NYC Spends $20M for Security at Private Schools, Including City’s Priciest

The Village Voice reports:

For an annual tuition of over $46,000, the Dalton School on the Upper East Side serves up about the best education money can buy. It offers advanced robotics programs, Broadway-worthy theater productions, and library facilities rivaling those of many colleges. It’s a far cry from the city’s public schools, plagued as they are by inequities and often struggling to provide extras beyond a basic education.

But despite its advantages, Dalton is also among the private schools that have cumulatively received $2.2 million in public funds so far this year, and are slated to receive millions more, as part of a controversial program enacted by the City Council in 2015.

Records released by the city under the state Freedom of Information Law show that a measure pitched in part as an anti-terrorism effort has benefited some of the city’s most prestigious — and expensive — private schools. In all, 162 private institutions, the majority of them religious schools, are slated to receive a total of about $20 million in the first year of a program that reimburses nonpublic schools for the cost of on-site security guards.

The Hewitt School, Town School, and Collegiate School, each of which has a tuition topping $45,000 a year, are all on that list. The latter advertises itself as “among the top all-boys K–12 schools in the world” and counts among its alumni Bill Kristol and John F. Kennedy Jr.; JFK Jr.’s sister, Caroline Kennedy, attended Brearley, another school slated to receive public funds. The funds pay for one full-time guard at institutions with three hundred students or more; schools with five hundred students or more can be reimbursed for the cost of two guards.

Councilman David Greenfield, who represents Borough Park, had championed versions of the bill for years before it was finally enacted. (Greenfield’s initial proposal, to station city police officers at private schools upon request, was shot down by the NYPD.) It was only in December 2015 — less than a week after fourteen people were killed in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California — that it finally passed the council, the result of a compromise struck with City Hall.

The great moments of rent-seeking! Did you really think today's progressives think the 1st Amendment means you can't subsidize religious schools that they send their children to?