
New York City schools opened their doors to more than 1,000 kids on Monday, bringing the number of students in the city’s public schools to nearly 3 million.
The school year starts on March 5, and schools in New York have a long history of being at the forefront of fighting the spread of crime.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is leading the citys effort to improve the safety of its schools and to address the threat of gun violence.
The mayor announced the citywide effort after his father, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, called the recent murders in Newtown, Conn., and the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., to reassure the public that the country needed to take action to combat the scourge of gun crime.
The city’s schools are among the busiest in the country.
New Yorkers are among those most likely to have been the victims of gun attacks in the past 10 years.
About 2,700 people have been killed by guns in New Yorkers, compared with 1,700 victims of mass shootings in the United States over the same period, according to the Gun Violence Archive at the University of Pennsylvania.
The new measures are part of a plan that de Blasio announced last week to help keep kids safer.
New safety measures The new steps were announced after a New York Times investigation found that at least one-third of the victims in the two shootings were shot by teachers and staff members.
The Times said it identified only three teachers and two staff members who were killed in the shootings.
Cuomo called the shootings “an act of terror,” and the mayor has promised to make the state safer.
In an interview with the Times, Cuomo said the state needs to “do more.”
He also said he wanted to take some steps to ensure the city is a safer place, including making it easier to carry concealed weapons.
He said his administration will launch an extensive review of the state’s gun laws.
“What I have done in the last week is to come out with a number of changes to make sure that we are able to make it safer,” Cuomo said.
“I want to make New York a better place to live, to work, to play, to go to school.”
He added, “We are doing a lot to try to get kids out of danger.
We are going to make our streets safer.
But we are also going to get gun violence out of our communities.”
The plan comes after an incident last week in which a gunman opened fire at a high school in Newtown that killed 26 people.
Authorities say he was armed with a semiautomatic assault weapon and was killed by police.
De Blasio said that the school shooting was “a horrific act of violence.”
The state has a history of school shootings.
In 2012, a gunman killed 10 students and a teacher at Woodbury High School in Newtown.
He later killed himself.
And in 2014, six students were shot to death at a school in North Carolina.
Cuomo said that in New Jersey, at least five people have died at schools since 2011.
He added that the state is working on “reforms to the way that our schools are run and to the accountability and monitoring that we need.”
The governor is not the only public official to announce that schools will open.
A federal judge on Monday issued an order allowing schools to open in some places that were not covered by state law, including New York’s Long Island.
The judge said he was “satisfied that New York has done the right thing in addressing gun violence and has done so in a timely and effective way.”
The judge added that it would be “improper” to delay the implementation of the order until more information about the plans was made public.
Delegates in New Hampshire were also allowed to attend the school opening ceremony.
The state is home to nearly 70,000 students in a state that has a population of more than one billion.
In a statement, the governor said the city will have a plan in place to improve school safety for kids by “working with the federal government to enact comprehensive background checks and to protect our kids from violence and the threat it poses to our society.”
The schools opened with music, games, a “family reunion” and other activities.
Cuomo praised New Yorkers for their willingness to take on this challenge.
“This is about making our schools safe,” Cuomo told the crowd.
“And this is about doing more.”
Cuomo is also leading a push to make school buildings more accessible.
The governor said that during the school year, the city has been working with the state Department of Education to expand the capacity of the schools’ main buildings to accommodate more students.
“We know that this can be done in a number to do with technology and how we can get into our classrooms,” Cuomo added.
The announcement comes amid an uptick in gun violence in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says more than 4,300 people have lost their lives to gun violence since December.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.