Earlier this year, Tom Palermo noticed something was wrong.
New York City’s system for alerting independent schools like his to nearby emergencies seemed to have vanished. Mr. Palermo, a facilities director at the Chapin School in Manhattan, had not received an alert in weeks.
Sarah Feinberg, a parent at another private school who had worked with him to push for the creation of the alert network, had not received any recent notifications either. She sought an explanation from the city’s emergency management agency, which ran the system, and got an answer on April 29.
“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 the agency that was obtained by The New York Times. It was referring to the upcoming soccer competition and a July 4 parade of ships through New York Harbor, both of which are expected to bring an influx of tourists to New York City.
The reason struck Mr. Palermo and Ms. Feinberg as curious, given the rationale for the system’s creation in the first place.
“It’s crazy,” Mr. Palermo said. “We need to know, too, right away if something’s happening.”
Independent schools enroll about a third of New York City students. But they are largely not protected by the Police Department’s School Safety Division, which has called itself the largest school law enforcement agency in the world. The division patrols public schools, and school safety officers are alerted via radio of nearby incidents.
The origins of the independent-school alert system can be traced to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when administrators at many private schools had to turn on the news to see what was happening, Mr. Palermo said. Ms. Feinberg got involved after a pandemic-era shooting near her daughter’s school.
After a sustained campaign, the city in 2024 began sending text-message notifications to some independent school administrators and parents about potentially dangerous situations near their schools. While the system was never widely adopted — roughly 100 administrators and parents among the city’s more than 1,100 charter, parochial and private schools had subscribed — it represented a potential solution to what advocates had regarded as a significant gap in the city’s emergency communications system.
City officials referred to it as a pilot program and left Mr. Palermo to promote it. Numerous private schools, including some of the largest in the city, said that they had not heard of it. Mr. Palermo said that he had spread the word about the program and shared instructions for how to subscribe with officials at more than 100 schools. “It’s up to them individually to sign up,” he said.
Rabbi Joseph Beyda, the head of school at the Yeshivah of Flatbush Joel Braverman High School in Brooklyn, said that his team did not know about the service, but argued that private schools should have access to the information it disseminated.
“Why should public schools be safer than private schools?” Rabbi Beyda asked.
The distribution of alerts to the independent schools by the emergency management agency was not automatic. Staff members would send notifications only after sifting through a stream of emails emanating from the School Safety Division, isolating the ones pertaining to schools in particular boroughs and then verifying the information.
City officials said that it was difficult to put a price tag on the program. But in the April 29 email exchange revealing its demise, the city said that the notifications for independent schools had consumed about 10 to 15 percent of the working hours of the staff members devoted to the citywide alert system, known as Notify NYC, which warns New Yorkers of major dangerous conditions, including hurricanes.
The notifications would alert private-school subscribers about public schools in their borough that had been locked down, including the name and address of the school and the relevant police precinct, as well as the reason for the lockdown — “irate male on the perimeter making threats,” one alert said, referring to a public school in Chelsea. “We worked very hard to get that system in place,” Mr. Palermo said.
The April email exchange suggested that the city would not restore the alert network in its previous form.
But after inquiries from The Times, Ines Bebea, a spokeswoman, said that the agency was keeping the door open to resurrecting it.
“The program is currently under agency review to ensure that, going forward, it is delivered in a way that is properly coordinated, sustainable and aligned with the standards” governing notifications from the emergency agency, Ms. Bebea said.
Many independent schools hire security teams and establish relationships with police precincts. They monitor social media, local news and apps such as Citizen to learn about crimes that may prompt lockdowns.
Over the years, legislators have required the city to pay for security guards at private schools. In April, the City Council passed a law allowing that money to also be used for security cameras.
David Kalin worked for nearly three decades at the Police Department, including in the School Safety Division, before joining the security team at the Horace Mann School, a private school in the Bronx. At the Police Department, he said, officers at a command center would listen to the citywide radio system and notify school safety officers when the police were responding to episodes near them. Much of that radio system has since been encrypted, meaning the public can no longer listen in.
At Horace Mann, the security team did not have the same level of direct communication with the police that public schools did, he said, but it did work closely with the local precinct and monitored social media and other sites. Mr. Kalin said that he had leaned on his connections with his former colleagues at the Police Department, who often alerted him to crimes unfolding near the school.
“It’s hard for private schools because they are sort of out of the loop,” Mr. Kalin, who has retired from Horace Mann, said.
New York’s private schools have upgraded their security in recent decades after a rise in school shootings in the United States. When prospective parents tour schools, they routinely ask about safety protocols, school administrators and consultants say.
“Parents are looking for consistent communication and real protection, not only in the school building, but in the streets around it,” said Emily Glickman, a private school consultant in New York. “Security is parents’ No. 1 priority, even before academics.”
Ms. Feinberg and Mr. Palermo became involved in the issue in the aftermath of what they perceived as serious communication failures.
After the confusion of Sept. 11, Mr. Palermo made himself a volunteer liaison between city emergency management officials and a group he created, the Consortium of Independent School Members. He maintained a network of administrators at independent schools and emailed them when he learned of emergency management alerts about major events such as Hurricane Sandy.
“On Sept. 11, the independent school world was left in a lurch,” Mr. Palermo said in an interview last week.
The day after the interview, Mr. Palermo announced that he would step down from the volunteer position at the organization after 24 years; he did not cite a reason. A new liaison will be named shortly, he said.
Ms. Feinberg, the former administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration and New York City’s former interim transit chief, came to the issue several years ago after she learned that a gunman had been seen near her daughter’s private school. When she asked administrators at that school how they learned about dangerous situations nearby, they told her they relied on a crowdsourced public safety app.
“Waiting more than 20 years to solve a basic child safety issue is absurd,” Ms. Feinberg said.
She added: “Turning off the tool that actually addressed the issue so you can translate World Cup messages instead is doubling down. Just turn the alerts back on, and share the tool with school administrators.”
Matthew Haag is a Times education reporter focusing on New York City schools.
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