The city is keeping students’ safety on hold.
The Adams administration has yet to publicly launch a school safety hotline promised at the start of the academic year, The Post has learned.
City officials previously said the tip line was slated to debut last fall, but no official launch announcement or updates had been made since an October City Council hearing.
In March, The Post’s Cindy Adams wrote a column disclosing school safety phone number.
The Post tested the line earlier this month and it was answered by police officers on the Juvenile Crime Desk.
But when The Post then inquired with the city Department of Education and the NYPD why they hadn’t publicly posted the hotline number, it was disconnected.
“We’re literally talking about hundreds of preventions, if not thousands of preventions, that haven’t happened simply due to not having a way to report something,” a DOE source fumed about the safety tool’s delayed launch.
At a September meeting with Mayor Adams and city Schools Chancellor David Banks, NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban promised the public they would be able to call into or text a hotline in the fall to alert authorities about any school-related threats or safety concerns.
The DOE even put together a poster that month highlighting the tip line, according to the source, with instructions for people to text or call a 917 phone number to report “any unsafe conditions or threats directly” to police.
It is unclear how much manning the secret tip line has cost Big Apple taxpayers, but it’s not the first time the city has made poor marks on delivering promised school safety improvements, critics charge.
A $43 million plan to install a remote door-locking system at 1,300 of the city’s public schools is severely behind schedule, The Post reported.
Less than 200 schools have been set up with the system as of March, compared to the targeted 700 in April, and many were plagued with glitches.
Meanwhile, danger on school grounds has soared: In December, three students were stabbed in the span of a week at schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn; and between September and December, weapons seizures at schools spiked 7% compared to the same period in 2022.
On Tuesday, four students were stabbed and slashed in three separate fights on high school grounds across the city.
The bloody attacks came just a week after a pair of 15-year-old boys were stabbed on a Williamsburg street on Tuesday over a school-related dispute, sources said.
Public school parents tore into city leaders for their silence on the tip line’s status and launch.
“There needs to be pull through,” said public school parent Yiatin Chu. “The onus is not on the parents to come back and say what happened to that [safety measure promised]. It’s for leaders to come back and deliver on it.”
Spokespeople for the DOE and mayor’s office referred all questions to the NYPD.
An NYPD spokesperson said the tip line was delayed “due to unforeseen technical issues.”
“We are working diligently to resolve them as soon as possible,” they said.
Additional reporting by Susan Edelman
