Benjamin Franklin school announces it will send students to precinct if parents are late
On Sept. 11, parents of children who go to P.S./I.S. 157 in Brooklyn woke up to a disturbing announcement: Any children whose parents are 15 minutes late picking them up from school will be sent to the local 79th police Precinct, and parents will have to pick them up from there. The 79th Precinct is about a half hour walk from the school.
Kourtney Boyd, principal of the Pre-K through Eighth Grade school, which serves primarily low-income Black and Hispanic families, said in the announcement that parents have a 15 minute grace period because unexpected things can occur throughout the day. But after that, Boyd wrote, the children will be taken to the precinct “for their safety,.”
When asked about the announcement, school officials claimed that a NYC Department of Education policy gave the school the authorization to drop students off at local precincts should parents fail to pick up their children on time. Yet this reporter could not locate any such policy from the D.O.E.