amilies of Los Angeles Unified School District students and advocacy groups began to question why the district had military-grade weapons in the first place, and how they intended to use them. Within a few months of community outcry, department officials announced they had also returned the 14-ton mine resistant vehicle.

When it comes to the contentious issue of policing in schools, the spectrum of opinion is wide, but the desire is the same. Everyone wants to keep children safe but disagreements arise on how best to accomplish the goal. Some point to deadly school shootings and argue that such devastating events can be avoided by outfitting campuses with metal detectors and police. Others note that school shootings are still relatively rare, and having police at school creates a breeding ground for the daily criminalization of students, particularly children with disabilities and those of color.

In response to Columbine, Sandy Hook and other mass school shootings, local educational agencies throughout the country, often in urban areas, began to harden their security measures. Advocates say it has been a slow, difficult process to move the needle in the other direction.

Until recently.

“I think that the conditions of the pandemic, with people being extremely restless and having to be in their homes, not really active — once George Floyd’s murder hit, there was kind of immediate reaction of people being like, ‘What can we do?’” said Jasmine Williams, communications and development manager for the Oakland-based Black Organizing Project — a Black member-led community organization that works for racial, social and economic justice through grassroots organizing and community-building.

The Black Organizing Project played a pivotal, near decade-long role in the Oakland USD’s school board’s historic decision this summer to dissolve its own 63-year-old police force and move to start developing a new safety plan.

“Even here in Oakland, we received immense support from people that definitely weren’t supporting publicly before, hundreds of people who were maybe on the fence and not really ready to take an abolitionist stance of eliminating an entire department, maybe not understanding that police don’t equal safety,” Williams said. “I feel like, with this murder, it just opened people’s eyes and they were able to challenge their own biases and unlearn some of that.”

Two sides of the debate

Shortly after Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, as communities in all 50 states took to the streets every night for months in protest of police brutality, state and local education leaders declared that steps needed to be taken to seriously address the issue of racial bias in schools.

CSBA and the Association of California School Administrators announced the creation of a joint taskforce that would explore measurable actions to address systemic racism within the K-12 system so that schools could be a safe haven for students. At the same time, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced the creation of California’s Task Force on Safe Schools as part of a larger effort by the California Department of Education to address racism and implicit bias in the education system.

The CDE also hosted a series of virtual classroom sessions in October to engage educators, students and their families in a wide-ranging dialogue about the many forms of bias young people across the state face, as well as ways to end discrimination, starting in the classroom.

“Education continues to be one of our most powerful tools for countering hate and for promoting understanding and tolerance,” Thurmond said during a Sept. 21 press conference announcing the virtual lessons and other anti-bias training opportunities for teachers.

Meanwhile, board members in LEAs throughout the state have reduced budget allotments for school resource officers, or SROs, or agreed not to renew contracts with their local police departments when the time comes.

The debate among Oakland USD board members highlighted arguments common in discussions in board meetings across the state. During the June 24 meeting in which the unanimous vote to disband the district’s police force was made, board member Roseann Torres said that school safety needs to include support for the mental health of students, and that biases need to be squashed in order to ensure students of color are not being pushed out of school.

Meanwhile, in a prior meeting, board member Jumoke Hinton-Hodge said that although she strongly supported the Black Lives Matter movement, she opposed the effort to eliminate district police officers. She argued that the training given to district officers made them better equipped to work with teenagers than are the city police, who could be called to schools more often if the district no longer had its own force.

Brian Lande — a Richmond police officer who served as an SRO until May when the West Contra Costa USD board voted unanimously to cancel the district’s contracts with local police — said police are an important part of school culture.

Most of his time was spent talking with students and building trust and rapport, Lande said during the first meeting of California’s new safe schools taskforce at the end of June. This was especially important with Black students or undocumented youth who feared law enforcement. “We tried to rectify what we saw as a significant underserving of police services to those students by building relationships,” he said. “What we found as a result of that is that we were now getting conflicts reported to myself or the other SROs in a way that allowed us to collaborate with other partners.”

The difference in training between the typical officer and those who work in a school setting has also long been cited as a reason to keep police in educational settings. James “Mo” Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, told the Federal Commission on School Safety in 2018 that the number one goal of any successful SRO must be to bridge the gap between law enforcement and youth.

His said his organization “recommends 40 hours of specialized training at a minimum in areas including implicit bias, de-escalation, trauma-informed investigations, adolescent development, crisis intervention and active shooter situations.”

However, Canady noted, there is no national requirement that SROs receive that sort of training. In fact, only 12 states, including California, require specialized training for officers who work the school beat, according to a 2015 study by the American Institutes for Research.

For Williams and the Black Organizing Project, it makes more sense to rely on the expertise of those whose entire career is dedicated to handling such behavior in students and helping them to develop resilience and coping strategies.

“I think that taxpayer money could be used for other services that will actually prevent some of the things that police are coming onto campus to solve,” she said. “What we found in our research into OUSD is that police are being called for behavioral issues, and so we believe that those resources should be allocated to people that are trained and actually want to do the job of mentoring youth, of being counselors, of being behavioral therapists.”

Police more common in schools with more Black and Latino students

U.S. Department of Education analysis of 2013–14 Civil Rights Data found that 1.6 million students attended schools with police but no school counselors, and that those students were more likely to be Hispanic or Black. The American Civil Liberties Union found that number grew to 1.7 million in the 2015–16 school year, and added that 3 million students attended schools with police but no nurses.

In California, about two-thirds of high school students attend schools with SROs, as do a quarter of middle-schoolers, and a little over 10 percent of elementary students, according to a Public Policy Institute of California brief released in September. The probability of attending school with an SRO is even higher for older students who are Black or Latino. In ninth grade, Black students are roughly 16 percent more likely to attend a school with an SRO than white students. Latino freshman are 14 percent more likely than their white peers to attend a school with a police presence.

The presence of police in schools with more students of color is one of the key factors in why Black students are arrested at school at disproportionately higher rates in 43 states and the District of Columbia, according to an analysis of federal data by the Education Week Research Center. In 28 states, the share of Black students arrested is at least 10 percentage points higher than their share of enrollment in schools with at least one arrest. In 10 of those states, that gap is at least 20 percentage points.

It isn’t difficult to find disproportionate arrest rates even in California, where policymakers have attempted to reduce the impact of punitive discipline in schools. One such example illustrates how a lack of counselors can contribute to a poor school climate where disproportionate discipline thrives.

In 2004, the Fontana USD board laid off all of its 69 counselors due to a severe budget deficit. Around the same time, the board approved an increase in police spending. Over time, without counselors available to work with students, disciplinary rates increased, according to a 2019 report by the ACLU of Southern California. In 2011–12, the suspension rate was 9.2 percent — and more than 17 percent for Black students — well above the state average of 13.8 percent for Black students and 6 percent overall that year.

In light of such findings, some advocates and experts question whether students are actually safer, or whether they are just being pushed out of school and into the prison pipeline. If districts truly want to keep students safe, they argue, then schools should be swapping out police for mental health counselors and other support services.

An analysis of incident reports from Los Angeles USD between 2010 and 2019 by the UCLA Black Male Institute at the Graduate School of Education found a 906-percent increase in incidents such as suicide threats or misbehavior related to trauma, which researchers concluded could have been handled with mental health support, rather than referrals to police.

Such findings are not unique to Los Angeles schools. A 2018 study by the Education Trust found that funding inequities ensure that schools with Black and Latino majorities are less likely to have extra tutors, counselors, coaches and enrichment activities like field trips, and more likely to have facilities in need of upgrades. All of that creates an environment in which children are more likely to misbehave in class, get into conflicts with teachers and peers, or otherwise become disengaged in school, experts say.

During the first meeting of California’s Task Force on Safe Schools in June, State Board of Education and Learning Policy Institute President Linda Darling-Hammond noted that, while training and limits surrounding engagement between students and officers in schools is important, “we now have hundreds of studies and a set of meta-analysis [that] have found that if you explicitly teach all students and staff social-emotional skills and schoolwide restorative practices, school safety is significantly improved.”

Teaching students and school staff a range of problem-solving skills, a shared approach to conflict resolution, social responsibility for the safety and well-being of the community, emotional awareness, mindfulness and self-regulation strategies has been proven to not only make schools safer, but also significantly lower dropout rates and increase student achievement, Darling-Hammond said.

“What we found in our research into OUSD is that police are being called for behavioral issues, and so we believe that those resources should be allocated to people that are trained and actually want to do the job of mentoring youth, of being counselors, of being behavioral therapists.”

What is next for Oakland Unified?

Oakland was previously one of 23 districts in California that operated its own police department. In its decision to dissolve the department, the board agreed that the savings could be used to hire counselors, social workers and some of the restorative justice coordinators who were let go in 2019–20 as a result of budget cuts. Specific staffing will be determined once the district has completed an alternative safety plan, which should be by December.

District Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell said during the June 24 board meeting that having police in schools was ultimately a symptom of a much larger issue, and that, to really make progress, the district will need to “transform the underlying conditions within the school system that have brought us to this place.”

Oakland USD’s Police Chief Jeff Godown told board members that he was supportive of the vote and would work toward developing a safety plan that does not include a police department.

That plan will be crafted by a committee comprised of school administrators, community stakeholders, Oakland police and the Black Organizing Project, which developed The People’s Plan of 2019 (https://bit.ly/2ZS65UR) with significant input from parents, students and the community.

In addition to reinvesting in mental health specialists, behavioral specialists, counselors, social workers, librarians and nurses, Williams said The People’s Plan would re-envision the former Oakland USD police and current security guards as “peacekeepers” trained in conflict resolution and de-escalation who report to a community oversight board or some sort of equity-based office, rather than the chief of police. That way, when interactions do occur between students and peacekeepers, it is more likely to be a restorative experience instead of a punitive one, she said.

“We really see this win for the community as just the start of transforming school discipline and education as we know it,” Williams said. “In Oakland, it means that we are making history, and we’re leading the nation in this call. We really want to be a model for districts across the state and the country to really push their people in power to transform and reimagine.”

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Alisha Kirby is a staff writer for California Schools.