Reimagining student safety in LA Unified — my vote on the school police budget
Last Tuesday, I voted with a majority of my colleagues on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education to shift $25 million — out of our total $8 billion budget — from the school police department into supportive services for Black students, such as psychiatric social workers and campus safety aides. I did not make this decision lightly, but believe it is a necessary step to actualizing a new vision of safety for schools and well-being for students.
COVID-19 has revealed several truths about the elusive nature of equality in America. It has laid bare for all to see a system that does not provide adequate access to education, health care, jobs, or housing stability for all its citizens. The disease’s disproportionate impact on communities of color has also heightened our awareness of racially inequitable underpinnings of the impact of many of our institutions, including both schools and police, each of which has been unduly shouldering the weight of providing a social safety net, and doing so in ways that unfortunately perpetuate cycles of racism.
And while many were able to ignore the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on communities of color — in part because of the anesthetizing effect of decades of defunding schools and other elements of the social safety net, especially in these very communities — the recorded lynching of George Floyd could not be unseen. His murder sparked perhaps the largest movement in American history and challenged all of us to reflect on how Black people are treated in this country.
In that spirit, LA Unified leaders are taking a renewed look at how to best support our Black students. And while I have many ideas about how we can do this, I decided to listen. And I heard from a chorus of community members, advocates, parents, teachers, and — most importantly — students who identified over-policing and investments in armed officers in schools to the exclusion of social-emotional supports as a critical area for immediate action.
They showed up; they called; they emailed; they marched. They told us what they need, and it was up to us to listen. They asked us to reimagine safety — safety for whom? to whom? for what purpose?
And as I have spent the last few weeks listening, learning, (and unlearning) from students and community members, I have also looked to the data underlying those experiences, and it has become clear to me that our significant reliance on policing in schools doesn’t seem to actually be making us safer. I hear concerns about school shootings from supporters of our school police. I absolutely share them, and have introduced multiple resolutions to review emergency safety plans and address gun violence. But ninety-five percent of school shooters are current or former students, and eighty-five percent of school shootings take place with an armed guard on campus. No armed guards or police have ever stopped a school shooting in progress. In fact, evidence suggests that an increased presence of police in schools makes some students less safe.
LA Unified has been a leader in decriminalizing students and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. But despite dramatic decreases in suspensions, expulsions, and arrests of students in LA Unified over the last 7 years following the community-driven School Climate Bill of Rights, we can still do better. Our students are asking. We must listen and take action.
I appreciate our school police personnel and my vote to divest a portion of funding was not an indictment of any individual school police officer, their motives, or even their impact in the community. In fact, we heard from many school community members who had positive experiences with the school police officers who have dedicated their lives to serve our kids. But we need to look past individual intentions to see the effects of a system as a whole.
That’s the thing about systemic racism — it doesn’t require animus or individual motive to exist. It’s that systems are set up in such a way as to have a disproportionate effect on communities of color. It’s the system that determines whether you see a counselor or a police officer after getting caught smoking marijuana; it’s the system that dictates whether your day starts with a mindfulness class or a metal detector. And it’s the fact that even with the best school police force in the country, Black students make up only 8% of our student population, but account for 25% of police interactions.
And I’ve witnessed this system. I attended majority-white schools in LA without police on campus and taught at a school 20 minutes away serving exclusively students of color with police on campus. That’s the kind of systemic racism that requires our attention, and our solutions.
So what can make students safer?
First, it is my expectation that the remaining $55 million in our District’s school police budget should enable us to retain core emergency services that our school police provide, and we look forward to additional recommendations from the Superintendent’s task force in the coming weeks. It is my hope that in redefining the role of school police, they will be able to focus more on keeping campuses secure from external emergencies as they focus less on student discipline — a role more appropriate for teachers and counselors. School police respond when they are called and we must work with our school personnel to seek educator-led solutions in non-emergency situations.
Second, we consistently hear that relationships are central to preventing and addressing disputes in schools. Things like mentorship, counseling, social workers, support, putting more resources into schools, and more caring adults on campuses. Some of the most common positive experiences we’ve heard about with our school police is their work around mentorship, and that is important work that should continue, but it does not necessarily need to be provided by armed staff who make some students feel unsafe and criminalized. We are an underfunded school district with hard decisions to make about investing resources in our schools. Our vote last week was about rethinking who should be doing that support work.
It’s also important to step back and acknowledge, without undermining the importance of this struggle around policing, that systemic racism in our schools and educational institutions does not rest solely on the backs of school police; indeed, our entire system has failed Black students for as long as it has existed. It should not have taken George Floyd’s recorded lynching and the ensuing massive demonstrations to lay bare our district’s own role in perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline and ask us to reconsider our options for supporting Black lives. We have allowed ourselves to look the other way and not hold ourselves accountable for the pervasive opportunity gaps, the failure to recognize Black excellence, and lack of trusting, supportive relationships that hold students of color back from fulfilling their full potential.
We have a lot of work left to do. I am committed to continuing the conversation — with those who agree with me and those who don’t — until we get safety and education right for all of our students.
