Stringer: Time To Declare War On Bedbugs In Schools

As I pointed out here yesterday, the protocol for dealing with possible bedbug incidents in New York City public schools is archaic and harmful, designed more to protect Tweed from having to pay for bedbug extermination than to actually eradicate the problem.

Turns out Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer thinks the same thing:

Mayor Bloomberg must bring out the big guns to fight the war on bedbugs before it becomes a full-scale invasion, the fired-up Manhattan borough president said Saturday.

"I'm calling for a full on war against bedbugs starting in the public school system," Scott Stringer told the Daily News. "We should deal with bedbugs the way we deal with crime spikes, and we need to do it before it gets out of control."

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The News reported Friday that confirmed bedbug cases in city schools have spiked to 336 in the first two months of the academic year, compared with 135 in the same stretch last year.

Stringer sees public schools as the front lines in the battle.

As it stands, the onus is on school employees to detect bedbugs and call the city for help. Instead, Stringer wants the city to hire an army of inspectors and exterminators to search for and destroy the creatures.

"We're forcing principals and teachers to act like CSI inspectors," he said. "It's like fighting a building fire with a garden hose."

"You can't fight this epidemic with a paltry, small army," he said. "We're in the middle of this bedbug war. We've already lost the Waldorf, we lost Lincoln Center, hundreds of residential buildings, and now we see we're losing public schools."

The city launched its own turf battle against bedbugs this year with a new website and a special advisory committee that reports to the City Council.

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"I think we've spent too much time studying the issue and need to go back to basics," he said. "The mayor and City Council say we have an advisory panel and experts speaking about how to eradicate bedbugs, but the real way to fix this is to find and kill them."

The city says they do not have the financial resources to ensure that all city schools are free of bedbugs with proactive measures, so they will continue with the current reactive protocol of having employees find detect bedbugs themselves, send the insects away for two weeks of testing and THEN send in the exterminators to take care of the problem.

This protocol has contributed in large part to why bed bug incidents in schools have more than doubled from last year.

But I have a swell idea how Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein can get the resources to take care of the bed bug problem and ensure that every child and teacher is in a safe, bedbug free environment.

Take money from some of the no-bid test development contracts Bloomberg and Klein have handed out to McGraw-Hill or one of the other test prep companies.

After all, when you're putting Children First, as Bloomberg and Klein claim they are doing, what's more important - a bedbug-free learning environment or making children takes standardized tests in schools that are being overrun by the bedbugs?

In addition, Klein and Bloomberg MUST release the list of schools where bedbugs have been found so that parents, students and teachers can take steps to protect themselves.

As was pointed out here yesterday, Klein has been eager to release the names of teachers and teacher rankings in the newspapers, but refuses to release a list of schools that have had bedbugs.

He says it is the right of parents and students to know teacher rankings (even though they may have margins of error of as much as 25% in how the scores were calculated.)

If it is the right of parents and students to be able to look up teacher rankings in the newspapers, why isn't it also their right to know which schools have had bedbugs?