Amid rising incidents of religiously-motivated crimes and threats, New York City lawmakers are hoping to expand security coverage for yeshivas and other religious schools that are too small to qualify for funding under the existing policy. 

According to the current law, non-public schools are only eligible to receive reimbursement for security costs if their total enrollment is greater than 300 students. The councilman sponsoring the bill, Justin Brannan, who covers areas of southern Brooklyn, is hoping to broaden coverage to include all non-public schools, regardless of class size. 

“There is nothing more important than keeping our kids safe when they’re in school,” Mr. Brannan said in a statement. “Expanding the Nonpublic School Security Reimbursement Program (NPS) to cover more schools and more students just makes sense because we know the program works.”

The program, he added, “allows kids to focus on learning and gives parents and guardians priceless peace of mind in an upside-down world. Schools are a place for education, exploration, and inspiration, never hate, fear or violence.” 

During a hearing for the bill in September, principals of several NYC-based religious schools across varying faiths, including the  Islamic Cultural Center School, Yeshiva University High School for

Girls, and Cristo Rey High School, attested to the importance of expanding the grant program.

“When this grant was passed about 10 years ago, we were eager and excited, and we certainly did apply for this grant, only to be disheartened when we learned that as our enrollment has decreased since COVID, now we are ineligible to have this protection,” principal of Cristo Rey High School, Deanna Philippe, said during the meeting. 

As a result, the co-ed Catholic high school has been unable to hire a security officer. Thus, Ms. Philippe, along with the dean of students, and a few other teachers, have had to “serve as protection” for the students. “That’s unfair to me, unfair to our faculty and staff, and certainly our school community,” she added. 

This kind of situation is not unusual, the executive director for Teach NYS, Sydney Altfield, tells the Sun: “Every year I get a school calling me and saying, saying. I had 307 students last year, and now I have 294. What am I supposed to do?” Ms. Altfield’s organization advocates on behalf of city-based yeshivas Jewish day schools. 

“The program has been around for several years now and it’s been extremely successful. Security guards are really the first thing that parents think of to keep their kids safe,” she tells the Sun. “The problem though,” she adds, “is that it only gives funds to schools that have over 300 students and we have a lot of  schools in the city that have under 300 students.” 

In order to cover the some 550 private and parochial schools with fewer than 300 students, the city’s authorized spend for the current security grant program would have to nearly double to $39.3m from $19.8m. 

Religious schools have become more desperate for security funding in recent months as religiously-motivated hate crimes and threats in NYC have hit record-high levels. 

After Hamas’s attack on October 7, Teach NYS found that the amount being spent on school security — “the money coming out of parents pickets, and out of the bottom lines of schools” — had gone up by 40 percent, Ms. Altfield says. 

The increased cost, she adds, has imposed a significant financial burden on Jewish, Islamic, and Catholic schools across the city. “We had some schools that had to cut certain programs to cover these costs. We had some schools that went to the parents and said, you now have to pay,” she tells the Sun. 

Teach NYS is hoping that the bill — which currently boasts 24 council member sponsors — gets passed sooner rather than later. “Unfortunately trends of antisemitism and islamophobia, and hate crimes in general, are rising, not falling. So we’re pushing for this to get passed as soon as possible,” Ms. Altfield says. 

Not everyone is in favor of the proposal, however. During the September hearing, a senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, Beth Haroules, speculated that the bill would violate  “the constitutional separation of church and state.” 

Ms. Altfield, though, is not particularly concerned with the latest objection. “We don’t believe that it is a violation of church and state,” she tells the Sun, adding that just this week a 9th circuit court in Los Angeles ruled that providing federal funding for special education programs at religious schools would not be a violation of the First Amendment. 

“Every time that new rulings come out like that, it just further proves our point that there is no violation,” she says.