While Chancellor David Banks painted a rosy picture of the Big Apple’s public schools this week, the results of a citywide student survey show a darker reality — with a growing number of kids saying they are bullied, unhappy and unsafe.
Of 355,105 K-12 pupils polled by the city Department of Education this spring, 51% said harassment, bullying and intimidation by classmates was common. Last year, 48% of students felt that way.
Gang activity occurred some or most of the time in school, 27% of students said, up 2% from last year.
More kids feel unsafe and unhappy, the DOE survey found, with 20% of kids disagreeing with the statement: “most days I have felt safe when at school,” a 3% increase from 2023. And 26% of kids rejected the phrase: “most days I have felt happy when at school,” up from 24% a year earlier.
One Manhattan teen said she’s already heard classmates, within the first two weeks of school, claiming to be gangbangers, demanding cash and making threats like, “I will pop you.”
“It makes you feel scared,” said Jenny, 15, a freshman at Stephen T. Mather Building Arts & Craftsmanship High School in Hells Kitchen.
Another teen who attends Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology, located in the same West 49th Street building, said it’s hard to know who’s bluffing and who’s really in a gang.
“I feel like they’re mostly wannabes, but you never really know,” said Mason, 15, a junior.
Fear seems to go hand in hand with more gangs and guns in school.
“So far this year, there’s been a lot of school shootings everywhere, so it makes students feel a lot more overwhelmed and more nervous to come to school,” Mason explained.
On Thursday two kids were caught bringing guns into Flushing High School in Queens, and a teen was shot at a Staten Island playground a block from a school. On Friday, a 16-year-old was found with a gun in Mott Hall High School in Harlem, police said.
In May, two boys were slashed – one in the face and another in the torso – inside Mason’s school building.
Kids have been traumatized ever since, one sophomore said.
“My mom even wanted me to transfer schools because of it,” said, Maru, 15.
The troubling survey results were quietly released in August.
With city students cowering in class, new statistics show major crimes are up in schools.
Robberies on campus went up 18%, from 28 last year to 33 in FY 2024, which ended June 30. Grand larcenies jumped 20%, from 156 in 2023 to 187 in 2024, and felony assaults edged up 2%, from 136 to 139 this year, according to the Mayor’s Management Report.
Citywide, crimes against victims 17 and younger jumped 14% from Fiscal Year 2023, according to NYPD data in the report.
“Schools are in very big trouble with the amount of incidents happening in every neighborhood, with an overall uptick of gang violence, bullying and crime,” said Mona Davids, co-founder of the NYC School Safety Coalition, noting weapons are being seized from schools “at an alarming rate.”
Banks’ “lax” policies that fail to hold students accountable and DOE administrators who don’t fully report incidents for fear of making their schools look bad are also part of the problem, she contended.
Some of the worst examples of bad behavior in NYC schools…
The Department of Education’s citywide spring survey of K-12 showed a growing number feel unsafe, bullied, surrounded by gangs and generally unhappy.
Here are some of the worst examples of bad behavior in city schools:
- An 11-year-old girl at Mark Twain Intermediate School for the Gifted and Talented in Coney Island endured chronic bullying in school and online, including physical assaults, last school year – while educrats did little to stop it. “It’s a scary time to send your kids to school in this country for a plethora of reasons,” like high crime citywide, “and it’s absolutely inexcusable in what is supposed to be the greatest nation in the world,” her father told The Post this week.
- A wave of violence in just over an hour saw four students slashed in three separate stabbings at NYC schools on May 14. Two students slashed each other – one in the face and one in the torso – at a Hell’s Kitchen school complex; another student was stabbed in a gang attack inside the Evander Childs Educational Campus in The Bronx, and a fourth was knived at the Queens High School of Teaching, Liberal Arts and the Sciences.
- After a 15-year-old stabbed another student in the stomach at Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood on Dec. 5, students were screened as they entered the school building the next day – which uncovered 13 knives, seven pepper spray canisters and a box cutter.
- At Brooklyn Tech, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science — three of the city’s nine elite, specialized high schools — Jewish students were viciously tormented last school year by peers giving Nazi salutes and accusing them of being part of a “genocide” of Palestinians, while school administrators and teachers also spew pro-Palestine propaganda, The Post revealed in June.
“The bottom line is that children are fearful, and no child can learn in an unsafe environment — so these children are not learning, and that is a big problem,” Davids said.
At Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood — where 13 knives, seven pepper spray canisters and a box cutter were seized after a male student stabbed another in December — teens have become increasingly divided by gang affiliations, one junior said.
“Our school is very separated between the people who are involved [in gangs] and those who aren’t. . . . And there’s also a lot of cultural differences between people, so I don’t think that helps with bullying and everything,” the 16-year-old girl, who requested anonymity, explained.
International conflicts have made life tougher for New York’s kids, she said.
“There’s a lot of talk about [the Israel-Hamas] war, which brings up conflict, like heated arguments,” she added.
Cyberbullying is a regular occurrence, said 42% of kids, up from 38% in 2023, while bullying based on race, religion, ethnicity, language or immigration status is also a common problem, with 38% of students in 2024 citing the issue compared to 34% last year.
Harassment based on body type or disability was an issue for 39% of kids in this year’s survey, compared to 35% in 2023.
“I don’t feel like we get enough support or resources from the school to help us out mentally. They say to go to our guidance counselor but my guidance counselor doesn’t reach out to me. She doesn’t do anything,” said Assata,16, a junior at Murrow.
The statistics are “alarming,” said civil-rights lawyer Jim Walden, who sued the DOE in 2016 on behalf of parents whose kids had been tormented and beaten by bullies.
“The fact that complaints of bullying are going up is a troubling sign,” Walden said.
DOE spokeswoman Jenna Lyle said parents now have access to an online bullying reporting system, and students have “a range of supports available in schools.”
“At the end of the day, it is not only the responsibility but the expectation that every adult provide support to students in need,” she said.
Additional reporting by Deirdre Bardolf, Susan Edelman and Larry Celona.