Months after New York City abruptly turned off its emergency notification system for private schools, officials have reversed course and resurrected the tool in what they say is a new and improved form.
The revitalized system, which will launch on Tuesday, will issue alerts when an emergency has sent a nearby public school into lockdown or prompted its students to take shelter, according to an email sent to private school leaders last week. The tool now provides targeted alerts for neighborhoods and has been incorporated into Notify NYC, the emergency alert system that has 1.6 million subscribers.
The earlier system had been turned off, the city said, because it needed to redirect resources toward messaging for the World Cup and the America250 celebration.
Already, some 120,000 Notify NYC subscribers received schools information, but that information formerly focused on events such as weather-related school closures, according to Aries Dela Cruz, a spokesman for New York City Emergency Management.
The new “alerts are intended to provide additional situational awareness,” Emergency Management wrote in an explanation of the system for private school leaders seen by The New York Times. “They do not replace your school’s emergency procedures or direct coordination with N.Y.P.D. and your local precinct.”
The roughly 1,600 public schools in New York City are protected by the Police Department’s School Safety Division. The unarmed school safety agents patrol campuses and listen to police radios for alerts of nearby incidents.
But they are not responsible for protecting the city’s many private and parochial schools, which enroll about a third of New York City students. Instead, many of those schools employ their own security officers, sometimes with financial assistance from the city. Those security officers maintain contact with police precincts and monitor social media, local news and apps such as Citizen to learn about incidents that may prompt lockdowns.
Tom Palermo, a facilities director at the Chapin School, first grew alarmed by the security gap between public and private schools on Sept. 11, 2001, when administrators at some private schools had to turn to the media to get safety information. He created his own version of an alert system, relaying information from Emergency Management to independent schools by email.
But his list was limited — and of limited utility. During the pandemic, reports of a gunman near her daughter’s private school made Sarah Feinberg aware of the issue. Ms. Feinberg, the former administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration and former interim president of the New York City Transit Authority, was alarmed to learn that her daughter’s school relied on a crowdsourcing social media app to be aware of nearby dangerous conditions.
With Mr. Palermo, she helped persuade New York City in 2024 to establish a text alert system that private school operators could opt into. It was imperfect. Administrators could only opt into alerts by borough, so they often received alerts about school lockdowns happening miles away.
The system never got substantial buy-in, in part because the city relied on the schools to promote it. Only about 100 administrators and parents subscribed from the city’s more than 1,000 parochial and private schools and those charters that are not housed in public school buildings.
The original program was also cumbersome to operate. Since the system existed outside of Notify NYC, it required staffers to toggle between two different means of sending messages. Now, Emergency Management workers will be working within one format, and the department is seeking City Hall approval to hire two additional staff members.
New York City intends to advertise the new system via outreach to school organizations and social media.
In an April 29 email exchange shared with The Times, a city official said that the former system consumed more than 10 percent of the working hours of those operating Notify NYC. But even so, proponents said the alert system was better than nothing.
And then, earlier this year, that system abruptly vanished. Ms. Feinberg sought an explanation and ultimately got one: “With the World Cup and Sail 250 coming up, we needed to rededicate staff hours to preparing messaging in 14 different languages for a huge number of events and emergency messaging templates to ensure we can keep N.Y.C. residents and visitors safe,” read an email from Emergency Management.
The agency said that it would help spread the word about the new tool with help from a private schools consortium. Some schools that were not aware the previous alert system have signed up for the new notifications, including Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn.
Rabbi Joseph Beyda, the head of school at Yeshivah of Flatbush’s Joel Braverman High School, said he was eager to use the new program.
“This will definitely be an additional tool we will place in our box of methods with which we keep ourselves informed/apprised and our students and staff safe,” the rabbi said.
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