Amid the national debate on school safety, the administration of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is working to revise the governing document for the more than 5,300 school safety agents who work in the public school system. After all, the Giuliani-era "Memorandum of Understanding" between the Departments of Education and Police has not changed in 20 years.

The process comes months after New York City students walked out to protest gun violence. The rallies highlighted how many students felt more unsafe around the uniformed agents who run metal detectors and monitor threats to school safety than they worried about a lone shooter targeting their school.

"They're so ready to like, jump at you," a student named Abigail said about the safety agents. She said they questioned her even if she was simply going to class; the interactions made her feel "shaken" and "scared."

Other students raised similar concerns at the mayor's town hall on school safety in March, a month after the school shooting in Parkland, FL. When de Blasio asked the audience of teenagers if they trusted the safety agents at their schools, many did not raise their hands. The mayor pledged to change the approach to school safety, including holding dialogue sessions between students and agents to help build trust. 

But advocates for students said this is a surface-level solution to a broader issue of overly involving agents and police officers in student discipline and mental health crises. Since 2012, school safety agents have issued fewer summonses and arrests but they are still heavily involved when it comes to responding to instances of a "child in crisis," according to quarterly data released by the NYPD.

"We're having a police response to to a mental health issue," said Dawn Yuster, director of the School Justice Project for the non-profit group Advocates for Children. "We really need to take a look at how we're managing that."

In 2017, agents responded to 2,702 "child in crisis" calls, where students were restrained and transported to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, according to a report by Advocates for Children. 

Student advocates and the union for safety agents agree that this role is better suited for social workers or guidance counselors.

"That's a special need," said Gregory Floyd, union president for Teamsters Local 237. "You're not going to have a school safety agent get a degree in social behavior and be a school safety agent. The two jobs don't co-mingle."

Adding more mental-health staff was one recommendation in the 2015 report released by the Mayor's Leadership Team on School Climate in Discipline. That group also recommended revising the memorandum of understanding to narrow the responsibilities of safety agents when it comes to school discipline and mental health.

In the last two years the city has added more than 100 guidance counselors and social workers, bringing the total to 4,173. And there is more funding set aside in the 2019 budget. Still, de Blasio has maintained his support for more mental health training for school safety agents.

"That’s the wave of the future," de Blasio said on WNYC. "To keep giving more and more people that training and that’s what we want to do." 

While most of the 5,300 agents have received three days of conflict de-escalation training, NYPD officials told the City Council that only about 700 agents have been trained in mental-health first aid.