Education Week - June 10, 2020 - 4

Joshua L. Jones/Athens Banner-Herald/AP

A Tragic Killing in Minneapolis Prompts Districts
To Take a Harder Look at School Police

By Evie Blad &
Stephen Sawchuk
Just eight days after a Minneapolis
police officer killed George Floyd, an
unarmed black man, the school board
there voted to cut ties with the city police department, fulfilling a long-time
goal of activists.
As mass protests continued nationwide over police brutality, activists in
other cities-including Chicago and
Denver-hope the demonstrations
will cause their districts to review their
own agreements with local law enforcement agencies, and to consider
how those relationships can disproportionately affect students of color.
Young people's very first interactions with law enforcement increasingly occur at schools. Such interactions can be positive, but they can also
be a vulnerable child's first step into
the labyrinth of the criminal justice
system. And federal data show black
students are more likely to be arrested
or referred to law enforcement than
their peers.
The Minneapolis school board's
unanimous June 2 vote was explicitly
tied to Floyd's death, which was captured in a gruesome viral video. In the
video, the 46-year-old Floyd is heard
saying "I can't breathe" as an officer
presses a knee into his neck.
The vote came the same day the

state launched a civil rights probe into
the city's police department, and the
same week several other organizations, including the University of Minnesota, opted to end their agreements
with the agency. Under a $1.1 million
annual contract with police, 14 city police officers worked as school resource
officers for the district
"Recent actions of officers in the
Minneapolis Police Department run
directly counter to the values the district seeks in partners," the resolution
reads. "The district has decided the
current contract and any continuing
contract for services with the Minneapolis Police Department do not
align with the priorities of the district's
equity and social emotional learning
goals."
"I firmly believe that it is completely
unnatural to have police in schools,"
board member Kim Caprini said before the vote.
Already school board members and
administrators in a handful of other
districts, including neighboring St.
Paul, Portland, Ore., and the nearly
90,000-student Denver district, have
urged new discussions about their
agreements with local law enforcement.
Youth activists in other cities, like
Chicago, said they view the Minneapolis vote as a powerful sign that
the changes they have pushed for

4 | EDUCATION WEEK | June 10, 2020 | www.edweek.org

are possible.
"I feel like we can be the next big city
that's moving and mobilizing," said
Lanessa Young, a senior at Chicago's
Hyde Park Academy who has worked
with a coalition of youth organizations
to push for the end of school policing.
"I felt like if they could do it, we could
do it."
But the Minneapolis district's discussion also underscored the challenges of replacing school police with
alternative safety plans. The board
rejected several amendments that
would have committed the district to
increasing mental health resources,
restorative justice practices, and community partnerships-punting the
safety conversation down the road a
little longer.
Eric Moore, Minneapolis' chief of
accountability, research, and equity,
said in an interview with Education
Week that ending the police contract
is only a first step. Under his oversight,
a climate framework steering committee will be developing a set of "belief
statements" about the values that they
want security officers to adhere to.
"You've eliminated the SRO position, but you still have to have [security] positions at the schools," Moore
said. "And I think it's naive to think
that those adults have not also been
influenced by racism, white supremacist thought, issues of power and

race. Whatever adult you bring in to
support our students, they have to be
made aware of concepts of power and
privilege."
But the decision wasn't without
some mixed emotions. Prior survey
data showed that SROs were generally well-regarded among students in
the district, and a handful of parents
and students called on the board not
to end the contract, citing the work of a
beloved SRO and football coach at the
city's North High School.
That, school safety experts say, is
partly why the work is so difficult.
From the 1999 massacre at Columbine
High School onward, parents are often
among those who have advocated for
more police, rather than fewer, as part
of an overall school safety plan. Two
mass school shootings in 2018-in
Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Texas-
reignited calls to install additional
police or other armed personnel in
schools.
Following those shootings, public
concern about student safety-and
demands for new school safety measures-surged, surveys showed.
"It's important for people to reexamine the policing role, because
we have a tension here: People want
police in schools for safety," said Anthony Petrosino, the director of the
justice and prevention research center
at WestEd, a nonprofit education re-

search organization. "But is it creating
more harm than good? Is there a way
to structure this relationship so it's
helping students and staff?"

By the Numbers
In 2017-18, 58 percent of American
schools reported having a sworn law
enforcement officer on campus at
least once a week, a majority of them
as SROs. Most staff their schools with
officers through cooperative agreements with local law enforcement
agencies, and they sometimes have
limited input in the officers' selection,
placement, and training.
Despite having a theoretically different role than beat cops, officers that
work in schools share many features.
Among schools that employ them,
such police almost always carry firearms and physical restraints, such as
stun guns or handcuffs, according to
U.S. Department of Education data.
Federal data also show that schoolbased officers are far more common
in schools where more than half of
students are nonwhite. Some research links the presence of police to
higher rates of entry into the criminal justice system in what's called the
"school to prison pipeline."
Black students made up 15 percent
of U.S. K-12 students, but 31 percent of
those arrested or referred to law en-

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Education Week - June 10, 2020

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