A 12-year-old girl was slashed in the leg at a Bronx middle school on Wednesday, a day after one 15-year-old boy stabbed another at a Brooklyn high school, the police said.
The episode in the Bronx, at the James M. Kieran middle school in the Soundview section, occurred shortly after 9:30 a.m., the police said. Officers responding to a 911 call found the victim with a slash wound to her right leg, the police said.
The girl was taken to Jacobi Hospital, where she was in stable condition, the police said. A knife was found at the scene and a person of interest was in custody on Wednesday afternoon, the police said. It was unclear whether the person was a student.
Jenna Lyle, a Department of Education spokeswoman, said in a statement that movement had been restricted in the school building after the attack and that it would be scanned for weapons. The school’s other students were safe, she said.
“The safety and well-being of our students is our top priority, and dangerous items have no place in our schools,” Ms. Lyle said.
The assault came a day after a 15-year-old boy was stabbed in the torso at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn’s Midwood section at around 9:20 a.m. Tuesday, the police said. He was taken to Maimonides Medical Center, where he was in stable condition, according to the police.
A second 15-year-old boy was arrested in the attack and charged with attempted murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon, the police said.
The James M. Kieran school, which is also known as Junior High School 123, has about 540 students; Edward R. Murrow High School has about 3,600. Neither is a so-called scanning school, where students must pass through metal detectors upon entry.
In a separate school incident on Wednesday that did not result in an injury, a 16-year-old was in custody after he was found with a gun at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx. It was not immediately clear if metal detectors are used at the school.
The use of metal detectors in the city’s schools is a contentious issue that pits public safety concerns against civil rights considerations. Concrete information about how many of the city’s more than 1,800 schools employ the devices is not readily available. Ms. Lyle referred questions on the subject to the Police Department, which declined to provide a figure.
In a report last year, the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has long sought detailed information from the police about which schools use the detectors and when, estimated that nearly 200,000 students had attended schools with scanning since 2016. Most were Black or Hispanic.
Such scanning, the report said, puts the students who are subjected to it “at risk for harassment, invasive searches and fraught interactions with the police.”
But Greg Floyd, the president of Teamsters Local 237, which represents school safety agents, said that metal detectors were necessary in some schools and that those who did not agree did not understand how dangerous schools could be.
According to the most recent data available from City Hall, felony crime in the city’s schools rose 16 percent in the 2023 fiscal year, which ended June 30, compared with the previous fiscal year.
Mr. Floyd said that after the stabbing at Edward R. Murrow, students leaving the building at day’s end were subjected to a “reverse scan” that turned up knives, stun guns, box cutters and pepper spray.
“Crime in the schools continues to roll on,” he said.
Troy Closson contributed reporting.