Philly’s school year looms. So does the city’s gun violence.

With exactly a week left to go until 114,000 Philadelphia School District students return to class, city officials say they are paying close attention to safety as the city’s gun violence epidemic continues.

Uniformed city police officers will form 27 safety zones that take in 40 district and charter schools in hot spots identified across Philadelphia, Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw and School Safety Chief Kevin Bethel said at a news conference Monday.

“Students and parents will notice an increase in presence on the way to and from school,” Outlaw said.

The schools have not been publicly identified, but were determined using crime data. The safety zone program was established last fall, amid a spike in shootings near schools, but is being beefed up for the 2022-23 term.

“We know that the safety of our city’s children is at the top of everyone’s mind,” Mayor Jim Kenney said Monday.

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Most district schools, including elementary schools, will have full-time school safety officers this year, Bethel said. Schools that had an officer two or three days a week will now have five-days-a-week staffing. (Some schools will continue to be served by part-time officers; those decisions were made based on school request and historical data.)

And though every city high school will continue to have metal detectors, Bethel said the district is ending its practice of random weapons scans at middle schools and elementary schools with middle grades — at least for now.

“I‘m very conscious of the impact that it has on putting children through metal detectors,” Bethel said. “We’re not going to come back into the school year as our immediate posture.”

But, Bethel said, if data indicates younger children are bringing weapons to school, the district might reinstitute scans for younger children.

Bethel also said the school system is not requiring clear backpacks, as some have done nationwide.

In 2021, 119 young people 21 years old and younger were killed by gun violence. Forty-seven were students enrolled in public or charter schools.

The district saw a dramatic uptick in guns discovered in school last school year, Bethel said — 14. (In one case, a student at Philadelphia Learning Academy South shot himself in the leg in school.) The number is usually one or two.

“That was probably one of the most significant increases we had in history,” said Bethel. Officials also saw an increase in weapons hidden around schools, the chief said. In some cases, canine units will be making sweeps of buildings to perform weapons checks, Bethel said — though the units will not go inside schools.

The district is also adding mental health supports to its threat assessment team, which responds to reports of safety trouble inside schools.

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Last year, the team responded to 225 threats inside the district’s 215 schools.

The beginning of the school year will also see the debut of a safe paths program that pays community groups to ensure kids’ safety. The program, announced last fall, was supposed to begin last school year but was delayed by contract problems, Bethel said. It will start at eight city high schools this fall.

The three-year, grant-funded program will cost close to a million dollars and will cover eight high schools.

Both Outlaw and Bethel expressed confidence in schools’ security.

“Schools continue to be the safest space for our students,” Bethel said.