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Do Police Officers Make Schools Safer or More Dangerous?

School resource officers were supposed to prevent mass shootings and juvenile crime. But some schools are eliminating them amid a clamor from students after George Floyd’s death.

By Dana Goldstein

The national reckoning over police violence has spread to schools, with several districts choosing in recent days to sever their relationships with local police departments out of concern that the officers patrolling their hallways represent more of a threat than a form of protection.

School districts in Minneapolis , Seattle and Portland, Ore. , have all promised to remove officers, with the Seattle superintendent saying the presence of armed police officers “prohibits many students and staff from feeling fully safe.” In Oakland, Calif., leaders expressed support on Wednesday for eliminating the district’s internal police force, while the Denver Board of Education voted unanimously on Thursday to end its police contract .

In Los Angeles and Chicago, two of the country’s three largest school districts, teachers’ unions are pushing to get the police out, showing a willingness to confront another politically powerful, heavily unionized profession.

Some teachers and students, African-Americans in particular, say they consider officers on campus a danger, rather than a bulwark against everything from fights to drug use to mass shootings.

There has been no shortage of episodes to back up their concerns. In Orange County, Fla., in November, a school resource officer was fired after a video showed him grasping a middle school student’s hair and yanking her head back during an arrest after students fought near school grounds. A few weeks later, an officer assigned to a school in Vance County, N.C., lost his job after he repeatedly slammed an 11-year-old boy to the ground.

Nadera Powell, 17, said seeing officers in the hallways at Venice High School in Los Angeles sent a clear message to black students like her: “Don’t get too comfortable, regardless of whether this school is your second home. We have you on watch. We are able to take legal or even physical action against you.”

During student walkouts to protest gun violence and push for climate action over the past two years, some officers blocked students from leaving school grounds or clashed verbally with protesters, she recalled. At Fremont High School in another part of Los Angeles, where the student body is about 90 percent Latino , the police used pepper spray in November to break up a fight.

“All people who are of color here are looked at as a threat,” Ms. Powell said.

For years, activists have called on districts to rein in campus police. They cite data showing that mass shootings like those in Parkland, Fla., or Newtown, Conn., are rare , and that crime on school grounds has generally declined in recent years.

The presence of officers in hallways has a profound impact on students of color and those with disabilities, who, according to several analyses and studies, are more likely to be harshly punished for ordinary misbehavior.

Still, efforts to remove school resource officers face the same pushback as a broader national effort to reduce funding for police departments: resistance from the police themselves, who are often politically powerful, and concern from some parents and school officials that removing officers could leave schools and students vulnerable.

In Oakland, Jumoke Hinton Hodge, a school board member, said that although she strongly supported the Black Lives Matter movement, she opposed the effort to eliminate district police officers. Those officers are 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, she said.

The district’s officers train to prevent school shootings, Ms. Hinton Hodge said, and they respond to students who have reported sexual abuse or are at risk of suicide. The proposal to eliminate the force felt rushed, she said, and would leave the district without an adequate safety plan.

“Are you here for the long haul, about a movement?” she asked. “Or are you in a moment?”

In New York City last weekend, hundreds of teachers and students marched in a protest calling for the police to be removed from schools and replaced by a new crop of guidance counselors and social workers. Mayor Bill de Blasio committed to diverting some of the Police Department’s funding to social services for children, but has so far not shown a willingness to significantly reduce police presence in hallways.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago has rejected calls from the teachers’ union and others to remove officers from schools, saying they are needed to provide security.

Both mayors control their city’s school systems. It is districts with elected school boards, which are more independent from other local government agencies, that are currently driving the wave of change.

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said he was disappointed by attempts to link school policing to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He called Mr. Floyd’s death during an arrest “the most horrific police abuse situation I’ve seen in my career.”

Well-trained school resource officers operate more like counselors and educators, Mr. Canady said, working with students to defuse peer conflict and address issues such as drug and alcohol use. He suggested that disproportionate discipline and arrest rates for students of color and those with disabilities could be driven by the actions of police officers coming off the street to respond to one-off calls from schools, or by campus officers who lack adequate training in concepts such as implicit bias.

“The message to the districts has to be, ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,’” Mr. Canady said.

But as schools face significant budget cuts brought about by the coronavirus pandemic , some students, educators and policymakers say it would be wiser to hire psychologists to provide counseling and nurses to advise students on drugs and alcohol, instead of training police officers to do such tasks.

In Prince George’s County, Md., outside of Washington, Joshua Omolola, 18, has marched to protest the killing of Mr. Floyd. Now, as the student member of the Board of Education, he is supporting a proposal to remove police officers from the county’s schools, whose students are predominantly black and Hispanic.

The millions the county spends annually on school policing should be reallocated to mental health services, Mr. Omolola argued, to treat the root causes of student behavioral problems.

Police departments have typically responded to calls from school employees, but the everyday presence of officers in hallways did not become widespread until the 1990s. That was when concern over mass shootings, drug abuse and juvenile crime led federal and state officials to offer local districts money to hire officers and purchase law enforcement equipment, such as metal detectors.

By the 2013-14 school year, two-thirds of high school students, 45 percent of middle schoolers and 19 percent of elementary school students attended a school with a police officer, according to a 2018 report from the Urban Institute . Majority black and Hispanic schools are more likely to have officers on campus than majority white schools.

But when the Congressional Research Service reported on the effectiveness of school resource officers in 2013, it concluded that there was little rigorous research showing a connection between the presence of police officers in schools and changes in crime or student discipline rates.

Activists who have worked for years to remove officers from hallways said they were shocked at the speed with which school districts were promising significant change after Mr. Floyd’s death. The coming weeks may equal the impact of a decade’s worth of incremental reforms, according to Jasmine Dellafosse, an organizer in Stockton, Calif., east of San Francisco, with the Gathering for Justice, a nonprofit group.

After the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Northern California and the state Department of Justice investigated harsh discipline practices in Stockton schools, the district police force agreed last year to establish new restrictions on the use of force and on when to arrest students.

Now the school board plans to consider, later this month, a resolution to remove police officers entirely from schools and to reallocate their budget to programs such as ethnic studies , counseling and restorative justice .

“There won’t be real change,” Ms. Dellafosse said, “until police are out of the schools.”

Eliza Shapiro and Erica L. Green contributed reporting.

Dana Goldstein is a national correspondent, writing about how education policies impact families, students and teachers across the country. She is the author of “The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession.” More about Dana Goldstein

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The Highlight

Cops at the schoolyard gate

How the number of police officers in schools skyrocketed in recent decades — and made for a harrowing education for Black and brown youth.

by Kristin Henning

A Los Angeles school police officer patrols the halls of a school in this 2015 photo.

Part of The Schools Issue of The Highlight , our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

When I was in high school, my school looked like a school. Teachers were in the classrooms. Our principal was in the front office. We had a guidance counselor who helped us think about where to go to college or how to get a job. We had a gym, a basketball court, and a football field.

Today, when I meet my clients at school, I can barely distinguish a school visit from a legal visit to the local youth detention center. At the front door, I am greeted by a phalanx of uniformed police officers, some of whom have guns at their side. In schools, these officers are called school resource officers, or SROs. They are sworn police officers who patrol schools all over the country. In DC, the officers tell me to take everything out of my pockets, put my items in a plastic bin, and run them through a metal detector. I am then instructed to walk through a full-body scanner, and if I wear big jewelry or have metal in my shoes, the officer will “wand” me again with a handheld detector on the other side.

I watch as students all around me are treated the same. There is a lot of banter between the students and the officers — some of it playful, some of it hostile. At one school, an officer tells a child, “You know you’re not supposed to have a cellphone in school. You need to sign that into the front office.” The student lets out a loud sigh and drops the f-word. Another student yells out, “Man, I’m going to be late to class, let me go through.” At least one student is asked to remove his shoes. As I look up, I can see security cameras in the lobby. And when I head to a classroom on the third floor, I am escorted to the elevator by an officer who wants to make sure I am okay. To put it mildly, the schools my clients attend look like prisons at the front door.

I have now been representing children in DC for 25 years, mostly as the director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown Law, where I supervise law students and new attorneys defending children charged with crimes in the city. I also spend a good deal of time traveling, training, and strategizing with juvenile defenders across the country in partnership with the National Juvenile Defender Center.

From the East Coast to the West, from the Deep South to the North, Black children appear in juvenile and criminal courts across the country in numbers that far exceed their presence in the population. Black children are accosted all over the nation for the most ordinary adolescent activities — shopping for prom clothes, playing in the park, listening to music, buying juice from a convenience store, wearing the latest fashion trend, and protesting for their social and political rights.

In DC, our elected attorney general is more attentive now to the harms and disparities impacting people of color, but even with these changes, I have still spent much of the last two decades fighting for Black children who have been arrested and prosecuted for “horseplay” on the Metro, breaking a school window, stealing a pass to a school football game, throwing snowballs (a.k.a. “missiles”) at a passing police car, hurling pebbles across the street at another kid, playing “toss” with a teacher’s hat, and snatching a cellphone from a boyfriend. I have seen Black children handcuffed at ages 9 and 10; 12- and 13-year-old Black boys stopped for riding their bicycles; and industrious 16-and 17-year-old Black youth detained for selling water on the National Mall. The list goes on.

We live in a society that is uniquely afraid of Black children. Americans become anxious — if not outright terrified — at the sight of a Black child ringing the doorbell, riding in a car with white women, or walking too close in a convenience store. Americans think of Black children as predatory, sexually deviant, and immoral. For many, that fear is subconscious, arising out of the historical and contemporary narratives that have been manufactured by politicians, business leaders, and others who have a stake in maintaining the social, economic, and political status quo.

There is something particularly efficient about treating Black children like criminals in adolescence. Black youth are dehumanized, exploited, and even killed to establish the boundaries of whiteness before they reach adulthood and assert their rights and independence. It is no coincidence that Emmett Till was 14 when he was lynched, Trayvon Martin was 17 when he was shot by a volunteer neighborhood watchman, Tamir Rice was 12 when he was shot by the police at a park, Dajerria Becton was 15 when she was slammed to the ground by police at a pool party, and four Black and Latina girls were 12 when they were strip-searched for being “hyper and giddy” in the hallway of their New York middle school.

School resource officers appear in all 50 states. They are visible in both urban meccas and small towns. In 1975, only 1 percent of US schools reported having police stationed on campus. By the 2017–18 school year, 36 percent of elementary schools, 67.6 percent of middle schools, and 72 percent of high schools reported having sworn officers on campus routinely carrying a firearm. In raw numbers, there were 9,400 school resource officers in 1997. By 2016, there were at least 27,000.

Because police operate under many different titles in schools, these numbers are surely low. Tallies often miss private security guards and neighborhood officers assigned by the local police department to patrol several schools without any formal agreement with the school district.

According to a survey of school resource officers in 2018, more than half worked for local police or sheriff’s departments. Twenty percent worked for school police departments, and the remaining worked for some “other” category including the school district, an individual school, school security employers, private companies, and fire departments. Some school systems, like those in Baltimore, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Miami, Oakland, and Philadelphia, have their own independent police departments. The Los Angeles School Police Department has more than 350 sworn police officers and 125 non-sworn school safety officers.

School resource officers often patrol with guns, batons, Tasers, body cameras, pepper spray, handcuffs, K-9 units, and handheld and full-body metal detectors like those found at an airport. Some are even equipped with military-grade weapons such as tanks, grenade launchers, and M16s.

So what happened to cause such a shift in school culture since I was in high school 35 years ago? For far too long I accepted the simple and often repeated explanation that parents were terrified to send their children to school after the deadly mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. Although Columbine certainly played a role in the rapid expansion of school resource officers in the early 21st century, the National Association of School Resource Officers had already formed in 1991, eight years before the tragedy in Colorado. Our nation’s obsession with policing in public schools began long before Columbine. That story began in the mid-20th century, with the fight for — and against — racial desegregation.

Researchers believe the first law enforcement officers appeared in public schools as early as 1939, when the Indianapolis Public Schools hired a “special investigator” to serve the school district from 1939 to 1952.

In 1952, that investigator began to supervise a loosely organized group of police officers who patrolled school property, performed traffic duties, and conducted security checks after hours. The group was reorganized in 1970 to form the Indianapolis School Police. It is significant that the Ku Klux Klan controlled both the state legislature and the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners from the 1920s through the formation of the early school police force. The Klan had segregated Indianapolis schools by 1927 and kept them that way until the federal government intervened in the 1960s.

Our nation’s obsession with policing in public schools began long before Columbine. That story began in the mid-20th century, with the fight for — and against — racial desegregation.

Other school districts began hiring police in the mid-20th century — more explicitly in response to the evolving racial dynamics in the country. American cities had become more diverse after World War II as Blacks left the Jim Crow South in search of opportunities in industrial centers such as Los Angeles and Flint, Michigan. Whites who were uncomfortable with the exploding populations and shifting demographics blamed the new migrants for emerging social problems such as poverty, racial and ethnic tension, and crime.

Teachers in Flint planted the seed — maybe inadvertently — for a law enforcement presence in schools during a 1953 workshop, when they expressed concerns about growing student enrollments and the potentially negative impacts of overcrowding, including delinquency. Seeking to address these concerns, Flint educators, police, and civic leaders collaborated in 1958 to implement the nation’s first Police-School Liaison Program and ultimately developed the framework for school resource officers as we know them today.

Schools across the country followed Flint’s lead. Programs sprang up in cities including Anchorage, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Boise, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Oakland, Seattle, and Tucson, on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end legal segregation in public schools.

State and local governments sent police into schools under the pretense of protecting Black youth. The real motives, however, likely had more to do with white fear, privilege, and resentment. Municipal leaders in the North and South claimed that Black children lacked discipline and feared they would bring disorder to their schools. In 1957, representatives from the New York City Police Department described Black and Latinx students in low-income neighborhoods as “dangerous delinquents” and “undesirables” capable of “corroding school morale.” Policing in schools also gave school administrators a mechanism for preserving resources for white middle-class students and keeping Black youth in their place.

Tensions escalated the following decade as Black students balked at whites’ opposition to racial equality and schools’ bold refusals to integrate. In cities like Greensboro, North Carolina, and Oklahoma City, students organized protests, walkouts, and marches to demand equal resources and opportunity. Students also insisted on culturally relevant curricula and basic dignity in the classroom.

White, middle-class Americans equated civil rights action with crime and delinquency, inflaming — and sometimes manufacturing — fears of a growing youth crime problem. In this turbulent climate, cities implemented school-police partnerships to combat a “problem” that police and educators explicitly and implicitly blamed on Black and other marginalized youth.

Policing in the schoolhouse grew in lockstep with civil rights protests and gradually became a permanent fixture in integrated schools.

While most school-police partnerships started as local initiatives like the one in Flint, these programs began to draw federal support in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice to “inquire into the causes of crime and delinquency” and provide recommendations for prevention. In its 1967 report, the commission predicted that youth would be the greatest threat to public safety in the years to come.

The report drew a tight connection between race, crime, and poverty and frequently reminded readers that “Negroes, who live in disproportionate numbers in slum neighborhoods, account for a disproportionate number of arrests.” The commission referred to young people in racially charged language like “slum children” and “slum youth” from “slum families” and noted that many Americans had already become suspicious of “Negroes” and adolescents they believed to be responsible for crime. The commission’s analysis aligned with television and newspaper reports that stoked fears by depicting civil rights protests as criminal acts instead of political demonstrations against oppression.

Against this backdrop, local and state law enforcement agencies applied for federal grants through the Department of Justice’s newly created Office of Law Enforcement Assistance to fund new crime prevention plans like school-police partnerships.

Concerns about discrimination in school-based policing surfaced almost immediately, including in Flint, the birthplace of the school-police partnership. Notwithstanding initial concerns about delinquency in school, Black teachers and parents began to complain that Flint’s Police-School Liaison Program targeted students of color. As reported in a 1971 review of the initiative, some teachers said the program was “aimed specifically at the black community” and was “anathema to black people” because it enforced “middle class white ethics and mores.”

The race-baiting and fearmongering that motivated the first school-police partnerships during the civil rights era were followed by the mythic lies of the “superpredator” craze in the 1990s. With crime on the rise and the crack epidemic at full throttle by the end of the 1980s, white fears reached epic proportions. State and federal politicians accepted Princeton professor John J. DiIulio Jr.’s highly publicized yet unscientific 1995 predictions of a coming band of Black teenage “superpredators” with reckless abandon, and passed legislation to increase police presence in every aspect of Black adolescent life. Schools were a natural focus.

Congress also passed both the Gun-Free Schools Act and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994. The Gun-Free Schools Act was passed to keep drugs, guns, and other weapons out of schools. The Violent Crime Control Act created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, radically increased federal funding for policing in communities, and laid the foundation for a new wave of federal funding for police in schools.

And then there was Columbine.On April 20, 1999, the nation was rocked by a mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Two 12th-graders, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 12 students and one teacher. Twenty-one additional people were injured by gunshots. Another three were injured trying to escape the school. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in US history.

Columbine was the 12th in a spate of school shootings committed by students between 1996 and 1999. These deadly tragedies terrified parents and teachers and prompted increased funding for school safety everywhere. In October 1998, just months before the shooting at Columbine, Congress had already voted to allocate funding for the COPS in Schools grants program.

Days after the shooting, in April 1999, President Bill Clinton promised that the COPS office would release $70 million to fund an additional 600 police officers in schools in 336 communities across the country. In 1998 and 1999, COPS awarded 275 jurisdictions more than $30 million for law enforcement to partner with school systems to address crime and disorder in and around schools. Between 1999 and 2005, COPS in Schools awarded more than $750 million in grants to more than 3,000 law enforcement agencies to hire SROs.

Although these shootings do explain the immediate increase in funding for police in schools, the shootings do not explain the disproportionate surge of police in schools serving mostly Black and Latinx students. Although the vast majority of the school-based shootings in the 1990s — and again in 2012 — occurred in primarily white suburban schools, school resource officers are more likely to be assigned to schools serving mostly students of color.

National data from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights reveals that youth of color are more likely than white youth to attend schools that employ school police officers. In the 2015–16 school year, 54.1 percent of middle and high schools serving a student body that was at least 75 percent Black had at least one school-based law enforcement or security officer on campus. By contrast, only 32.5 percent of schools serving a student body that was 75 percent or more white had such personnel in place.

The 1990s brought a rapid increase in both school suspensions and school-based arrests as police officers remained confused about their roles on campus and new laws were passed to criminalize normal adolescent behavior. Administrators in the first school-police partnerships viewed school resource officers as part teacher, part counselor, and part law enforcement officer only when necessary.

The partners in Flint hoped to foster a positive relationship between youth and police, prevent youth crime, and provide counseling services for students believed to be at risk of delinquency. As police became more entrenched in schools, students, parents, and civil rights advocates complained that police officers weren’t trained to be counselors and worried about the potential for conflicts of interest when police tried to serve multiple functions. Civil rights groups worried that police were violating students’ rights through unsupervised interrogations, harassment, and surveillance.

Thirty years later, police still haven’t figured out what schools want them to do, and schools haven’t figured out what they want police to do. Only 15 states require schools and law enforcement agencies to develop memoranda of understanding (MOUs) to specify the scope and limits of the officers’ authority on campus. When school districts do have an MOU, they usually focus on the cost-sharing aspects of the agreement and offer few details about when, where, and how police can intervene with students.

Thirty years later, police still haven’t figured out what schools want them to do, and schools haven’t figured out what they want police to do

Even when school resource officers are expressly hired to respond to emergencies and protect students from guns and serious threats of violence, they are quickly drawn into the more routine activities of law enforcement on campus. Forty-one percent of school resource officers surveyed in 2018 reported that “enforcing laws” was their primary role on campus. Police often arrive with little or no training on how their traditional law enforcement roles should differ within the school context and even less training on developmental psychology and adolescent brain development.

A 2013 study found that police academies nationwide spend less than 1 percent of total training hours on juvenile justice topics. In the 2018 survey, roughly 25 percent of school police surveyed indicated that they had no experience with youth before working in schools. Sixty-three percent reported they had never been trained on the teen brain; 61 percent had never been trained on child trauma; and 46 percent had never been trained to work with special education students. Without better training and guidance, police in schools do what they always do. They detain, investigate, interrogate, and arrest. They also intervene with force — sometimes violent and deadly force.

Ultimately, more police in schools means more arrests — three and a half times more arrests than in schools without police. And it means more arrests for minor infractions that teachers and principals used to handle on their own.

When I was in high school in the mid-1980s, we were sent to the principal’s office when we acted out. Sometimes we had to stay after school for detention. I even got suspended once for “play fighting” with one of my classmates, but I was never arrested. Today, children get arrested regularly at school, and mostly for things kids do all the time: fighting or threatening a classmate, breaking a window in anger, vandalism and graffiti, having weed, taking something from someone on a dare, arguing in the hallway when they are supposed to be in class.

Data from across the country mirrors what I see in DC. Although only 7 percent of officers surveyed in 2018 described their duties as “enforcing school discipline,” evidence shows that educators routinely depend on police to handle minor misbehaviors such as disobedience, disrespectful attitudes, disrupting the classroom, and other adolescent behaviors that have little or no impact on school safety. State lawmakers have even passed laws making it a crime to disturb or disrupt the school. As of 2016, at least 22 states and dozens of cities and towns outlaw school disturbances in one way or another.

The Maryland state legislature adopted its “disturbing schools” law back in 1967, shortly after the Baltimore City School District created its school security division. During the 2017–18 school year, 3,167 students were arrested in Maryland’s public schools. About 14 percent of those arrests were for “disruption.” Until May 2018, students in South Carolina could be arrested for disturbing the school if they “loitered about,” “acted in an obnoxious manner,” or “interfered with or disturbed” any student or teacher at school. The penalty was a $1,000 fine and a possible 90-day sentence in jail.

In the 2015-16 academic year, 1,324 students were arrested or cited in the state for disturbing schools, making it the second most common delinquency offense referred to the family court. Black students were almost four times more likely than white youth to be deemed criminally responsible for disturbing schools. South Carolina lawmakers finally eliminated the crime in 2018.

Police in schools are symbolic. They provide an easy answer to fears about violence, guns, and mass shootings. They allow policymakers to demonstrate their commitment to school safety. And for a time, they make teachers and parents “feel” safe. But those who have studied school policing tell us this is a false sense of security.

Schools with school resource officers are not necessarily any safer. An audit from North Carolina, for example, found that middle schools that used state grants to hire and train SROs did not report reductions in serious incidents like assaults, homicides, bomb threats, possession and use of alcohol and drugs, or the possession of weapons.

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This story was produced as part of a collaboration with the Center for Public Integrity and USA TODAY .

What is a referral to law enforcement? Does it mean a student was arrested?

A referral occurs when a school employee reports a student to any law enforcement agency or officer, including a school police officer or security staff member for an incident that happens at school, during a school-related event or while taking school transportation, regardless of whether official action is taken.

All arrests are referrals. But not all referrals lead to arrests.

During the 2017-18 school year, nearly 230,000 students were referred to law enforcement across the country. Roughly a quarter of those referrals led to arrests, federal data shows.

The U.S. Department of Education has tweaked the definition of “referral to law enforcement” over time in an effort to include all contact a student may have with officers or security staff that could have negative consequences for the student.

Citations, tickets and court referrals are also considered referrals to law enforcement.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of U.S. Department of Education data from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico found that school policing disproportionately affects students with disabilities, Black children and, in some states, Native American and Latino children.

Despite calls from children’s and civil rights organizations to reduce police presence in schools, these disparities persist. Nationwide, Black students and students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement at nearly twice their share of the overall student population, the Public Integrity analysis found.

What rights do students have when they are referred to law enforcement? Do they have Miranda rights when questioned in connection with a possible crime?

Referrals to law enforcement is such a broad category that it is hard to pinpoint what rights students have. It often depends on the situation, advocates say.

When questioned about an incident that could lead to an arrest, students, in theory, should have the right to refuse to answer questions or provide information to law enforcement or school resource officers. The rules, however, are not always clear on school grounds.

When an officer is based in or assigned to a school, their investigations or interrogations can be viewed differently than those of officers that come in from the outside.

Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, lays out two different scenarios that could ultimately lead to a student or students being arrested:

In the first, a law enforcement officer walks into a school and informs an administrator, “I’m here to question a student about …” In that situation, known as a custodial interrogation, a student is supposed to be informed of their rights.

In the second scenario, a school resource officer has a conversation where a student discloses something about drug use or possession by themselves or others. Because the student has not been told the officer was investigating something, the student has no reason to suspect it’s an interrogation. But the officer could try to use that information as the basis for an arrest or criminal investigation, Jordan said.

“Even if it’s about somebody else, police will sit you down and ask you a bunch of questions. You don’t automatically know whether you’re the suspect or not,” Jordan said. “So that’s the reason Miranda is important. You have the right to shut up because you have no idea what it is that they’re investigating and how it could be used.”

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in J.D.B. v. North Carolina that police and courts must consider a child’s age when determining whether the child should be read Miranda rights. But there is no federal law that requires it and the decision is left to states.

In Kentucky, for example, the state Supreme Court ruled that students must be given Miranda warnings if a law enforcement officer or school resource officer is present when students are questioned about possible criminal conduct.

Criminal is the key word, though. Students accused of committing minor infractions or violating a student code of conduct would not likely have the same rights.

Are schools required to notify parents or guardians when students are referred to law enforcement?

There is no federal requirement for parent notification, even in situations where a student is questioned about an incident that may lead to an arrest. If there is a policy, it is most likely to be set at the district level.

An agreement between the San Franciso Unified School District and the city police department requires school employees to contact a parent or guardian and give them a reasonable opportunity to be present for any police interrogation, unless the child is a suspected victim of child abuse. In their efforts to contact parents or guardians, school officials in that district must use all numbers listed on an emergency card and any additional numbers supplied by the student. If the parent cannot be reached, the school must offer the student the option of having an adult of their choice from the school available during the interrogation.

In Iowa, children under 14 may not waive their Miranda rights without the consent of an adult such as a parent or guardian.

But advocates caution that few districts or states have policies on the books.

How have school districts tried to address concerns about overuse of law enforcement and bias in school policing?

The Des Moines, Iowa, school district ended its partnership with the city police this year. But administrators are not operating under the assumption that taking officers out of schools will eliminate racial disparities in referrals to law enforcement.

Jake Troja, the district’s director of school climate transformation, said that school employees, who initiate many of the referrals, are partly to blame.

“It isn’t that we’re moving away from the use of law enforcement,” Troja said. “We’re still required to call law enforcement for violations of law. But the overuse of law enforcement is not required.”

A common complaint among school resource officers is that they’re called in by teachers and administrators to manage classroom behavior and student discipline, tasks that fall outside the scope of their assigned duties.

Developing policies and agreements between districts and law enforcement agencies that limit or prohibit officer involvement in routine matters can help reduce referrals and arrests, experts say.

When Thomas Traywick Jr. took over as chief of safety and security for schools in Georgia’s Clayton County in 2016, he prohibited officers from arresting students without permission from supervisors. Working alongside Clayton County Chief Juvenile Court Judge Steven Teske, he doubled down on plans to steer students involved in classroom disruption, disorderly conduct and school fights to conflict-resolution workshops instead of court hearings.

At one point, more than 90% of the referrals that came to Teske’s court were those types of cases, he testified before Congress in 2012. Now, “we very seldom ever see a school-related offense,” he said in a recent interview with Public Integrity.

Traywick said he lost officers who complained that the new approach kept them from doing their jobs effectively. But in his second year leading the district police department, referrals to law enforcement decreased 44%, federal data shows. And that was the right outcome, he said.

“We had to change the mindset of the officers,” Traywick said. “We were criminalizing our kids.”

Corey Mitchell is a reporter at the Center for Public Integrity , a nonprofit investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.

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Inside The National Movement To Push Police Out Of Schools

Anya Kamenetz

Police presence in schools has been growing for decades; now there's a national movement to get them out.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Why Do We Have Cops in Schools?

In the mid-1970s, police officers were in only about 1 percent of US schools. That changed since the late 1990s.

The head of school security, and a Miami-Dade Police officer stand at the front entrance to the Kenwood K-8 Center on August 24, 2018 in Miami, Florida.

In the weeks since the police murder of George Floyd, school districts across the country have cut ties with police departments. The shift has the potential to reverse a trend that’s lasted more than two decades, as law enforcement has become increasingly intertwined with education. In 2018, Joshua P. Starr, CEO of education organization PDK International, described what that looked like firsthand . He’s a former superintendent of school districts in Montgomery County, Maryland and Stamford, Connecticut.

Starr writes that the federal School Resource Officer (SRO) program, which pays for part of the cost of stationing officers in schools, started in the 1950s but didn’t catch on for a long time. In the mid-1970s, police officers were in only about 1 percent of US schools. That changed since the late 1990s, as school shooting incidents brought a wave of concern about safety. Today, 60 percent of schools have a police presence.

And, at least until recently, SROs were hugely popular. In a 2018 poll, Starr writes, 80 percent of parents favored posting armed police officers at their child’s school. That made superintendents like him cautious about airing “even the mildest criticism” of SROs,” he writes. “Privately, though, many district leaders will tell you that if they had a choice, they’d rather not have armed officers in the schools at all.” School administrators may have little control over the hiring or management of SROs.

“I’ve seen cases where students got into a fight and the principal responded by offering conflict resolution, only to learn that the SRO decided to charge the participants with a crime,” Starr writes.

In cases across the country, legal writer Stephanie Francis Ward writes, SROs have arrested students over offences as mild as flatulence or dress code violations . She describes one incident in Raleigh, North Carolina in which a student, who had been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, cut in front of another student in the lunch line.

“A school resource officer reportedly grabbed the boy, 16, by the arm,” they write. “They boy pulled away, and the officer pulled his arm behind his back and handcuffed him in front of other students.”

The boy was suspended for three days. Upon his return to school, the legal complaint alleged, a group of students assaulted him, and the SRO responded by shooting pepper spray in his face while he was on the ground.

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Starr and some education officials Ward spoke with advocated for ways to improve SROs, like helping them learn more about child development and having clear agreements between schools and police departments. But others argued for completely replacing the law-enforcement model. For example, in one Chicago school, Mariame Kaba, an educator and prominent advocate of police and prison abolition, helped create a “peace room.” Rather than punish students for misbehavior, teachers could recommend that they visit the room and work with volunteers trained in restorative justice techniques.

With municipal policies and public opinion on policing in flux, that could be a model more schools will investigate.

Editor’s note: This story originally stated that George Floyd’s death was a police shooting. Floyd died after a police offer knelt on his neck for over eight minutes.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

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How charges against 2 Uvalde school police officers are still leaving some families frustrated

This combo of booking images provided by Uvalde County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office, shows Pete Arredondo, left, the former police chief for schools in Uvalde, Texas, and Adrian Gonzales, a former police officer for schools in Uvalde, Texas, Both men were arrested and booked into jail before they were released on charges related to the May 24, 2022, attack that killed 19 children and two teachers at at Robb Elementary. (Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office via AP)

FILE - Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo, third from left, stands during a news conference outside of the Robb Elementary school on May 26, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Arredondo was arrested and briefly booked into the Uvalde County jail before he was released Thursday, June 27, 2024, on 10 state jail felony counts of abandoning or endangering a child in the May 24, 2022, attack that killed 19 children and two teachers. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, File)

This photo provided by Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office shows Pete Arredondo. Arredondo, the former police chief for schools in Uvalde, Texas, was arrested and briefly booked into ail before he was released Thursday, June 27, 2024, on 10 state jail felony counts of abandoning or endangering a child in the May 24, 2022, attack that killed 19 children and two teachers.(Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office via AP)

Esta fotografía proporcionada por el Departamento de Policía del condado de Uvalde muestra a Pete Arredondo. El exjefe de la policía escolar de Uvalde, Texas, fue arrestado y fichado en la prisión del condado el jueves 27 de junio de 2024. (Departamento de Policía del condado de Uvalde vía AP)

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Two indictments against former Uvalde, Texas, schools police officers are the first charges brought against law enforcement for the botched response that saw hundreds of officers wait more than an hour to confront an 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 fourth-grade students and two teachers at Robb Elementary.

For some Uvalde families, who have spent the last two years demanding police accountability, the indictments brought a mix of relief and frustration. Several wonder why more officers have not been charged for waiting to go into the classroom, where some victims lay dying or begging for assistance, to help bring a quicker end to one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history.

Former Uvalde schools police Chief Pete Arredondo and former Officer Adrian Gonzales were indicted on June 26 by a Uvalde County grand jury on multiple counts of child endangerment and abandonment over their actions and failure to immediately confront the shooter. They were among the first of nearly 400 federal, state and local officers who converged on the school that day.

“I want every single person who was in the hallway charged for failure to protect the most innocent,” said Velma Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of the teachers killed. “My sister put her body in front of those children to protect them, something they could have done. They had the means and the tools to do it. My sister had her body.”

Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell has not said if any other officers will be charged or if the grand jury’s work is done.

Here are some things to know about the criminal investigation into the police response:

The Shooting

The gunman stormed into the school on May 24, 2022 and killed his victims in two classrooms.

More than 370 officers responded but waited more than 70 minutes to confront the shooter, even as he could be heard firing an AR-15-style rifle.

Terrified students inside the classrooms called 911 as agonized parents begged for intervention by officers, some of whom could hear shots being fired while they stood in a hallway. A tactical team of officers eventually went into the classroom and killed the shooter.

Scathing state and federal investigative reports on the police response have catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems.

The Charges

The indictment against Arredondo , who was the on-site commander at the shooting , accused the chief of delaying the police response despite hearing shots fired and being notified that injured children were in the classrooms and a teacher had been shot.

Arredondo called for a SWAT team, ordered the initial responding officers to leave the building and attempted to negotiate with the 18-year-old gunman, the indictment said. The grand jury said it considered his actions criminal negligence.

Gonzales was accused of abandoning his training and not confronting the shooter, even after hearing gunshots as he stood in a hallway.

All the charges are state jail felonies that carry up to two years in jail if convicted.

Arredondo said in a 2022 interview with the Texas Tribune that he tried to “eliminate any threats, and protect the students and staff.” Gonzalez’s lawyer on Friday called the charges “unprecedented in the state of Texas” and said the officer believes he did not break any laws or school district policy.

The first U.S. law enforcement officer ever tried for allegedly failing to act during an on-campus shooting was a campus sheriff’s deputy in Florida who didn’t go into the classroom building and confront the perpetrator of the 2018 Parkland massacre. The deputy, who was fired, was acquitted of felony neglect last year. A lawsuit by the victims’ families and survivors is pending.

The Lawsuits

The families are pursing accountability from authorities in other state and federal courts. Several have filed multiple civil lawsuits.

Two days before the two-year anniversary of the shooting, the families of 19 victims filed a $500 million lawsuit against nearly 100 state police officers who were part of the botched response. The lawsuit accuses the troopers of not following their active shooter training and not confronting the shooter. The highest ranking Department of Public Safety official named as a defendant is South Texas Regional Director Victor Escalon.

The same families also reached a $2 million settlement with the city under which city leaders promised higher standards for hiring and training local police.

On May 24, a group of families sued Meta Platforms , which owns Instagram, and the maker of the video game Call of Duty over claims the companies bear responsibility for the weapons used by the teenage gunman.

They also filed another lawsuit against gun maker Daniel Defense, which made the AR-style rifle used by the gunman.

Family of 13-year-old fatally shot by Utica police says he never forgot to say ‘I love you’

Nyah Mway’s mother, Chee War, remembers about seven years ago when he told her he wanted to name his baby sister himself.

“‘Paw K War,’” Chee War, 39, said, explaining that the name means “blooming flower.” “We didn’t even know how he got that name.”

From then on, Nyah Mway — the 13-year-old boy who was fatally shot by police in Utica, New York, on Friday — was fiercely protective of his sister. He was protective of his whole family, in fact.

He’s being remembered as a doting sibling and son.

“Whenever he comes back from school, he’ll say, ‘I love you,’” Chee War said.

The people of Myanmar do not customarily have surnames, instead taking individual compound names.

Nyah Mway was tackled to the ground and shot after he ran from police, who said he was one of two youths stopped in connection with an armed robbery investigation. Authorities said he appeared to have a weapon in his hand, which turned out to be a replica of a Glock 17 Gen 5 handgun with a detachable magazine.

Utica police has identified Patrick Husnay as the officer who fired his weapon at the teen. Officers Bryce Patterson and Andrew Citriniti were also involved in the incident. All three are on paid administrative leave under department policy, officials said.

Investigations have been launched by the police department and the State attorney general’s Special Investigations Office. In an email, Utica Police Lt. Michael Curley did not comment on the probes but said that through the process, “the facts of the incident will be made available for the public to see.”

“We will continue to be transparent and open with the investigative process to rebuild the trust within our local community,” he said.

Nyah Mway, a refugee who had fled to the U.S. from Myanmar with his family when he was 4, had just finished eighth grade and was looking forward to starting high school in the fall, his family said. His mother said that like any other teenager, he loved spending time playing with his friends. But Nyah Mway, whom she described as “obedient and respectful,” had a particularly close relationship with his family.

After his sister was born, Chee War said, Nyah Mway took on a protector role, making sure she was not out too late, helping her mind her manners and pitching in with homework help.

Thuong Oo, Nyah Mway’s older brother, also said he had a loving relationship with his two older siblings, acting not only as a video game buddy at times but also as a source of wisdom.

“He always had advice for me when I asked him,” Thuong Oo said. “He would talk to me, like, ‘Do you need help? Do you need anything?’ He always talked to me in a calm voice.”

Without Nyah Mway, a soothing force in his life, things feel different, Thuong Oo said, adding that their 16-year-old brother, Maung Zaw Myint, has been “traumatized.”

“I just can’t think right now. Some of the time, people come talk to me,” he said. “I act like I’m all right but I’m not.”

Thuong Oo said the family came to the U.S. looking for a better life. Their ethnic group, the Karens, are among those who are warring with the military rulers of the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar. After having resettled in New York, Nyah Mway had big plans, his family said.

“He always told me that he wanted to keep going to school. He wanted to make my parents proud,” Thuong Oo said through tears. “He wanted to see me and my brother graduate from high school and go to college and have a degree and everything. He wanted to be a doctor when he grew up.”

But the family are now unsure of their safety in the U.S.

“Police are supposed to be protectors,” Thuong Oo said. “If they really did that, then how can we trust the police?”

The family did not go into detail about their thoughts on the investigation. Earl Ward and Julia Kuan, their attorneys, said in a statement that they are seeking accountability from the officers.

“As this family grieves the loss of their 13 year old child, they simply want to know why? Why was Nyah Mway shot and killed when he was held down by officers and posed no threat?” the attorneys said. “No one has answered that question. The family and the community deserve an answer. And not next week, not tomorrow but now.”

Thuong Oo captured his thoughts in a poem he dedicated to his brother.

“Love is love,” he wrote in the opening line. “But a brother’s love will never be gone.”

For more from NBC Asian America, sign up for our weekly newsletter .

Kimmy Yam is a reporter for NBC Asian America.

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The School That Calls the Police on Students Every Other Day

This story was originally published by ProPublica . ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox .

On the last street before leaving Jacksonville, there’s a dark brick one-story building that the locals know as the school for “bad” kids. It’s actually a tiny public school for children with disabilities. It sits across the street from farmland and is 2 miles from the Illinois city’s police department, which makes for a short trip when the school calls 911.

Administrators at the Garrison School call the police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. And because staff members regularly press charges against the children — some as young as 9 — officers have arrested students more than 100 times in the last five school years, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found. That is an astounding number given that Garrison, the only school that is part of the Four Rivers Special Education District, has fewer than 65 students in most years.

No other school district — not just in Illinois, but in the entire country — had a higher student arrest rate than Four Rivers the last time data was collected nationwide. That school year, 2017-18, more than half of all Garrison students were arrested.

Officers typically handcuff students and take them to the police station, where they are fingerprinted, photographed and placed in a holding room. For at least a decade, the local newspaper has included the arrests in its daily police blotter for all to see.

The students enrolled each year at Garrison have severe emotional or behavioral disabilities that kept them from succeeding at previous schools. Some also have been diagnosed with autism, ADHD or other disorders. Many have experienced horrifying trauma, including sexual abuse, the death of parents and incarceration of family members, according to interviews with families and school employees.

Getting arrested for behavior at school is not inevitable for students with such challenges. There are about 60 similar public special education schools across Illinois, but none comes anywhere close to Garrison in their number of student arrests, the investigation found.

The ProPublica-Tribune investigation — built on hundreds of school reports and police records, as well as dozens of interviews with employees, students and parents — reveals how a public school intended to be a therapeutic option for students with severe emotional disabilities has instead subjected many of them to the justice system.

It is “just backwards if you are sending kids to a therapeutic day school and then locking them up. That is not what therapeutic day schools are for,” said Jessica Gingold, an attorney in the special education clinic at Equip for Equality, the state’s federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities.

“If the school exists for young people who need support, to think of them as delinquents is basically the worst you could do. It’s counter to what should be happening,” Gingold said.

Because of the difficulties the students face in regulating their emotions, these specialized schools are tasked with recognizing what triggers their behavior, teaching calming strategies and reinforcing good behavior. But Garrison doesn’t even offer students the type of help many traditional schools have: a curriculum known as social emotional learning that is aimed at teaching students how to develop social skills, manage their emotions and show empathy toward others.

Tracey Fair, director of the Four Rivers Special Education District, said it is the only public school in this part of west central Illinois for students with severe behavioral disabilities, and there are few options for private placement. School workers deal with challenging behavior from Garrison students every day, she said.

“There are consequences to their behavior and this behavior would not be tolerated anywhere else in the community,” Fair said in written answers to reporters’ questions.

Fair, who has overseen Four Rivers since July 2020, said Garrison administrators call police only when students are being physically aggressive or in response to “ongoing” misbehavior. But records detail multiple instances when staff called police because students were being disobedient: spraying water, punching a desk or damaging a filing cabinet, for example.

“The students were still not calming down, so police arrested them,” wrote Fair, speaking on behalf of the district and the school.

This year, the Tribune and ProPublica have been exposing the consequences for students when their schools use police as disciplinarians. The investigation “The Price Kids Pay” uncovered the practice of Illinois schools working with local law enforcement to ticket students for minor misbehavior. Reporters documented nearly 12,000 tickets in dozens of school districts, and state officials moved quickly to denounce the practice .

This latest investigation further reveals the harm to children when schools abdicate student discipline to police. Arrested students miss time in the classroom and get entangled in the justice system. They come to view adults as hostile and school as prison-like, a place where they regularly are confined to classrooms when the school is “on restriction” because of police presence.

U.S. Department of Education and Illinois officials have reminded educators in recent months that if school officials fail to consider whether a student’s behavior is related to their disability, they risk running afoul of federal law.

But unlike some other states, Illinois does not require schools to report student arrest data to the state or direct its education department to monitor police involvement in school incidents. Legislative efforts to do so have stalled over the past few years.

In response to questions from reporters about Garrison, Illinois Superintendent of Education Carmen Ayala said the frequent arrests there were “concerning.” An Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson said a state team visited the school this month to examine “potential violations” raised through ProPublica and Tribune reporting.

The team confirmed an overreliance on police and, as a result, the state will provide training and other professional development, spokesperson Jackie Matthews said.

“It is not illegal to call the police, but there are tactics and strategies to use to keep it from getting to that point,” Matthews said.

Ayala said educators cannot ignore their responsibility to help students work through behavioral issues.

“Involving the police in any student issue can escalate the situation and lead to criminal justice involvement, so calling the police should be a last resort,” she said in a written statement.

In 2018, Jacksonville police arrested a student named Christian just a few weeks into his first year at Garrison, when he was 12 years old. His “disruptive” behavior earlier in the day — he had knocked on doors and bounced a ball in the hallway — had led to a warning: “One more thing” and he would be arrested, a school report said. He then removed items from an aide’s desk and was “being disrespectful,” so police were summoned. They took him into custody for disorderly conduct.

Christian has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and oppositional defiant disorder. Now 16, he has been arrested at Garrison several more times and was sent to a detention center after at least one of the arrests, he and his mother said.

He stopped going to school in October; his mother said it’s heartbreaking that he’s not in class, but at Garrison, “it’s more hectic than productive. He’s more in trouble than learning anything.”

“If they call the police on you, you are going to jail,” Christian told reporters. “It is not just one coming to get you. It will be two or three of them. They handcuff you and walk you out, right out the door.”

Handcuffs and Holding Rooms

Just over an hour into the school day on Nov. 15, two police cars rushed into the Garrison school parking lot and stopped outside the front doors. Three more squad cars pulled in behind them but quickly moved on.

Principal Denise Waggener had called the Jacksonville police to report that a 14-year-old student had been spitting at staff members. When police arrived, one of the officers recognized the boy, because he had driven him to school that morning. The student had missed the bus and called police for help, according to a police report and 911 call.

School staff had placed the boy in one of Garrison’s small cinder-block seclusion rooms for “misbehavior,” police records show. A school worker told the officer she had been standing in the doorway of the seclusion room when the boy spit and it landed on her face, glasses and shirt.

The child “initially stated he did not spit at anyone, but then said he did spit,” according to the police report, “but instantly regretted doing so.” The report said the child “stated he knew right from wrong, but often had violent outbursts.”

The worker asked to press charges, and the officer arrested the boy for aggravated battery.

One officer told the child he was under arrest while another searched and handcuffed him. They put him in the back seat of a squad car, drove him to the police station, read him his rights and booked him. Officers told the boy the county’s probation department would contact him later, and then they dropped him off with a guardian, records show.

The Tribune and ProPublica documented and analyzed 415 of Garrison’s “police incident reports” dating to 2015 and found the school has called police, on average, once every two school days.

The reports, written by school staff and obtained through public records requests, describe in detail what happened up until the moment police were called. These narratives, along with recordings of 911 calls, show that school workers often summon police not amid an emergency but because someone at the school wants police to hold the child responsible for their behavior.

About half the calls were made for safety reasons because students had fled the school. Those students rarely were arrested. Students whom police did arrest were most often accused of aggravated battery and had been involved in physical interactions such as spitting or pushing; by state law, any physical interaction with a school employee elevates what would otherwise be a battery charge to aggravated battery. The next most common arrest reasons were disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and property damage.

The school once called police after a student was told he couldn’t use the restroom because he “had done nothing all morning,” records show. The boy got upset, left the classroom anyway and broke a desk in the hallway.

The school called police on a 12-year-old who was “running the halls, cussing staff.”

And the school called the police when a 15-year-old boy who was made to eat lunch inside one of the school’s seclusion rooms threw his applesauce and milk against the wall.

Police arrested them all.

“These students, I would imagine, feel like potential criminals under threat,” said Aaron Kupchik, a sociologist at the University of Delaware who studies punishment and policing in schools.

“We are taking the actions of young people, and, rather than trying to invest in solving real behavioral problems that are very difficult, we are just exposing them to the legal system and legal system consequences.”

Jacksonville Chief of Police Adam Mefford said officers respond to every 911 call from Garrison on the assumption it’s an emergency, and as many as five squad cars can respond. Police often find a child in a seclusion room, Mefford said.

Officers determine whether a law has been broken but leave the decision whether to press charges to the school staff, he said. Police sometimes issue tickets to Garrison students for violating local ordinances, though arrests are far more common.

“The school errs on the side of pressing charges,” Mefford said. “They typically have the student arrested.”

He wondered whether school administrators call police so frequently because it’s become a habit that’s difficult to stop. “The school has gotten used to us handling some of these problems,” Mefford said.

Once arrested, the students are taken to the police station until parents pick them up or an officer takes them home. One mother told reporters that her 10-year-old son, who has autism and ADHD, was “bawling, freaking out,” when she picked him up after he was booked at the jail.

Mefford said he tried to make the experience less traumatic by moving the booking process from the county detention facility to the police station in 2021. He also said police refer students and their families to services in the community, such as counseling or substance abuse help.

After they are booked, students are screened to determine if they should be sent to a juvenile detention facility. Most are assigned to an informal alternative to juvenile court that Morgan County court officials regularly use, said Tod Dillard, director of the county’s probation department.

These young people avoid going to juvenile court, but the “probation adjustment” process also requires them to admit guilt and denies them a public defender. Students must periodically report to a probation officer, typically for a year.

Violating the probation terms, such as by skipping school or getting arrested again, could lead to juvenile delinquency charges. In a juvenile court case, a student’s record of previous informal probation can be used when considering bail or sentencing.

Garrison has some students who are 18 and older, and they can be charged as adults. In 2020, an 18-year-old Garrison student was arrested for disorderly conduct after he “caused a disturbance” when he threw a cup of water and punched a pencil sharpener, court records show. That student spent four days in jail and was held on $3,000 bail. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay $439 in court costs and $10 a month in probation fees.

Even for younger students, juvenile charges related to Garrison can later have consequences in adult court. If they are arrested again after they turn 18, prior cases can be used to illustrate that they have a police record.

The boy who spit in anger this fall at Garrison now has an aggravated battery arrest on his record. Even Fair, the school’s director, found the decision to arrest the child troubling.

The day after the boy was taken into custody, Fair told reporters she knew the child had been arrested but said she did not know why school administrators had called police. Reporters told her it had been for spitting on one of her employees.

“That’s not arrestworthy. That is not what we should be about,” Fair said. In a later interview, after learning more about the incident, Fair said staff considered the student aggressive and said, “I guess they did what they thought was right.”

From Empathy to “Coercive Babysitting”

Bev Johns, a local educator, founded Garrison in 1981 with just two students — and a belief that with a caring staff and the right support, they could be successful.

The children had exhibited such disruptive behavior that staffers at their home schools felt ill-equipped to teach them. Her solution: Open a school designed to teach students not just academic subjects but how to manage their behavior. It became part of the Four Rivers Special Education District, a regional cooperative that today provides services to students in school districts across eight mostly rural counties.

The school was considered groundbreaking, and many of the techniques that Johns implemented at Garrison are still widely considered best practice for managing challenging behavior: giving students space when they’re upset, teaching them ways to manage their emotions and giving them choices rather than shouting demands.

Those techniques often involve trying to understand what’s driving a student’s behavior. A student shoving papers off their desk may feel overwhelmed and need assignments in smaller increments. A student struggling to sit still may need classwork that involves them moving around the room.

Taking the students’ disabilities into account when they misbehave is now a firmly entrenched concept in education. In fact, it’s federal law.

“There’s a requirement both in the law — and just morally — that kids with disabilities are not supposed to be punished for behaviors that are related to their disability, or caused by it, or caused by the school’s failure to meet their needs,” said Dan Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Johns, who led Garrison until 2003, has dedicated her career to these ideas. She published research about “the Garrison method” to help other educators, taught at a nearby college and continues to speak regularly at conferences.

“Choice is such a powerful strategy. It’s such an easy intervention,” Johns recently told a standing-room-only crowd at an Illinois special education convention in Naperville. And schools should look welcoming too, she said. “I see some schools that look like prisons. Why would a child want to go there?”

The Garrison of today isn’t a prison, but it relies on rules and methods meant to manage students.

In recent years, staffers sometimes took away students’ shoes to discourage them from fleeing, though Fair said that has not happened under her watch. Before a recent Illinois law banned locked seclusion in schools , Garrison workers used to shut students inside one of the school’s several seclusion rooms — staff members would stand outside and press a button to engage a magnetic lock. The doors have since been removed, but the “crisis rooms” are still used. The Four Rivers district reported to ISBE that workers had restrained or secluded students 155 times in the 2021-2022 school year — three times as many incidents as students.

“They would lock me in a concrete room and then close the door on me and lock it. I would freak out even worse,” said an 18-year-old named Max, who left the school in 2020.

Some of the school’s aides are assigned to one of two “crisis teams” of four employees each that respond to classrooms and can remove students who are upset, disobedient or aggressive.

Employees’ handwritten records describe several incidents where they confined a child to a small area inside the classroom. In one case, the crisis team made a “human wall” around a 14-year-old student who was wandering in the classroom, swearing and being disruptive. A 16-year-old student told reporters that school employees drew a box around his desk in chalk and told him not to leave the area or there would be consequences.

Charles Cropp, who has worked as part of crisis teams at Garrison on and off since 2009, said he and his colleagues try to help students learn how to calm down when they are upset. He said teams aim to help students learn how to manage their emotions but that sometimes the young people also need to be held “accountable” when they are physical or disruptive.

“I was one that never really cared to watch kids get escorted out in handcuffs,” said Cropp, who returned to the school full time in late November. “I never liked it but in the same sense, they have to learn when you graduate and you are an adult in the public, you can’t do those things.”

Jen Frakes, a board-certified behavior analyst who worked at Garrison in 2015-16, described the culture at Garrison as “coercive babysitting.” She said she never saw a situation that warranted arresting a student.

“It seemed more of a power dynamic of ‘You’ll either follow my rules or I will show you who’s in charge,’” said Frakes, who runs a Springfield business that helps schools and families learn to work through challenging behavior. “When I saw a kid get arrested, he was sitting underneath his desk calm and quiet, and they came in and arrested him.”

This isn’t how other schools similar to Garrison are handling difficult student behavior.

Reporters identified 57 other public schools throughout Illinois that also exclusively serve students with severe behavioral disabilities. To determine how often police were involved at those schools and why, reporters made public records requests to all of the schools and to the police or sheriff’s departments that serve each one. Reporters were able to examine police records for 50 schools.

The two schools with the most arrests during the last four school years had 16 and 18, respectively. At 23 of the schools, no students were arrested in that period; six schools had only one arrest.

By comparison, five students were arrested at Garrison by mid-November of this school year alone, according to school and police records.

John McKenna, an assistant professor specializing in special education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, said arresting students not only criminalizes them but also takes them out of the classroom.

“Kids are supposed to be receiving instruction and support and not opportunities to enter the school-to-prison pipeline,” he said.

“If you don’t provide kids with academic instruction, particularly those with behavior and emotional needs, the gaps between their performance and the peers who don’t have disabilities grows exponentially and sets them up for failure,” McKenna said.

The fact that Garrison students have disabilities that may explain some of their behavior appears to be lost on many of the officials who encounter them in the justice system; some described Garrison as a school for delinquents, not disabled children. A public defender tasked with representing students in juvenile court described the children as having been “kicked out” of their regular schools. An assistant state’s attorney thought students at Garrison had been “expelled” from traditional schools. Neither of those descriptions is accurate.

Rhea Welch, who worked under Johns and retired in 2016, said that during her 26 years as a teacher at Garrison it was not a place that relied heavily on police. “You don’t want your kids arrested, for heaven’s sake. You want to be able to work with them so that doesn’t happen, so they’re more in control,” she said.

For Johns, Garrison is no longer the school she remembers. Students need positive feedback, she said, not constant reprimands from and clashes with the adults they are supposed to trust.

“I always say when you’re having trouble with a child, the first place you look is yourself,” she said.

Johns read some of the school’s recent police incident reports and said she found them “bothersome,” adding, “It’s obviously hard for me to watch what’s happened.”

“I Did Everything I Could to Get Him Out”

Gabe, a 12-year-old boy with autism, likes to share with anyone who will listen all the details of his Pokemon collection and has gotten good at using online translators to read the cards with Japanese lettering on them. His stepmother, Lena, said that over the years Gabe has learned to ask for what he needs. When he gets overstimulated at home, he asks for space by saying: “I need you to back up.”

(When using the last name of a parent would identify the student —– and in doing so, create a publicly available record of the student’s arrest —– ProPublica and the Tribune are referring to the parent by first name only.)

Gabe ended up at Garrison in 2019 after having difficulty in traditional schools. He will sometimes yell and lash out when frustrated.

Lena said school officials asked her to pick up Gabe if he got upset. “I would hear Gabe screaming, and then heard them screaming back at him,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’ And they’d still get up in his face.”

And then one day, Gabe and Lena said, school workers barricaded him at his desk by pushing filing cabinets around it. He pushed over one of the cabinets while trying to get away, and the school called the police, Lena said.

“We had to pick up our 10-year-old at the police station,” Lena said. “I would freak out if I got boxed in with filing cabinets.”

It got so that Gabe would wake up angry and not want to go to school.

“That school is at the bottom of the food chain. If you got all the schools in the world, they would be at the bottom of the food chain. The workers there are mean,” said Gabe.

Other parents described their children becoming angrier, more withdrawn; the students dreaded going to school at Garrison. Some families begged their home districts to find another school for them.

“It was like hell,” said one mother, who said her son was miserable while he was a student there. “I did everything I could to get him out.” Her son attended Garrison for about five years before she got him returned to his home school. He is in his first year of college now.

Michelle Prather, whose daughter Destiny attended Garrison from fifth grade until she graduated in 2021, said school employees threatened to call police over minor missteps: throwing a piece of paper, or pushing a desk.

“She would walk out of a room and they’d say, ‘We’re going to call police,’” Prather said. Destiny was arrested at least once after she shoved an aide while trying to leave a classroom.

Prather and other caregivers said watching their children be arrested over and over was troubling, but it was also upsetting to realize that the school wasn’t providing the support services the students needed.

Destiny has intellectual disabilities and ADHD as well as acute spina bifida, a defect of the spine. Because of her medical condition, Destiny had difficulty sensing when she needed to use the restroom. She would sometimes get up from her desk and tell staff that she urgently needed to go.

“They would say, ‘No you don’t,’” said her mother. “She would have accidents. I would have to bring her clothes.”

Madisen Hohimer, who is now 22 and working as a bartender, said she transferred to Garrison in sixth grade when her home school recommended it. She remembers Garrison as a place that failed to help her. Hohimer said she frequently ran away from the school and employees took her shoes to try to keep her from fleeing.

“I was never involved with the police before Garrison. I started mostly acting out when I got sent over there because I felt like I had nobody,” she said. One time, she said, she swung and kicked at staff after they cornered her in a seclusion room. She wound up being arrested for aggravated battery.

Just weeks before Hohimer was set to graduate, she left for good. “I wish they would have found a way to help me,” she said.

After Gabe’s filing cabinet incident, his parents kept him home until he could be placed at a private therapeutic school three counties away. He’s been going there since last year.

“It’s an hour and a half ride and he’d rather do that than go to Garrison,” said Lena, a nursing student. He’s thriving there, she said, and noted that the school has never called police about Gabe’s behavior.

But one of Lena’s other children, Nathan, remained at Garrison.

Then one morning in late September, she got a text from her son:

“I’M AT THE POLICE STATION THERE GOING TO GET MY FINGERPRINTS AND TAKE A PICTURE OF ME AND BRING ME BACK TO THE HOUSE.”

Nathan, who was 14 at the time, had been arrested after he hit a classmate and then shoved an aide who was trying to physically keep him in the classroom, according to a school report. He then left the school. In a 911 call, a school administrator asked police to find Nathan and also to come to the school “because a staff member will probably press charges.”

Nathan’s family decided not to send him back to Garrison. He’s taking classes online instead.

“That was my worst mistake, putting either of my kids in Garrison,” Lena said. “If I could take it back, I would.”

No One Watching

Warning signs that Garrison was punishing students with policing have been there for years, waiting for someone to take notice.

Since as far back as 2011, the federal government has published data online about police involvement and arrests at schools. That year, the data showed, Garrison called police on 54% of its students and 14% were arrested. Three subsequent publications of similar data show the arrest rate climbing each time — until, in 2017-18, more than half of Garrison’s students were arrested.

Though the federal data could have raised red flags, Illinois does not collect data on police involvement in schools and does not require that the state education board monitor it. The state does monitor other punitive practices in schools, such as their numbers of suspensions and expulsions, and requires schools to make improvements when the data shows excessive use.

Illinois legislation that would have required ISBE to collect data annually on school-related arrests and other discipline stalled last year.

The state board, however, has issued guidance about involving police in school discipline . Earlier this year, ISBE and the state attorney general’s office told school districts across the state to use social workers, mental health professionals and counselors — not police — to create a “positive and safe school climate.”

Before last week, no one from ISBE had been to Garrison for at least the last seven school years. There had been no complaints that would have triggered a monitoring visit, said Matthews, the state board spokesperson.

Garrison has its own school board, and it — not the state board — is responsible for monitoring the school, including police activity, ISBE officials said. The school board is made up of representatives from some of the 18 school districts that rely on Four Rivers for special education staffing and placements at Garrison.

The board president, Linda Eades, said after a November board meeting that she couldn’t answer questions about the police involvement at Garrison and described the board as hands-off. “We don’t get down in the trenches,” she said.

Fair, the district’s director, said she is trying to understand the scope of police involvement at Garrison and is “digging into” school reports. “I’m trying so hard. It’s a lot of stuff to change,” she said in an interview. “There are a lot of things that need to improve.”

Earlier this year, Garrison was awarded a $635,000 “Community Partnership Grant” through ISBE for training to help students with their behavioral and mental health needs and help schools reduce their reliance on punitive discipline.

Some of the grant money has been used to pay for training in Ukeru, a method of addressing physical aggression that doesn’t involve physically restraining a child.

The Ukeru method focuses on training workers in how to prevent challenging behavior from becoming a crisis and uses soft blue pads to block kicks and punches if necessary. Garrison workers were trained in the method in October; blue pads are now propped up in the hallways in the building.

Starting two weeks ago, Fair said, the school began using its two social workers and a social work intern in a new way. One of the social workers is now available to go into a classroom when a student needs help, providing a way to intervene before behavior escalates into a crisis. Fair said she also plans to incorporate social emotional learning into the curriculum.

School administrators mentioned the Ukeru training and some of Garrison’s latest efforts at the November board meeting, which lasted about 20 minutes. Fair said the school had begun to monitor police involvement and arrests and said she is trying to “boost up some of the supports for the kids.”

Her priority now, she assured them, is to “really help make it a therapeutic place for the kids.”

That’s what it was always supposed to be.

Silent strength: my time as a prisoner’s wife turned advocate, reclaimed identity: keith jesperson’s sixth murder, why does legacy food media ignore prison food.

Thank you for writing this article. I think every school should be investigated. There is so much going in in schools that gets hidden. You should be able to know what a school is really like before your child attends there. Unfortunately, I did not have this information when enrolling my son at Triton Jr/Sr high. Didn’t realize things like this even happen. The school does treat these kids as disposable. Thinks I’m asking the worst thing for them not to involve police. They must keep their school safe is what I’m told. Yet, my son has not seriously injured anyone. Now he is in the system for punching another student on 2 occasions as a result of him being bullied. Bullying that was brought to the schools attention, and ignored. So 2 punches is all it takes to be labeled as a criminal. Nobody cares that he has a disability. It must be reported as they try to say. Now my son is scared to go to school. That he will lose control because of his disability. I’m just sitting here wondering what is wrong with people. These are just kids. Do we really want to send them to jail for something we can realistically prevent? But again….disposable

Should police officers be in schools? California education leaders rethink school safety

Students, community groups say schools should invest more in counselors and less in police..

Michael Burke

June 11, 2020, 14 comments.

A movement to reform California public school policing and drastically rethink school safety is quickly gaining momentum amid nationwide protests against police brutality following the killing of George Floyd.

In Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento and San Francisco, administrators and school boards are under pressure from students and community groups who are renewing demands for police-free schools and calling on districts to instead hire more counselors and other student support services. In some cases, including in Oakland and San Francisco, those ideas are now winning the support of majorities of school board members.

California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond at a press conference on Wednesday said he understands why “many are questioning why there should be police on campuses.” He said the California Department of Education is currently looking into standards for training school police officers, adding that he supports increased implicit bias training for officers.

“We need to have standards for school resource officers,” Thurmond said. “Those standards mean that we should never, ever at any school, expect a police officer to be the dean of students or a disciplinarian who disciplines a student for doing things that students do. There should be no criminalization of students for engaging in student behavior.”

Opponents of school police point to research showing that the presence of police in schools can lead to negative outcomes for black and Latino students, who are arrested and disciplined at higher rates than their peers. For those students, interactions with school police are often their introduction to the criminal justice system and the beginning of what has been dubbed the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the national trend of students being funneled from public schools to incarceration.

Protesters across the country over the past two weeks have demanded police reform after a bystander’s cell phone video captured a Minneapolis police officer pressing a knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him. In the weeks since his death, police departments in California and across the country have banned the practice of neck restraints used on Floyd.

“ With everything going on right now in the world, with the social climate where it is, this is the moment,” said Ashantee Polk, a high school senior in Los Angeles and one of dozens of members of Students Deserve Justice, a group of students across the Los Angeles Unified School District. The coalition for several years has pushed to reduce school policing in the district.

“Police feel like a threat to students, especially to black and brown students. Black and brown students are intimidated by police,” Polk added.

Schools in California aren’t alone in facing calls to reform how their schools are policed. Across the country in large urban school districts, activists are making similar demands. So far, school districts in Minneapolis and Portland have said they will remove police from schools by no longer contracting with city police.

The movement to remove police in Los Angeles this week gained significant support from United Teachers Los Angeles , the teachers’ union representing tens of thousands of teachers in the district. The union’s president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, said the union’s board of directors voted 35-2 to disband the district’s police department, which with more than 400 sworn officers is the largest independent school police force in the nation. E choing the beliefs of some students, Caputo-Pearl said the $70 million the district spends on the department could be better allocated to mental health services.

District leaders, however, have so far given no indication that they are considering eliminating or cutting back on the department. Superintendent Austin Beutner did not return a request for comment on this story.

The union representing the officers, the Los Angeles School Police Association, says reducing or eliminating police presence on campus puts students at risk.

“ The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) Board of Directors took the tragic and unnecessary death of George Floyd and attempted to use that as a political platform to remove the Los Angeles School Police Department from LAUSD and put OUR children at risk,” the police union said in a statement this week.

Activists calling for removing police from other districts across the state are making more progress. The Black Organizing Project, a community coalition focused on racial justice, for years has called for police to be taken out of Oakland schools. In recent days, the group has organized protests and press conferences to pressure Oakland Unified to eliminate its police department.

Oakland Unified Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell on Wednesday night announced her support for the plan, which also has the support of a majority of the school board. A resolution from school board members Roseann Torres and Shanthi Gonzales would get rid of the department and severely limit city police’s interaction with schools. The board is scheduled to vote on the resolution on June 24.

“T his is probably the most support and attention we’ve gotten on this issue,” said Jasmine Williams, spokeswoman for the Black Organizing Project. “And so that’s why we’re pressing super hard.”

Credit: Brooke Anderson/Courtesy of the Black Organizing Project

Advocates for eliminating the Oakland Unified police force rally outside the home of board president Jody London on June 5, 2020.

In nearby West Contra Costa Unified, the district’s school board voted unanimously Wednesday to terminate the district’s contracts with local police departments.

School leaders in San Francisco are also reconsidering whether police should be in schools. Currently, San Francisco Unified contracts with the San Francisco Police Department to assign officers to schools, but the district is renegotiating that contract.

School board president Mark Sanchez is in favor of not renewing the contract, he said Tuesday, while adding that the district would need to come up with an “exit strategy.”

“Any money that we are spending on this program is not OK. It sends a horrible message to our students of color,” Sanchez said during a school board meeting.

In Sacramento, the Black Parallel School Board, a group that advocates for black students, said in a statement this week that police shouldn’t be in schools — a view the organization has held for years.

“Policing in our schools teaches young people that they are viewed as criminals, not scholars,” the group said.

While districts such as L.A. Unified and Oakland Unified have their own school police departments, the vast majority of school districts in California do not. Instead, like San Francisco and West Contra Costa, most districts contract with municipal police agencies that provide officers to patrol schools. Those personnel are called school resource officers.

School police officers and school resource officers typically carry firearms.

Separately, schools also often employ security guards, who don’t carry firearms and who provide another layer of security. L.A. Unified and Oakland Unified each have unarmed school security officers who patrol campuses.

School shootings over the last two decades have often led school districts to justify more — not less — police presence at schools across the country. Security at LA Unified schools and other schools across the country intensified after the Columbine school shooting in 1999 and again after the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012.

It’s unclear, however, whether more school police and security actually prevent school shootings. The 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 people dead, occurred while there was an armed officer on campus. There were also officers present on the Santa Fe High School campus when a student shot and killed eight students and two teachers in 2018.

After the Parkland shooting, thousands of academics and psychologists signed a document calling for preventative measures to end gun violence at schools, rather than investing more in police and other school security to prepare for shootings. The document called for a “comprehensive public health approach” that, among other steps, suggested a national requirement for schools to assess school climate and implement higher staffing levels of counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

When schools instead invest in a heavy police presence, it can negatively impact school climate, said Ron Avi Astor, a professor of social welfare at UCLA and an expert on school safety.

“Very heavily armed schools prime the kids in those schools to think of the place more like a prison,” he said. “Militarizing and turning schools into things that look like prisons is not healthy for development. It’s not healthy for identity.”

In Oakland, the Black Organizing Project has called for restructuring the role of security personnel so that they emphasize “peace-keeping” and work under the district’s Office of Equity or Behavioral Health Department. Under the school board resolution introduced this week, the district would hire social workers, psychologists and other mental or behavioral health professionals with the money it saves by eliminating the police department.

“Too often, the inclination is to focus on physical aspects such as police, school resource officers, metal detectors, surveillance cameras, security systems and such. Supporting and promoting the social, emotional, behavioral, mental health of students is equally important in promoting school safety and promoting safe, supportive and effective schools,” said Shane Jimerson, a professor of psychology at University of California, Santa Barbara, and an expert on school safety.

Polk, the Los Angeles high school senior, said a police officer patrolled her high school every day when schools were open. She said it made her uncomfortable to know an officer was present at the campus, especially when she first entered high school in 2016.

At the time, on Polk’s mind was the death of Sandra Bland, a black woman who in 2015 was pulled over for failing to use a turn signal. She was arrested and later found hanged in her Texas jail cell. Her death was ruled a suicide. Her family accused police and the jail of not doing enough to prevent her death, and later settled a wrongful death lawsuit for $1.9 million .

“I was a little scared. I kind of wanted to move schools because I thought, being around school police on campus, that’s a little scary,” Polk said.

Fernando Escobar, a 2013 graduate of John F. Kennedy High School in L.A. Unified, said he experienced similar anxiety about the police officer that patrolled his school.

“He seemed really like a decent person, but at the same time, there’s an underlying feeling of uneasiness,” Escobar said. “At least for me, I just feel uneasy with any police around.”

Jayden Eden, a student at South Pasadena High School, said he believed searches of students at his school using drug-sniffing dogs are disproportionately targeted at classes with more black and Latino students.

Eden wrote this week in an op-ed for the community news website South Pasadenan that Advanced Placement classes at the school are filled with white and Asian students, while mostly black and Latino students are enrolled in “regular classes.”

“I can recall several periods in which my regular classes had been searched,” he wrote . “However, not at any point could I recall during the entire year of AP United States History that we’d been taken and formally searched.”

Black students are also more likely to be disciplined by school police.

In Los Angeles, black students made up 25% of all arrests, citations and diversions issued by the school police from 2014 through 2017, despite black students accounting for less than 9% of the student population, according to an analysis by UCLA’s Million Dollar Hoods project, which studies arrest records and mass incarceration in Los Angeles.

Similar trends exist in Oakland. In 2013, a report found that over a two-year period, black students accounted for 73% of the Oakland School Police Department’s arrests even though they made up only 30.5% of the student population.

L.A. Unified has taken some steps in recent years to reform its policing practices. In 2013, the district banned suspensions for “willful defiance,” which includes defying teachers and other staff or disrupting school activities.

Following advocacy from Students Deserve Justice, L.A. Unified’s school board voted last summer to end the district’s practice of randomly searching students with metal detectors, which students said was an invasive practice that disproportionately subjected black students to searches.

Sgt. Rudy Perez, the public information officer for the L.A. school police department, said school police officers in Los Angeles also focus heavily on “relational-based policing.” They work to build relationships with students and help guide students “in the right direction,” Perez said.

“ We are definitely an organization that is very progressive,” Perez said. “I can’t tell you how many stories that I have heard time after time of the impact that officers make in kids’ lives.”

To some students and advocates, however, those types of roles should be left to psychologists, counselors and other professionals.

“I f police officers are counseling students, that’s the job of counselors, and they can hire more counselors to do that,” said Amir Whitaker, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California, which has advocated for school districts to hire more counselors and fewer police officers.

Polk and Escobar both said they could have used counseling in high school but weren’t comfortable going to a police officer for that support.

While in high school, Escobar thought school was pointless, felt lost and didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. But he never considered going to the police for guidance because he viewed the officer as someone who was in his school “to uphold the law,” he said.

“That’s not something that made me think, ‘This guy can help me with how I’m feeling,’” Escobar added.

Whitaker said he expects that more students across the state will have similar experiences unless schools reconsider the role of school police.

“ It’s almost like we have a leaky roof and the school police are like the bucket that’s just going to collect the water,” Whitaker said. “And investing in mental health support services would be like actually getting up there on the roof.”

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Randy Weber 4 years ago 4 years ago

I thought we’re at a point in time when we're trying to improve relationships between people and the police. What better time than when they are children to socialize with police in an environment and situation that is non-hostile. When I was in high school, we had police officers in our school who were there regularly and interacted in a friendly manner with students. It was a way for the police to interact positively … Read More

I thought we’re at a point in time when we’re trying to improve relationships between people and the police. What better time than when they are children to socialize with police in an environment and situation that is non-hostile.

When I was in high school, we had police officers in our school who were there regularly and interacted in a friendly manner with students. It was a way for the police to interact positively with the community and for the community to learn about who the people were policing it. How do we improve relationships with police when the only interaction is when they’re called to crimes?

RV3 4 years ago 4 years ago

What a joke. Who will be around when things get out of control? When a parent comes to school and kicks another kid's ass because that child did something to their kid. Also counselors don't work, mental health services don't work especially when the person doesn't want to hear all of the fancy terms and theories on how such and such can help. I went to LAUSD schools as a child in what some called … Read More

What a joke. Who will be around when things get out of control? When a parent comes to school and kicks another kid’s ass because that child did something to their kid. Also counselors don’t work, mental health services don’t work especially when the person doesn’t want to hear all of the fancy terms and theories on how such and such can help.

I went to LAUSD schools as a child in what some called a bad/troubled neighborhood and only saw school police when they were called or after school where they stood post to keep the old gangbangers away. But hey these people will get their wish, with no real plan in place to keep the kids safe. But at the end of the day they got rid of school police and they can be proud as these kids suffer the consequences of adults’ actions.

Julia Mansfield 4 years ago 4 years ago

Blood Bath. Get ready because that’s what will happen. In California they already have had a huge surge in criminal/drug dealing activity in junior highs and middle schools!! ! What do you think will happen when there are no deterrents at all??

Jmac 4 years ago 4 years ago

Two things I did not read about from any of the sources opposed to the police in schools. Parents and personal accountability (strange). Also none of these people & groups against it have a solution for violence in schools. No counselors or student support services are going to be there to break up fights. Remove the police and watch the significant increase in attacks on LGBT students, sexual assaults, etc. It appears the majority opposed … Read More

It appears the majority opposed to police in school share a common political ideology. If these people are successful in the removal of police, the students really will suffer. I pray common sense prevails.

Omar Medina 4 years ago 4 years ago

I’m trying to get cops out of our schools and am proposing this to my fellow school board members, but need all the help I can get: http://omarmedina.com/srpd-out-of-srcs/

Dr. Bill Conrad 4 years ago 4 years ago

I salute you for your courageous work Omar. Best of luck to you and I hope that you reach your goal.

the collective 4 years ago 4 years ago

Our collective call to action demands the removal of the Berkeley Police Department from Berkeley High School and for the reallocation of funds for counselors, mental health professionals and others who support our students' development of mediation and conflict resolution skills. We call for Berkeley Unified School District to create thoughtful ways of working with students that engender an inclusive, respectful and transformative environment for learning. The Berkeley High School website states that "we … Read More

We call for Berkeley Unified School District to create thoughtful ways of working with students that engender an inclusive, respectful and transformative environment for learning. The Berkeley High School website states that “we treat each other with respect and act with integrity” and yet the real life experiences and stories of Black students are daily accounts of the mistreatment, a pattern of being pulled from class, unlawfully searched and aggressively handled at the hands of the police.

The presence of police in a place of learning promotes the criminalization rather than education of our students of color and sends the wrong impression to all our students. Together we demand the dismantling of the current police state climate that is an everyday reality for our students and transform the educational environment from one that hinders to one that fosters all of our young people’s ability to explore, grow and manifest their full capacities and gifts.

Sheila 4 years ago 4 years ago

So why does this article say black and brown kids are intimidated with police in school? Now that is about the racist thing I have heard. Are they not American kids just like others? Police are there so the nut cases that want to bring guns in and kill all of you get caught before they do it! Unless they have stuff that they’re doing that they know is wrong and they don’t want to get caught?

Rapha 4 years ago 4 years ago

Only in the United States are police officers on school campus. Throughout the world there are not police on school campus. My questions is why there is the need the have police officers on school campus? Also, I work in a Juvenile Hall as a mental health clinician, and all of the juveniles that get arrested on school campus are Latinos and African American. In my opinion, there is no need for police officer to … Read More

In my opinion, there is no need for police officer to be on any school campus. I hear of many school districts are laying off teachers and cutting budgets, but I have never heard of a school district laying off police officers. Now is the time to remove any law enforcement from school campus.

Frank 4 years ago 4 years ago

It’s not about the people, it’s about the system–the rules. Police officers are highly trained members of the community who need to be closer to the community, not further. But the rules of the police and the system they operate have to change. We have seen several instances of police officers standing alongside protesters. Change can happen. Alienating and breaking relationships rarely makes things better.

Jeff Crawford 4 years ago 4 years ago

What’s missing from the conversation is all the good that is done by having professional police officers on a campus. The mentoring, the role modeling, the relationships with students and their families. All police departments are not the same. The answer is open dialogue, transparency, and training.

Shy 4 years ago 4 years ago

When I was in school, having the police on campus made me feel safe. When rioting broke out, the police were already there to handle the situation.

Wait until the next active shooter comes on campus. Who will you call? The school counselor to try to talk him down? Good luck with that. I’d rather have a police officer with a gun any day.

Dave Parada 4 years ago 4 years ago

While we can certainly question the need for a police presence in schools generally, what will happen when a uniformed presence is gone and another traumatic event happens on campus? Among the many hats educators wear, are we now going to have to get PD in deescalating high tensions? I’m curious.

I give Giant Kudos to the Black Organizing Project and Jasmine Williams for their outstanding work in advocating for the removal of city police from OUSD schools. This great BOP team has persisted valiantly in advocating for the use of restorative justice practices led by the school communities to address discipline issues with Oakland Unified Schools. It is a long time overdue that we as educators take responsibility for disciplining the children. We should … Read More

It is a long time overdue that we as educators take responsibility for disciplining the children. We should never have succumbed to a pathology that outsourced discipline to city police. What were we thinking? We now need to listen to the children and act on their behalf. No more waffling.

If you want to do something concrete to support racial justice, please consider visiting the Black Organizing Web site at http://blackorganizingproject.org/ and donating a bunch of money as the kids deserve the support! They are an amazing team of students.

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School Policing Programs: Where We Have Been and Where We Need To Go Next

In 2019, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) was directed to provide Congress with a report on the state of school policing in the United States that examined the current role of police in schools and provided recommendations on how they can better serve the needs of students. To address this directive, NIJ engaged two consultants to conduct a comprehensive literature review and examination of data sources, facilitate four days of expert panel discussions, and synthesize the results from these data collection efforts. This report is the result of those efforts. The report focuses exclusively on the United States and on sworn officers and does not consider the use of school police in nations outside the United States or on the employment of private security, retired military, or other types of nonsworn police in schools. Much of the writing of this report occurred in 2020 amid the civil unrest stemming from the murder of George Floyd and the police killings of other people of color. It also was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, which undoubtedly will also have impacts on school policing. This report focuses on what we currently knew at the time of its writing.

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Education | Study finds removing police officers in Chicago…

Education | Study finds removing police officers in Chicago Public Schools did not impact perceived safety

A Chicago police officer works at Whitney Young High School on Feb. 20, 2024. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

The study — conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital Center for Childhood Resilience — examines the outcome of CPS’ plan to phase out police officers in schools.

The research coincides with CPS’ removal of the remaining uniformed police officers in 39 schools before the 2024-25 school year.

While having little effect on perceived safety in schools, the study found that, in some cases, removing uniformed officers, known as school resource officers (or SROs), in district schools coincided with fewer “high-level” disciplinary events, which include violent offenses, drug-related offenses and other behavior that would generally prompt police to be notified.

The study used districtwide data from 2014-2015 and 2022-2023 to examine the difference in outcomes between schools that removed SROs and those that continued to employ them. It is based on responses from annual CPS surveys and includes all district-run high schools, excluding charter schools.

In previous years, CPS contracted with the Chicago Police Department to employ SROs, whose job was to maintain safety in high schools. CPS does not employ SROs at elementary or middle schools, and most district schools, 595, currently have no school resource officers. A maximum of two SROs work at each school that employs them.

In 2020, following the racial justice protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, a resolution passed by the Chicago Board of Education instructed Chicago Public Schools to phase out the use of school resource officers and create alternative safety systems, a resolution the district termed the “Whole School Safety Program,” which focuses on creating physical and emotional safety and relational trust in school communities. As part of this initiative, CPS partnered with several community-based organizations to develop a new approach to school safety.

In February, the board voted unanimously to remove all SROs from district schools before the 2024-2025 school year.

School resource officers will be removed from all schools by June 30, according to CPS, and the board’s decision to remove all SROs and implement the Whole School Safety Program in all schools is expected to be codified at the Board of Education’s July 25 meeting.

Chicago Public Schools students, along with other organizations, march to push to remove police from schools during a rally outside of CPS headquarters in Chicago on June 9, 2020. (José M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune)

Of the approximately 84 schools studied, 16 still had both of their SROs in 2023, and 23 had retained one SRO, according to CPS.

The results of this research are encouraging for CPS, which is moving forward with implementing the Whole School Safety Program, which includes additional funding for schools losing SROs. Those funds can be used toward safety measures l such as capital improvements, hiring security guards and restorative justice coordinators and additional staff training.

“I think it (the study) reinforced one of our key perspectives, which is (that) removing police officers is not something that’s happening in a vacuum,” said Jadine Chou, the district’s chief of safety and security. “It’s happening in light of other resources and plans that are going in place.”

The U. of C. study’s lead researcher, Amy Arneson, noted that these concurrent safety measures may account for some of the reduction in disciplinary infractions. She also said that the study’s data only reflects the early years of what removing SROs might entail for schools, and future research may offer different insights.

The rollout of the new policy is likely to be different from the gradual phasing out of SROs, Arneson said, particularly since the schools transitioning from having a police presence are the same schools that previously voted to keep SROs. She hopes that the research will nevertheless inform communities as they make the transition.

“They’re gonna be the ones using it (the research) as well, combining it with their own lived experiences in moving forward, in terms of redefining safety in CPS over the next couple of years.”

The U. of C. study is the first part of a larger research effort that plans to analyze broader safety goals, including additional safety measures, particularly how schools removing SROs spent the additional funding they received to improve safety.

The study also found that, in 2022-2023, 63% of Black high school students had at least one SRO in their school, compared with 29% of Latino and white students and 22% of Asian and Pacific Islander students, disparities that became more pronounced as some schools phased out their SROs. Students receiving free or reduced lunch, non-English learners and students receiving special education services were also more likely to be in schools with SROs, according to the study.

For parents and community members who have lobbied against police in school, the board’s February decision came as a relief.

“The general vibe in CPS, particularly for Black students and Black kids with (disabilities), is that is that there is a police officer available in the event that there is an incident, instead of leveraging restorative practices and the things we know that work best, particularly for our students in special education, to de-escalate situations,” said Cassandra Kaczocha, a Kenwood High School parent and board president of the education nonprofit Raise Your Hand. “Police officers don’t participate in that, and in fact, they tend to escalate situations.”

Kaczocha had previously lobbied against SROs at Mather High School, and began to speak in support of removing SROs at Kenwood when her son transferred there.

Other community members remain uncertain as to what the upcoming school year will look like.

A Chicago police officer observes dismissal at the end of the school day at Roberto Clemente High School on Sept. 14, 2015. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)

Michele Clark High School, a magnet school in the Austin neighborhood, voted to keep both of their SROs during the 2022-2023 school year and, at the end of the 2023-2024 year, had retained both SROs.

According to Bernard Clay, a community representative for Michele Clark’s Local School Council, the community wants to keep their SROs, but that conflicts with the Chicago Board of Education’s ruling.

Although many schools have elected to remove their SROs since 2020, Clay believes the universal decision across all CPS schools does not consider the specific needs of each school community.

“Those are those schools,” Clay said. “We voted to keep ours. We know our community.”

After the February board decision, Chou said the district began working with school communities to make the transition. The 39 schools that have to remove their SROs by the start of the school year formed committees to develop a safety plan.

“People have strong points of view on this topic, which is why engagement was so important,” said Chou. “The board decided they were going to move forward, and it was our job to make sure that we were incorporating any concerns that people have in light of the decision.”

For example, Chou said a number of the schools in which SROs were removed requested a Police Department presence at dismissal time, which, she said, the district has promised to provide next year.

CPS said they spoke with students, parents, principals and teachers in the schools that wanted to keep their SROs to determine what safety measures would ease the transition to a school without police presence. “What things have to be in place to make sure that you feel that you have what you need for your school’s safety?” Chou said.

The removal of uniformed officers in schools is too narrow a focus when it comes to addressing school safety, according to Dwayne Truss, a former Chicago Board of Education member and 29th Ward alderman candidate in 2019. According to Truss, the Board of Education has focused on police presence in schools, but this overshadows pressing issues such as literacy and academic concerns.

“It’s just the social justice warriors’ mentality,” he said. “It was like the symbolism of, ‘Let’s get police officers out of the schools.’ Every school is not the same. Every community is not the same.”

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Chicago schools that removed police officers saw slight drop in high-level discipline violations: study

Chicago high schools that removed police in the last few years saw a slight dip in the most serious types of student disciplinary violations, according to a new study released Wednesday.

The study, from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, comes as Chicago Public Schools plans to launch a new safety policy for the upcoming school year that will unilaterally remove school resource officers, or SROs, from all campuses.

The study’s authors looked at the district’s more than 80 CPS-run high schools, and focused on those that removed officers after the summer of 2020 , when the Chicago Board of Education directed Local School Councils to decide if they wanted SROs on campus.

As of last school year, 39 high schools had on-campus police officers staffed by the Chicago Police Department, while 44 other schools had none, according to the study. Fourteen schools had voted since 2020 to remove them. The Board of Education plans to remove the remaining officers starting this fall.

The study’s authors examined different data points, such as discipline and how kids and teachers felt about their schools, before and after those campuses got rid of police officers.

“On average, on the whole, there weren’t that many changes or differences between schools that had removed SROs and schools that didn’t,” said Amy Arneson, senior research associate with the consortium. “And so the significant changes we did find were improvements.”

The authors found that schools that shed SROs saw small drops in high-level disciplinary infractions compared to the 2018-19 school year, when they still had officers. These incidents include student actions that are “very seriously” or “most seriously” disruptive or are illegal, such as threats or actual violence and anything involving alcohol, drugs, and weapons. High-level infractions generally rose across CPS between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 school years, the study said.

While schools without officers now had fewer high-level disciplinary violations compared to before the pandemic, those more serious incidents rose between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years — but not as much as schools that still had officers, the study found.

That drop could be the result of the district pushing schools to embrace alternative disciplinary practices and work on building a positive culture in school, said Jadine Chou, CPS’s chief of safety and security. She acknowledged that it’s hard to know for sure, since the study did not explore why these changes happened.

When schools first began removing police officers, the district gave them funding to use toward things such as restorative justice and hiring security guards. A separate University of Chicago study last year found that schools that implemented restorative justice practices saw fewer student arrests.

At the same time, the study notes, schools that got rid of SROs already had a relatively low number of disciplinary infractions, while schools that kept their officers had higher such incidents.

There were no significant changes, however, when considering all types of discipline or suspensions at schools that got rid of campus police, according to the study. Less serious disciplinary violations can range from running in the hall to displaying a gang affiliation or getting into a fight that results in no injuries.

Also, there were no notable differences in police notifications, which are calls made to police when a student does something that warrants police involvement, per the Student Code of Conduct. Those notifications are typically not the same as 911 calls, Arneson said.

While students across all schools reported feeling less safe after the pandemic, there were no notable changes at schools that got rid of SROs, the study found. There also were no significant differences in how safe teachers felt, as well in how much students trust their teachers.

Implementing the new plan won’t ‘be a light switch’

Earlier this year, the Chicago Board of Education directed CPS CEO Pedro Martinez to create a new school safety policy that would ban SROs from campuses, effectively stripping LSCs of the power to decide. State lawmakers proposed a bill that would allow LSCs to contract with the Chicago Police Department in order to bring officers to their schools, but that bill was stalled.

The new school safety policy, which the board is expected to vote on in July, will require teachers and staff to get more training on restorative justice practices, which are alternatives to discipline and are meant to resolve conflict. That policy also emphasizes pairing students with more mental health resources.

Chou, the CPS chief of safety and security, said the study signals that “many other things” beyond the presence of police define what makes a school feel safe and CPS will have to work to understand what those factors are as officials implement its new safety plan.

At some schools, that could simply mean improving traffic around the school. At others, it could mean partnering with the Chicago Police Department to help with arrival and dismissal because of concerns about violence in a particular neighborhood, Chou said.

“This is not going to be a light switch, turn it on and everything will fall into place,” Chou said. “We realize that we’re going to have to do a lot of community engagement to understand what those needs are, and that’s one of the biggest components of whole school safety, is the engagement aspect.”

The new policy would require every school to make its own safety plan that follows some broader guidelines, such as removing police officers and getting training in alternative discipline practices.

Dwayne Truss, a former member of the Chicago Board of Education who advocated for giving LSCs the power to make decisions about their on-campus police, said there hasn’t been enough engagement with school communities. The board should have waited to make changes to the safety policy until after this study was conducted.

“I just want to be very, very clear: I’m not pro-SRO, anti-SRO; I’m just going to be against usurping the rights of Local School Councils,” Truss said. “And this is data that you share with people and have discussions with people to help educate them on what’s the best path forward, what are some of the best practices.”

For the district’s part, it collected about 9,000 responses to its proposed new safety policy, which it created in partnership with community organizations.

There were also some distinct characteristics about schools that chose to keep their SROs versus the ones that didn’t. In the 2018-2019 school year, before the board decided to let Local School Councils remove SROs, a similar share of students across different races attended a school with at least one officer, ranging between 87 to 93%.

By the 2022-23 school year, two years after schools started removing SROs, nearly two-thirds of Black high school students attended a school with at least one SRO, while the same was true for just 29% of white and Hispanic students and 22% of Asian American students. Students with disabilities, those from low-income families, and students who were native English speakers were also more likely to be enrolled in a school with an SRO.

High schools that had more reported disciplinary infractions were more likely to choose to keep their SROs, the study found. Also, smaller schools and those that enrolled smaller shares of students from low-income families tended to keep their SROs.

Arneson said the study released Wednesday is the first of a series that will examine the district’s approach to school safety. This first piece of research looks at the impact of removing SROs, but doesn’t explain reasons behind the findings, she said. Those questions will hopefully be answered in future studies related to school safety that the team plans to publish in the future.

Arneson wasn’t surprised by the findings, which she said followed the trends of some other national studies. There are still lots of questions to explore, she said.

“Now that there’s no SROs across CPS starting next year,” she wondered, “what are the differences that we’re seeing in schools that didn’t opt in to removing them up front?”

Reema Amin is a reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Reema at [email protected] .

Chicago schools that removed police officers saw slight drop in high-level discipline violations: study

Chicago Public Schools students and organizers who support removing school resource officers stand en masse, looking serious, before the Chicago Board of Education during a meeting.

Chicago Public Schools students and organizers who support removing school resource officers stand before the Chicago Board of Education during a Feb. 22 meeting.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times file

CPS dropping school police officers didn't change whether students or teachers feel safe, study reveals

The analysis by the university of chicago released wednesday also found a reduction in high-level discipline infractions at schools that had gotten rid of their cops..

Rashad Talley, the principal at Wendell Phillips Academy High School, believes healthy safety and discipline practices are more about the staff’s relationship with students and not whether the South Side high school has police in the building every day.

“It’s hard for me to pinpoint whether a [school resource officer] makes that much of a difference, because I could be an SRO and have a great relationship with a kid,” he said. “I don’t think it matters, the title of the person, or the position of the person. It matters, that relationship.”

Phillips was one of three Chicago high schools that were the first to remove police officers in summer 2020 amid protests against police brutality in the wake of the George Floyd police killing . Phillips didn’t have a functioning local school council, so Chicago Public Schools officials instructed the principal to talk with the community and make the decision.

Dozens more schools have removed one or both of their officers the past few years. Now only 39 district-run, noncharter high schools have them, or a little less than half. CPS is pulling cops from all the remaining schools in the fall .

Student activists have insisted that police escalated conflicts, disproportionately policed Black children and put them in danger of being thrust into the criminal justice system for in-school behavior. But a lot of high schools have feared that removing their officers would mean losing important adults who had relationships with students, helped with discipline and made parents feel their kids’ schools were safe.

My South Side high school is more than a ‘bad’ school

In reality, CPS has dramatically cut back on its use of cops in disciplinary incidents in the past decade. And research has shown school resource officers don’t usually prevent school shootings from outside threats. So the presence of officers in schools has often come down to perceptions of safety: Do staff or kids feel safe or unsafe with a cop in the building?

A study released Wednesday by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research examined the effects of CPS schools removing their police officers and found there were minimal changes to perceptions of safety. But the analysis discovered a reduction in high-level discipline infractions at schools that had gotten rid of their cops, and found Black students were more likely to have officers in their schools than other racial groups.

The researchers compared outcomes in schools that removed both of their officers with schools that kept one or both.

They found that students’ and teachers’ perceptions of whether their schools were safe didn’t change for better or worse without school police officers. Neither did student-teacher trust. Those findings came from the 5Essentials survey developed by UChicago and administered in CPS schools every year.

There also wasn’t a major correlation between removing officers and the rate at which schools called the police on students. But researchers said that was because the number of police notifications, as they’re called, is already too low to have much of a takeaway.

Schools that removed both officers did, however, fare better with discipline infractions. Incidents rose in CPS schools from the 2018-19 school year to 2022-23, the study found, but there were not similar increases in schools without cops — their rates remained relatively flat.

Chicago Board of Education votes to remove police from schools

And when examining the demographics of schools with and without officers, the research found schools serving predominantly Black students were more likely to have cops, making Black students twice as likely as other kids to have an officer in their school.

Schools with fewer students and higher suspension rates also were more likely to keep their law enforcement. Overall, though, students in all groups were much less likely to have an officer in their school in 2022-23 than in 2018-19.

Talley took over Phillips as principal in 2022. He said he made it a point to develop a relationship with the police district commander so the police department knows it’s urgent if the school calls.

Talley’s main mission is to make sure students have strong relationships with staff. At his first staff meeting, he sad, he told them he wanted them to talk to every single student they pass by in the hall.

“Kids want to be seen, they want to be acknowledged,” he said. “We want them to be able to feel that we have their best interests at heart.”

When students have strong relationships with adults, they will feel safe telling them they are having a bad day, rather than acting out. Talley said.

Phillips, like many of the schools that removed police officers, has seen a reduction of misconduct incidents, especially in the most serious categories. Comparing 2019-2020 to 2022-2023, the most recent data, it had fewer in-school suspensions, but more out of school suspensions and police notifications.

Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ.

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Spokane Airport Board distances itself from John Sessions as liquidation of Historic Flight Foundation continues

A trip to the Historic Flight Foundation was magical, not just for the school children who would visit to learn about the science of flight but for the attendees of galas held at the multimillion-dollar hangar.

Even for Sheila Geraghty, former executive director of the nonprofit, the planes were alluring.

“I would just walk around in awe of these planes that were a part of World War II and how historical they were and how beautiful and majestic they were and the fact that they could fly at a moment’s notice,” Geraghty said. “Deep down in my heart, I loved that job.”

The museum was owner and founder John Sessions’ brainchild. He donated the planes, got the Spokane Airport Board to build the foundation a more than $5 million hangar, recruited a fleet of volunteers and appealed to donors.

It was also Sessions, according to Geraghty and court records, who caused the downfall of the Historic Flight Foundation.

A bad business deal in North Dakota led to a company owned by Sessions defaulting on its loan. Then a practice of transferring money between his companies, including the flight foundation, allowed the bank to collect funds from those businesses.

Now, the hangar paid for with public funds is largely used as a storage site for the receiver tasked with selling of the foundation’s assets to satisfy the $20.1 million North Dakota court ruling.

The airport board and CEO Larry Krauter repeatedly declined to answer questions about the future of the hangar and its impact on Felts Field. But emails obtained by The Spokesman-Review through a public records request show the desire for caution in allowing another nonprofit into the space and pushback against Sessions’ plans to continue using a nearby hangar as an event venue.

Last month the airport declined to allow Aero Centers Felts Field to give Sessions a space permit for his new venture, Runway 4 Events Center, citing land use obligations with the Federal Aviation Administration. Sessions, who has remained optimistic publicly and to donors, declined to answer questions, citing ongoing legal issues.

On Tuesday, three large shipping containers were being loaded outside the large glass doors of the former Historic Flight Foundation hangar. The Douglas DC-3 with Pan American Airways System emblazoned on the side sat outside nearby.

Steps away across a parking lot, a small sign was the only indication of the new events center.

An alluring vision

Wesley “Wes” Bare has always loved Felts Field and historic planes. He learned to fly there when he was 16 and went on to become a Boeing engineer. When it came time to retire in 2016, nearby Millwood was the perfect place for Bare.

He knew Sessions from his time in Everett, where Sessions previously showcased the Historic Flight Foundation. Hearing Sessions planned to move to museum to Spokane, Bare was first in line to volunteer.

“It was hectic,” Bare said of the move.

But the community immediately was excited about the “new and unique” venue with lines out the door the see the fleet of vintage planes that could still fly, Bare said.

The foundation operated as a museum, where people could go inside the vintage aircraft as well as book flights on the operational planes.

It also held STEM classes for local youth. The facility also served as a venue for fundraisers for other nonprofits, weddings and corporate events.

Volunteers would often work these events doing everything from setting up tables and chairs to providing attendees information about the planes.

Bare noticed Sessions was could be odd about money. He wouldn’t share anything about the nonprofit’s financial status or let other people help with things as simple as taking museum membership payments.

As a volunteer, Bare thought that was above his pay grade and moved on.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the foundation hard, but visitors slowly returned.

At the time, Geraghty, who was the executive director, said Sessions became more difficult than usual to work for, blaming her for a slow return by donors.

She had no one to turn to, Geraghty said. The board of the nonprofit was completely hands off with Sessions solely in control.

“John (Sessions) made it very clear that these were not directors,” she said.

Board members Larry Sohren and Bob Larson confirmed they were advisors and had no vote to set policy or govern the nonprofit.

Sessions was hard on the volunteers who performed most of the labor for the events, they said.

“He was controlling. He was opinionated. He was mean,” Geraghty said of Sessions. “Everyone in the nonprofit world knows you treat your volunteers with love and respect and kindness because they’re not being paid.”

Geraghty said she couldn’t stand the pressure from Sessions and working overtime to keep up with the events held in the space. She left in 2021.

Legal troubles

It wasn’t until 2023 that Bare heard about the lawsuit.

Sessions told volunteers he would appeal the North Dakota judgment being entered in Washington and everything would be fine.

In 2022, a jury in Williston, North Dakota, found that one of Sessions’ companies, Eagle Crest Apartments, had fraudulently transferred funds to other businesses he owns, including the fight foundation. Eagle Crest defaulted on its loan held by Kansas City, Missouri-based UMB Bank to build the apartments. The bank was awarded $20.1 million.

Due to the fraudulent transfers between Sessions’ businesses, the bank was allowed to collect from other companies owned by Sessions, according to the North Dakota judgment. Sessions appealed to the North Dakota Supreme Court but lost.

Last year, sales began on the vintage planes that were part of the Historic Flight Foundation’s collection .

Sessions told the foundation’s board of directors that he planned to appeal the North Dakota case in Washington courts.

Airport CEO Krauter was supportive of Sessions last July, filing a document in court detailing his support of the foundation.

In 2016, Krauter visited the foundation in its Paine Field location and courted a move to Spokane, he wrote.

He led the push for the Spokane Airport Board to build the hangar and approve a 20-year lease and operating agreement.

“HFF is an integral component of Felts Field, Spokane Airports and the community,” Krauter wrote.

He added that losing the foundation would greatly impact Felts as a whole.

“HFF is also a resource for based pilots at Felts Field, not to mention a considerable point of pride in the aviation community,” he wrote. “It is a primary component of why Felts Field enjoys a very positive reputation in the aviation community.”

Sessions argued in court that under Washington law a nonprofit couldn’t be implicated in a decision, despite the North Dakota court finding that Sessions was the sole operator behind the foundation and other businesses.

A Spokane judge ruled against Sessions in December. Sessions has since brought the issue to the Washington State Court of Appeals.

While the appeal is pending, the receiver continued selling off the flight foundation’s assets to satisfy the judgment. According to the receiver’s reports, Sessions has violated the terms of the agreement multiple times, including flying and crashing a World War II vintage Spitfire.

Hangar in limbo

The hangar at Felt’s Field built for the flight foundation has largely become a storage facility as the foundation’s assets are liquidated, according to court documents.

The Spokane Airport Board had lengthy discussions with the receiver managing the liquidation on how to handle the lease for the building, ultimately deciding to enter into a new lease with the receiver after terminating the prior lease with HFF. The foundation had a lease to purchase option.

Sessions, board members of the foundation and his friends tried multiple times to talk to the airport board about HFF 2.0, a new version of the museum after the legal issues resolved.

In emails, airport board attorney Brian Werst said the airport board would not sign a similar lease to the one it had with the foundation or transfer the least to a new nonprofit without changes.

“Piggybacking off the need to protect the Airport, the Airport will need to conduct due diligence of the nonprofit entity that is the potential assignee, which will take some time for the Airport and may not move at the desired pace,” Werst wrote in September.

As the year moved on, Werst said he had to limit contact with proponents of a new foundation due to the on going litigation. In the meantime, Sessions created a new company, Felts Field Development, LLC.

He began operating Runway 4 Events Center in a nearby hangar at Felts Field owned by Aero Center. He continued trying to find a way to lease the museum hangar.

In mid-February, Sessions signed a space permit with Aero on behalf of Felts Field Development. Sessions would pay no rent until February 2026, at which time he would pay $10,000 a month for a five-year period if the lease is renewed and there were no issues.

In March, Sessions emailed the airport, formally notifying them of the flight foundation’s intent to vacate the hangar, despite the receiver having taken over all operations of the foundation.

Emails and court documents show the receiver was frustrated at Sessions’ letter and that the airport largely disregarded it.

Last month, the airport board, through Werst, declined to consent to the sublease. The airport has the right to do so because it owns the airport itself.

“The current use of the Space for special events, activities involving vendors, and other commercial purposes is not an authorized use,” Werst wrote. “Concession or commercial use of any Airport aeronautical property is prohibited unless there is a concession agreement with the Airport.”

The airport also objected to the document allowing Sessions to purchase the leasehold from Aero Centers. Werst said the “prohibited uses” of the hangar needed to stop immediately.

Runway 4 has not posted on its Facebook page since May 21, days before the airport’s letter was sent .

It’s unclear if the business continues to operate in the hangar. Sessions declined to answer questions on the issue.

The future of the former hangar remains up in the air. Todd Woodard, director of marketing and public affairs at the airport, said in an email Tuesday, “matters pertaining to the hangar at Felts Field continue to be subject to litigation, which makes conversations about the future untimely.”

He went on to say that until the litigation concludes, “we cannot speculate about the future.”

Hydropower is ready to step up to the plate against summer heat

Summer is nearly here and the Northwest has sprung to life as the days have grown longer and warmer.

How charges against 2 Uvalde school police officers are still leaving some families frustrated

Two indictments against former Uvalde, Texas, schools police officers were the first charges brought against law enforcement for the botched response that saw hundreds of officers wait more than an hour to confront an 18-year-old gun who killed 21 at an elementary school

AUSTIN, Texas — Two indictments against former Uvalde, Texas, schools police officers are the first charges brought against law enforcement for the botched response that saw hundreds of officers wait more than an hour to confront an 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 fourth-grade students and two teachers at Robb Elementary.

Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell has not said if any other officers will be charged or if the grand jury’s work is done.

Here are some things to know about the criminal investigation into the police response:

The Shooting

The gunman stormed into the school on May 24, 2022 and killed his victims in two classrooms.

More than 370 officers responded but waited more than 70 minutes to confront the shooter, even as he could be heard firing an AR-15-style rifle .

Scathing state and federal investigative reports on the police response have catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems.

The Charges

Gonzales was accused of abandoning his training and not confronting the shooter, even after hearing gunshots as he stood in a hallway.

All the charges are state jail felonies that carry up to two years in jail if convicted.

The Lawsuits

The families are pursing accountability from authorities in other state and federal courts. Several have filed multiple civil lawsuits.

The same families also reached a $2 million settlement with the city under which city leaders promised higher standards for hiring and training local police.

They also filed another lawsuit against gun maker Daniel Defense, which made the AR-style rifle used by the gunman.

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