In the meantime, other teachers have been volunteering their time to help students succeed on their exams, using online meeting platforms as a medium. Yet, even some students do not feel this to be enough and demand more in-person tutoring hours.
Senior Zhenwei Zhou explained from a student’s perspective why she prefers in-person tutoring.
“It would allow teachers to review more on things that they decided to briefly skim over in class due to the lack of time, or topics that a student might not have been able to ask in class,” she expressed. She also suggested that some students may feel more comfortable participating during review sessions when they see that other students also need help on the same subjects.
The lowered number of tutoring sessions can cause mental stress on students as they have less opportunities to gain support from teachers before their momentous exam. In addition to this mental stress, the act of scanning itself has taken a toll on some students.
Junior Persey Dev had illustrated how restricting scanning has made school for him. “The metal detectors stress me out, and it feels disheartening as I try to avoid attending after-school events just to not deal with scanning,” he stated.
“I had an instance where I got stopped despite the scanner not beeping…it was because I was wearing my lanyard, and they told me that they needed to check it since they did not know what was inside it,” he explained. “I never had issues with it before, and I walked through the detectors with it every day.”
Dev also believes that teachers should understand that “scanning is a valid reason for how students could be late to morning classes, as it’s not fast or efficient.” Coupled with the “rudeness” that many students had reported to have experienced from the police officers, scanning does not make Cardozo a place where some students desire to be in the morning.
To ease the issue, Principal Colby proposed the solution taking effect next school year. She explained, “The scanning will all be done by agents who are fully assigned to our school, as opposed to special agents that are sent just to do mornings who are not here for the rest of the day.”
Principal Colby hopes that, “as it becomes permanent here, we will see a change in the demeanor of people because these are agents that students will know and deal with every day as opposed to strangers that are not familiar with our kids and our building.”
Overall, Cardozo’s administration is determined to distribute the budget strategically in a way that the consequences won’t directly affect students for the next school year. Avoiding grabbing money from anywhere possible at the last minute, they plan on taking the time to make up for the time lost this year.
