But now, bills before the state legislature would roll back these reforms and again allow schools to dismiss children in kindergarten through third-grade. 

Three measures under consideration would strip a prohibition on “disciplinary dismissals” — the removal of children from schools — in grades K-3, loosen the definition of student behavior meriting exclusion from the classroom, end a requirement that schools try non-exclusionary strategies before dismissing a child and let schools once again punish youngsters by denying or delaying their access to lunch and recess.

A separate bill would overturn a ban on seclusion for K-3 students — the practice of confining a child in isolation. Some people believe seclusion should be an option when a child’s behavior is out of control. Others call it punitive and cruel, particularly when used on very young children. 

That split was evident in testimony at a recent state House of Representatives hearing on the legislation. Sitting on opposite sides of a windowless Capitol hearing room, the witnesses took turns describing starkly different realities. 

Principal of Jeffers Pond Elementary in the affluent, suburban Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools, Patrick Glynn testified that suspensions provide “the gift of time” so staff can “allow for healing” and create a “re-entry plan” for the student in question. 

Minnesota Elementary School Principals Association President Lisa Carlson, who oversees a school in another prosperous Twin Cities suburb, said a suspension can send a strong signal to a parent in denial about a student’s issues: “For some families, the only way to truly recognize the severity of a situation is to be inconvenienced by it. When a child is suspended, parents are forced to stop, pay attention and take action.”

But parent and educator Ali Alowonle told lawmakers that suspension taught her child the wrong lesson. “She was told that she could not come to school because a police officer had to determine if she were a danger,” Alowonle said. “She began to hate school and refused to go. Suspension broke my kid’s trust in school and adults there.”

Parent Susan Montgomery broke down describing her son’s suspension setting off a destructive cycle. “Now, at 20, he is trying to rebuild his life,” she said, pausing to choke back sobs. “He is taking computer class, participating in healing circle, Bible study, working as a janitor and attending recovery groups — but all behind bars.”

However and whenever lawmakers vote on the bills — they may be standalone legislation or wrapped into an omnibus spending package – they will resurface longstanding racial and demographic divides.

Minnesota has long had nation-leading racial disparities in education, with a teacher corps that is more than 90% white and an increasingly diverse student body. Its schools also have a long history of suspending and expelling non-white students and children with disabilities at much higher rates than their white, nondisabled peers. 

In 2017, the state Department of Human Rights entered into a settlement with 41 school districts and charter schools that were found to have suspended and expelled non-white children and those with disabilities at disproportionate rates. A 2022 from Solutions Not Suspensions, a coalition of advocacy groups that has campaigned for 10 years for laws requiring schools to stop disciplinary practices, found that children of color received 79% of exclusionary discipline despite being 49% of the student body during the 2018-19 school year. Children with disabilities made up 14% of students but received 43% of suspensions and expulsions. 

The agency noted that when the reason for discipline was subjective — e.g. “disruptive behavior” or “verbal abuse,” versus bringing a weapon to school — the disproportionality skyrocketed.  

Armed with these numbers, advocates got a break in 2023, when Democrats gained power in both legislative chambers and the governor’s office. They enacted laws outlawing the use of dangerous prone restraints by police officers stationed in schools and dramatically narrowed schools’ authority to dismiss children. 

But limits on police authority in the wake of Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis officer had divided Minnesotans along both partisan and geographic lines, with city residents saying they were long overdue and rural residents largely opposed. In 2024, with an election looming and the support of rural Democrats feared to be softening, the Democratic-majority legislature reversed the ban on prone restraints.

The 2024 election left the state House evenly split, with equal numbers of lawmakers from each party set to take office. The late discovery that a Democrat did not actually live in the district where he was elected gave Republicans a one-vote majority until a March 11 special election likely restores the 67-67 split. They immediately started working to try to roll back policies enacted by the Democrats in 2023 and 2024.

Support for the discipline reforms passed in 2023 had been weak among rural Democrats. Now, advocates fear that the rollbacks being proposed by the Republicans could clear the state Senate, which has a one-vote Democratic majority. Advocates fear Democratic Gov. Tim Walz would not veto the measures. 

Kate Lynn Snyder is a lobbyist for Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union. Speaking in opposition to the changes, she reminded lawmakers that it is still legal for teachers to remove students from classrooms. Schools can send children home for less than a day, impose an in-school suspension or send a child to a sensory break room. When there is an ongoing, serious safety threat, expulsion is still possible.

“The largest complaint I hear about school safety from my members is that when our teachers call administrators to send someone to their office, no one is answering the phone,” she said. “That might be because of the perception that their hands are tied, or it might be because of the educator shortage, but either way teachers, like students, are not getting the currently allowed supports that they’re asking for.”

The state Department of Education also opposes the changes. At the hearing, lobbyist Adosh Unni described resources the agency has made available to schools interested in changing their approach to discipline.  

Matt Shaver, a former teacher who is policy director of the advocacy group EdAllies, urged lawmakers not to return to allowing schools to withhold or delay lunch or recess because of a student’s behavior.

“I took a lot of recess away from kids during my decade in the classroom,” he said. “I used this tool when students didn’t finish their homework or worksheets or weren’t focused in class. My line was, if you’re going to be playing during class time, you’ll do class time during your play time. I thought I was pretty clever and delivering consistent logical consequences that would teach the behaviors I wanted to see for my students. In hindsight, I was wrong.

“This wasn’t an effective tool because the same kids missed recess over and over,” he continued. “Instead of keeping a kid inside for a punishment, my time with them would have been much better spent on the playground building that relationship that would have made it more likely for them to respect and listen to me as their teacher.”

Now, however, some advocates say they fear that the task force’s law enforcement majority wants to shut down discussion of the issues at the core of the raging debate over the perils of stationing cops in schools. 

At the task force’s first meeting, in June, the executive director of the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training announced that the group would not discuss prone restraints or use of force, says Khulia Pringle, the task force member who represents Solutions Not Suspensions. Her coalition consists of community groups including disability and racial equity advocates.

“He said, ‘This is not a philosophical debate and we are not going to go beyond the substance of the statute,’ ” Pringle quoted Erik Misselt as saying. “I thought for sure we would get into the weeds of what we were there for.”

The board, which licenses law enforcement officers, is responsible for overseeing development of the model policy. 

The , Pringle and other advocates say, requires the committee to address a number of issues pertaining to the use of school resource officers, whose campus presence dramatically increases student arrests. They believed the model policy — to be adopted by law enforcement agencies whose officers work in schools — would specify when police can act in schools and lay out alternatives to the use of force.

The task force is scheduled to hold the second of four planned meetings July 18 and to agree on a finished model policy in mid-September. So far, members of the group have been given little research on policies guiding police presence in schools, causing some advocates to fear the end product won’t reflect best practices.

“The public was told this was sorted out, that children would be protected by a model policy,” says Erin Sandsmark, another Solutions Not Suspensions leader. “To say you can’t do the job without holding a child face-down in a dangerous hold seems extreme to us.” 

By law, the task force had to include representatives of the police licensing board and five other law enforcement organizations, four statewide education organizations and three community groups — one of them representing special education students. Maren Christenson, executive director of the Multicultural Autism Action Network — one of two disability-focused organizations in the Solutions Not Suspensions coalition — is concerned about the lack of representation for the students most impacted.

“We know who is on the receiving end of most types of disciplinary actions in schools,” she says, “especially students of color with disabilities. Limiting their representation in this discussion doesn’t help.”

The U.S. Department of Education has called for banning prone restraints, and the Justice Department in 2022 issued for in-school policing. 

More recently, the Government Accountability Office released research that draws on federal arrest data, which revealed dramatic disparities by race, gender and disability status. At schools where police are stationed, teachers and administrators often call on them to deal with student misbehavior, the report notes, dramatically ratcheting up arrest rates. 

In the wake of Floyd’s 2020 murder, numerous districts throughout the country — including Minneapolis — stopped stationing police in schools. In 2023, Minnesota lawmakers banned the use of in-school prone restraints altogether. 

But with election year politics already in play, in-school policing remained a red-hot topic. Although they control the state House of Representatives, state Senate and governorship, Minnesota Democrats have straddled a rural-urban divide on policing since Floyd’s death. After in-school prone restraints were outlawed, at least 16 suburban and rural law enforcement agencies pulled officers out of schools, arguing that they could not work if they were not allowed to use the holds. 

Fearing the controversy would cost the party seats in November, this year Democrats stripped the ban from state law but added detailed requirements regarding training, data collection and the creation of a model policy. Among other things, the law says the policy must prohibit calling on cops to enforce school rules or assist educators with discipline; specify de-escalation techniques and other alternatives to the use of force; create a timeline for school resource officers to complete extensive, new training on juvenile issues also called for under the law; and protect student data. 

Debate during the legislative session was hampered by a near-total lack of data on police presence in Minnesota schools. No one tracks how many school systems have contracts with law enforcement agencies, how many officers are stationed in schools and how often they intervene with students — much less which ones and why.

“Reporters kept asking, ‘Do you know how many kids are restrained?’ ” says Pringle, the only person of color on the task force. “And [lawmakers] kept saying, ‘That’s one of the things we will now know.’ ”

It’s not clear to her or other advocates present at the group’s first meeting if data will be collected or whether any agency will track law enforcement contracts with school systems.

Disability advocates nationwide for years have campaigned to outlaw prone restraints, which were linked to between 1993 and 2018. In 2015, Minnesota passed a law prohibiting school staff from using the hold and requiring education and school leaders to reduce other types of physical holds and seclusion, which are used disproportionately on children with disabilities. 

Though COVID-related school closures skew the data, the use of physical restraints involving students with disabilities in schools fell from 19,000 in the 2017-18 school year to some 10,000 in 2021-22. Black and Native American children are disproportionately likely to experience restraint, as are autistic students and those with emotional behavioral disorders. 

In preparation for the July 18 meeting, participants were asked to submit examples of model policies for discussion. Solutions Not Suspensions submitted the only guidance to go beyond the law’s basic scope, according to a meeting preparation packet emailed to participants. Created by the American Civil Liberties Union, it contains detailed information on many of the topics raised by the legislature.

The ACLU document distinguishes between disciplinary misconduct, which should be handled by school staff, and criminal behavior requiring police intervention. School resource officers can’t be called in when a student is disruptive or involved in a fight that doesn’t involve a weapon or result in injury, for example. The rules also require police to collect data on their in-school activities and make it publicly available. 

Other models submitted include a policy drafted by the Minnesota School Boards Association and manuals used by a school system in Georgia that operates its own police department. The Georgia materials do not address prone restraint, instead defining different levels of physical force, ranging from benign redirection to lethal steps. 

Like most school board organizations, the Minnesota association typically creates policies for its members, many of whom serve on boards of districts that are too small to generate their own. So that it can be used in many contexts, this type of model policy is typically very general. simply reiterates the main points of the new state statute without addressing alternative strategies. 

The task force will use the school board policy as a starting point, law enforcement board officials said in an email sent to members along with an agenda for their July meeting. The group is supposed to have a finished model policy by September, after which the law enforcement board will decide whether to adopt it. 

In an emailed response to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s request for comment about advocates’ concerns, Misselt wrote, “All members of the working group have the opportunity to discuss their opinions and viewpoints during the meetings and all participants are expected to do so.” 

Lawmakers who voted both for and against allowing police to use prone restraints said they have not yet received updates on the development of the model policy and thus can’t comment. Disability advocates said they expect several legislators will be present at the task force’s next meeting.

In the end, Pringle is concerned that the task force won’t have time to come up with a nuanced recommendation. “I’m just confused as to how in the world this is supposed to work,” she says. “It feels like whatever happens in this model policy is going to be focused on the adults.”

The found that when “race, gender and disability statuses overlap” — a concept often known as intersectionality — students “can experience even greater adverse consequences.”

“Race, gender and disability all figure prominently when it comes to arrests, but they matter differently for different groups of students,” report author Jacqueline Nowicki, the GAO’s director of education, workforce and income security, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

The GAO’s analysis of federal student arrest data found that Black and indigenous students faced school-based arrests at rates two to three times higher than those of their white counterparts. Among demographic groups, the report found, the arrest rate was particularly stark for boys with disabilities.Ìę

Students with disabilities are arrested at higher rates than students of the same gender who did not receive special education services, researchers found, however, Black girls without disabilities are arrested at a greater rate than white girls with disabilities. 

The GAO report adds the latest insight into the ongoing debate over whether police make schools safer or whether their presence feeds the school-to-prison pipeline, particularly for students of color and those with disabilities. After a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd in 2020, some school districts cut ties with their local police agencies in the face of student and community protests. But many of them brought cops back after students returned post-pandemic with heightened mental health and behavioral issues. 

The report, which was mandated by Congress, found that student arrests were particularly high in schools where police officers engaged in routine student discipline — something that education and law enforcement leaders say is outside the scope of how school-based police should function. 

To reach its conclusions, the federal watchdog analyzed recent, pre-pandemic data on student arrests nationally collected by the U.S. Education Department and conducted site visits at three unidentified school districts in California, Maryland and Texas. It was on the site visits that researchers “got a flavor for what it looks like to have police in schools,” Nowicki said. On paper, the officers were not supposed to participate in routine student discipline, like acting out in class, she said, but researchers found that school officials often lacked a clear understanding “of what it means to involve police appropriately.” 

“There were districts that explicitly were not supposed to have police involved in discipline but the police were telling us that teachers and administrators were calling them for discipline issues,” she said. “There’s not necessarily a common or a clear understanding all the time about the roles and responsibilities of police in schools, even in districts that have police.” 

Mo Canady, executive director of the nonprofit National Association of School Resource Officers, said that while school policing models differ in districts across the country, they’re generally trained to refrain from getting involved in student disciplinary incidents. However, he noted that there are no national rules that specify how officers are trained or selected.

“There are national best practices or recommendations, but there are no required national standards,” said Canady, whose group provides training to school-based officers. “I think this speaks more loudly to the lack of national standards than anything else.” 

Research has for years called attention to longstanding racial disparities in student suspensions, expulsions and arrests. In one recent report, researchers found that officers perceived students as more threatening in schools where students of color made up the largest share of enrollment compared to officers who worked at campuses where students were predominantly white. 

Among academic researchers, officers’ role in preventing campus crime and violence is an ongoing question. Another paper found that placing school resource officers on campuses led to a marginal decline in some forms of school violence including fights, and a stark uptick in student disciplinary actions, especially among Black students and those with disabilities. 

In Chicago, the removal of police officers in some of the city’s high schools beginning in 2020 has shown promising results, according to new , which found that taking school cops out of the equation “was significantly related to having fewer high-level discipline infractions.” 

To the GAO’s Nowicki, the gap in arrest rates is unlikely explained by “the idea that police are just responding to significant behavioral incidents more” often in schools with a regular police presence compared to those without one.

“I am not convinced,” she said, “that the answer is, ‘Well, there’s just more crime in schools with police.’ ”

This is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber.ÌęSign up below.

The Minnesota House of Representatives voted 124-8 Monday afternoon to approve legislation that removes a ban on school resource officers using prone restraint on students. The bill now moves to the Senate for consideration.

Nearly four years after George Floyd suffocated to death while being pinned face down to the pavement by a police officer, Minnesota Democrats are fast-tracking legislation that would undo a less-than-year-old ban prohibiting school-based cops from using that same type of restraint on students. 

As early as Monday, the state’s House of Representatives is slated to consider a proposal that presents a drastic departure by Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — rules that explicitly barred school resource officers from using face-down “prone restraint.”

The ban was part of a broader police reform movement that followed Floyd’s murder. The fatal physical hold led to the largest civil rights protest in U.S. history, a national reckoning on racism, policy reforms that sought to address police brutality and, in Minneapolis and dozens of districts nationwide, the removal of sworn officers from school campuses. In Minnesota, new state rules barred police officers from using chokeholds on people and prone restraints were banned in the state’s prisons. 

Now, as the state’s Democrats make a 180-degree turn on the campus reform, education equity advocates have accused state leaders of falling to the political pressure of law enforcement groups ahead of a November election where party lawmakers seek to maintain their narrow majority in the state House. The proposal cleared the House Ways and Means committee earlier this week. 

Physical restraints have for children including injury and, in some cases, death. Yet for Republican lawmakers and law enforcement, the change in Minnesota went a step too far. Police departments statewide pulled their cops from schools in protest of the restraint restriction. 

During a recent Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee hearing, Democratic Sen. Bonnie Westlin, lead sponsor of the Senate version of the bill that would restore prone restraints in schools, presented it less as a backtrack and more as an opportunity. The issue is about ensuring campus cops remain “important team members in our schools,” Westlin said, while creating uniformity across school resource officers’ duties, their training requirements and accountability.  

Along with removing restraint rules for school-based police and campus security staff, the pending legislation would allocate $150,000 this year to develop consistent, statewide training standards for school resource officers and require police to complete the lessons before working on campuses. The bill also seeks to clarify that school-based police officers should not be involved in routine student discipline. 

“When a local community determines that they would like to engage SROs, we want to make sure there is uniformity about expectations for everyone concerned,” Westlin said.

Advocates who lauded the prone restraint ban, however, say that lawmakers have turned their backs on Floyd’s legacy. 

“How is it that — in the state where this man gets killed and the world erupted — that we are not the leading people who are banning this on our kids?” asked advocate Khulia Pringle, the Minnesota director of the National Parents Union and a steering committee member of the Solutions Not Suspensions Coalition, a group of education nonprofits that has lobbied against the legislation. “It’s banned in prisons, it’s banned for students with disabilities. 

“Why can’t we extend that same courtesy to all children?” 

The ‘fix’

Presented by Democratic leaders as an “SRO fix” bill, the proposal comes after police departments got wind of the restraint ban last fall — an under-the-radar change in a larger education bill that passed without opposition. In response, about 40 law enforcement agencies removed their school resource officers from campuses. 

, school resource officers and campus security personnel are prohibited from using face-down prone restraints and “certain physical holds,” including those that restrict or impair “a pupil’s ability to breathe” or their “ability to communicate distress.” 

The ban represented an extension of state rules that have been on the books for years. In 2015, after that “it is only a matter of time before a Minnesota child is seriously injured or killed while in prone restraint,” lawmakers banned educators from using the technique on children with disabilities. Nationally, that curtail educators from using prone restraints and other tactics that restrict students’ breathing. 

In Washington, D.C., Democratic lawmakers have sought for years to pass . Nationally, about 35,000 students were placed in physical restraints at school during the 2020-21 school year, from the Education Department’s civil rights office. Black students represented 15% of K-12 school enrollment and 21% of those placed in physical holds. Meanwhile, students with disabilities represented 14% of the national enrollment — and 81% of those subjected to restraints. 

After the new changes were put in place in Minnesota and students returned to classes last fall, law enforcement agencies argued it stirred confusion among their ranks, opened their departments to lawsuits and tied their officers’ hands in how they work to keep schools safe and combat crimes like vandalism. Republican lawmakers seized on the furor and demanded a special legislative session to repeal the law. 

The Coon Rapids Police Department, located in a northern Minneapolis suburb, is among the agencies that removed its officers from schools. That decision was reversed and the agency’s four campus cops after the state attorney general issued a clarification on the law’s limits. The school resource officer program was put on hold temporarily last fall in part because of how officers are trained to do their jobs, Captain of Investigations Tanya Harmoning told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. She said she wasn’t sure how often prone restraint had been used by her officers inside schools. Regardless of whether an officer is stationed inside a school building or on a city street, she said, they “are all trained in the same tactics.” 

“Our officers are trained a certain way to handle certain situations,” she said. “Some of these people transition back out onto the road, so to expect them to transition from ‘you can do it here, but you can’t do it here,’ kind of thing, that’s just not how we train our people.”

In last fall, Attorney General Keith Ellison clarified that the ban didn’t restrict officers from using prone restraints in cases involving imminent harm or death, which offered assurances to many law enforcement agencies that agreed to return officers to schools. 

The special session that Republicans and police brass demanded didn’t come to fruition but the issue has become a top priority this year for Gov. Walz and his Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which controls both chambers of the state legislature. 

State officials and education leaders have sought to frame the debate as being not about prone restraint, but rather the need to get police back in schools. 

‘The voices of all stakeholders’

When Democratic Rep. Cedrick Frazier appeared before the House Education Policy Committee in mid-February, he acknowledged the timing of his testimony: “We are not far removed,” he said, “from the tragic murder of George Floyd.” 

He pivoted to a state law passed in response that banned police from using chokeholds — rules that he said were critical to their discussions about school-based police. With the chokehold ban in place, he suggested the prone restraint prohibition was unnecessary. 

“The tension and anxiety that has been discussed, in large part, stems from the egregious visual of that tragic day,” Frazier testified. But even without a ban on prone restraints, he said that state law would continue to prohibit school-based officers from pinning students to the ground in ways that restrict breathing.

“Our only focus must be doing everything we can to ensure that while our young people are in our schools, that we ensure that their environment is safe from any type of harm,” Frazier said. “We must ensure our young people have the best environment to have the best possible outcomes.” 

His testimony didn’t explicitly touch on prone restraints or why police needed greater autonomy around their use in classrooms. Representatives for Frazier and the governor didn’t respond to requests for comment and state Sen. Westlin’s office declined an interview request. 

In his testimony, Education Commissioner Willie Jett focused on schools’ need for campus police officers and the bill’s new training requirements. He, too, didn’t touch specifically on restraint procedures. 

“SROs are viewed by many as essential to maintaining safe and secure learning environments and data from the tells us that an overwhelming majority of students from all demographic areas value the SROs in their schools,” Jett said. 

In Minnesota, state education officials have sought to reduce schools’ reliance on restraint tactics for years. The reveal that students with disabilities were subjected to more than 10,000 physical restraints during the 2021-22 school year, with such holds disproportionately used on Black and Indigenous students. Frequently, , these holds result in injuries — and more often for adults than children. During the 2021-22 school year, districts reported 733 staff injuries from placing students in restraints — a rate that equates to about one staff injury for every 14 physical holds. That same year, 161 students were reported injured.  

Frazier’s work leading the reform bill appears to be at odds with his broader championing of policing and public safety. After Floyd’s murder, Frazier became known in the state as in favor or progressive police reforms, often drawing on his personal experiences with inequities growing up as a Black teen on Chicago’s South Side. In September, as police agencies statewide began pulling officers from schools, Frazier signaled his support for the new prone restraint ban. The House People of Color and Indigenous Caucus, which Frazier co-chairs, released a statement expressing that same sentiment.

“The provision in the education bill passed earlier this year related to school personnel is clear: School staff, including school resource officers, are not allowed to use prone restraints,” or other holds that restrict a student’s ability to breathe, the caucus wrote in the statement, which bore Frazier’s name. Given the attorney general’s opinion extending SROs’ authority to restrain kids in serious cases, the group wrote, “changes to the law are not needed.”

In Republican’s unsuccessful bid to force a special legislative session, they found common ground with Education Minnesota, the state teacher’s union, which noted that on how to protect themselves and students during potentially dangerous situations. In 2021, union spokesperson Chris Williams told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ the group was concerned about “the ongoing racial disparities that we know exist in the use of restrictive procedures,” and noted support for rules that prohibited prone restraint in classrooms. 

Williams didn’t respond to a list of questions about the pending legislation introduced by Frazier who, along with being a state representative, works as a . 

‘Prone kills kids’

When Matt Shaver testified at the House education committee last month, he opened with a grim warning: “Prone kills kids.”

“We are advocates for kids — and prone kills kids,” said Shaver, the policy director of the nonprofit EdAllies, which is a member of the Solutions Not Suspensions Coalition working to maintain the current prone restraint ban. “This is not about whether SROs belong in schools,” as lawmakers and state education officials have cast the conversation, he said. “This is about whether we believe holds that kill children belong in school.” 

Shaver cited which examined childhood fatalities that stemmed from physical restraints over a 26-year period. Researchers identified 79 incidents where restraints led to deaths in settings including foster homes, psychiatric agencies and schools. Deaths were most common when children were held in the face-down prone restraints — and most often for benign childhood behaviors like failing to remain silent or sit without wriggling. Investigations into the fatalities found that adults routinely failed to follow proper restraint policies and laws. 

“In 15 fatalities, children vomited, urinated or turned blue during the restraint,” researchers concluded in the 2021 study, which was published in the academic journal Child & Youth Care Forum. “These signals should have been detected by an adult monitoring these events and immediately triggered a change in tactics or discontinuation of the restraint.”

Shaver told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ he believes the Democrats are reacting to the politics of the police “work stoppage” and a desire not to appear soft on crime ahead of the November election. That has placed them in the position, he said, of wanting to overturn the restraint restriction, but “not in a way that will freak out their base.” 

“They may have failed at doing that,” Shaver said.

Nearly 44% of public K-12 schools were staffed with school resource officers at least once a week during the 2021-22 school year, by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. Between Floyd’s murder in May 2020 and June 2022, ended their school resource officer programs or cut their budgets following widespread Black Lives Matter protests and concerns that campus policing has detrimental effects on students — and Black youth in particular. 

The data reflect an 11% decrease in school policing from the 2019-20 school year, when more than 49% of schools had a regular police presence, according to the nationally representative federal survey. That year, schools underwent an increase in campus policing after the 2018 mass school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, prompted a surge in new security funding and mandates, a pattern that could repeat itself when future federal numbers capture the nation’s reaction to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“This is the George Floyd effect,” said criminal justice researcher Shawn Bushway, who pulled up a calculator during a telephone interview with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and crunched the federal survey data against that removed cops from their buildings, which collectively served more than 1.7 million students. 

“It’s not seismic, but I think what’s most interesting about it is that it’s the reversal of a trend in a fairly dramatic way,” said Bushway, a University at Albany in New York professor. “It’s been going up quite a bit and now it’s dropped.”

The new federal data were published the same week as Thursday’s release of a damning U.S. Department of Justice report that cited “critical failures” by police during the May 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. During the shooting, 376 law enforcement officers responded to the scene but waited more than an hour to confront the 18-year-old shooter, a botched reaction that disregarded established police protocols and, investigators said, cost lives.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in Uvalde.

“Their loved ones deserved better,” he said. 

Chris Chapman, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said on a press call Tuesday that the survey data didn’t make clear a definitive reason for the decline in school-based officers. Experts said that several other factors, including campus closures during the pandemic, budget constraints and a national police officer shortage, may have also contributed. 

Either way, the downward trend may be short-lived. 

Multiple districts that cut their school resource officer programs after Floyd’s murder, including those in Denver, Colorado, and Arlington, Virginia, reversed course after educators reported an uptick in classroom disorder after COVID-era remote learning. Mass school shootings have long driven efforts to bolster campus policing, a reality that has played out in the last several years as the nation experienced an unprecedented number of such attacks. 

Despite officers’ grievously mishandled response in Uvalde, the shooting led to renewed efforts in Texas and elsewhere to strengthen police presence in schools. A similar situation played out after the mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Federal data show national growth in campus policing even after the school resource officer assigned to the Broward County campus failed to confront the gunman, who killed 17 people. 

The now-former officer, Scot Peterson, was acquitted of criminal negligence and perjury charges but faces a new trial in a civil lawsuit by shooting victims’ families, who allege his failure to intervene during the six-minute attack displayed a “wanton and willful disregard” for students’ and teachers’ safety. Qualified immunity generally protects officers from liability for mistakes made on the job. 

After Parkland, a new Florida law required an armed security presence on every K-12 campus. The Uvalde shooting led to similar . In both states, a police officer labor shortage, which experts said may have contributed to the 2021-22 decline in schools, has hindered officials’ efforts to comply. In Kentucky, more than 40% of schools lack school resource officers, a reality that school officials have blamed on a lack of funding and a depleted applicant pool. 

“It wouldn’t surprise me if, when that data comes back out, we see that spike go back up,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which offers a training program for campus cops. “It’s not the way I want to gain business, but some of the busiest years we’ve had training wise are 18 months after a school massacre. I can tell you that 2019 was the biggest year in our association’s history by far — and that’s coming right off the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.”

Advocates for police-free schools recognize the headwinds they face. Tyler Whittenberg, the deputy director of the Advancement Project’s Opportunity to Learn initiative, said that while advocates “are proud of the victories that were won” after George Floyd’s murder, educators who removed police from schools “are fighting really hard to hold onto those gains,” some of which face in districts that don’t want them. 

“We’re not really rushing to a conclusion that this represents an overall reduction in police in schools, especially because for many of our partners on the ground this is not their day-to-day experience,” he said. “They’re having to fight back — especially at the state level — against efforts to increase the number of police in their schools.” 

Safety threats on the decline

In the 1970s, just 1% of schools were staffed by police. Decades of efforts since then to swell their ranks have coincided with a marked improvement in campus safety. 

During the 2021-22 school year, 67% of schools reported at least one violent crime on campus, totaling some 857,500 violent incidents. Federal data show the nation’s schools experienced a violent crime rate of 18 incidents per 1,000 students in 2021-22. That’s a steep decline from 1999-00, when schools recorded a violent crime rate of 32 incidents per 1,000, and 2009-10, when the violent crime rate was 25 per 1,000. 

Police officers’ contributions to making schools safer over the past two decades, however, remain the subject of ongoing research and heated debate. In a study last year, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Bushway and his colleagues found that placing . And although researchers were unable to analyze officers’ effects on mass school shootings because such tragedies are statistically rare, they were associated with an uptick in reported firearm offenses — suggesting an increased detection of guns. The officers were also associated with a stark uptick in student disciplinary actions, including suspensions and arrests, particularly among Black students and those with disabilities. 

“There’s a cost-benefit here and everybody’s calculus on how you weigh these different things is going to be different,” Bushway said. “There’s no pure answer to that question, different people are going to answer that question differently.”

Previous research suggests that suspensions or improve school safety, but have detrimental effects on punished students’ academic performance, attendance and behavior. Their effects on non-misbehaving students remain unclear. 

Other researchers have reached a much more critical conclusion about the effects of school-based police on students. In in November on the existing literature into school officers’ efficacy, researchers failed to identify evidence that school-based law enforcement promoted safety in schools but reinforced concerns that their presence “criminalizes students and schools.” 

“I think the evidence is increasingly supporting the notion that police don’t belong in schools,” report author Ben Fisher, an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Removing officers who have been there for years, he said, may cause problems of its own. “If we’re going to get police out of schools, which I think is the right long-term vision and short-term vision, I think we need to do it thoughtfully with plans in place to make schools welcoming and supportive.” 

The federal survey, which was conducted between Feb. 15 and July 19, 2022, also found large geographical differences in the types of tools that school-based police use on the job. Across the board, officers in urban areas were less likely than their rural and suburban counterparts to carry guns and pepper spray or to be equipped with body-worn cameras. 

Beyond data on campus policing, the new federal survey offers a comprehensive look at the state of campus safety and security, reflecting school leaders’ responses to the pandemic and record numbers of mass school shootings. Other findings include: 

• In 2021-22, about 49% of schools provided diagnostic mental health assessments to evaluate students for mental health disorders. This is a decline from 2019-20, when 55% conducted assessments. Meanwhile, 38% provided students with treatments for mental health disorders in 2021-22, down from 42% in 2019-20. 

• Restorative justice, a conflict resolution technique, was used in 59% of schools in 2021-22, which was similar to 2019-20 but an increase from the 42% that used the approach in 2017-18. 

• The latest data indicate a decline in campus drug and alcohol incidents. In 2021-22, 71% of schools reported at least one incident involving the distribution, possession or use of illegal drugs, down from 77% in 2019-20. Meanwhile, 34% reported at least one alcohol-related incident in 2021-22, down from 41% in 2019-20. 

And while the controversy surrounding the issue hasn’t changed, the pandemic offers up a troubling new context: Districts are reporting spikes in , violent attacks on school employees and blatant disregard for school rules.

“There is certainly a much higher level of dysregulation in our kids,” said Rico Munn, superintendent of the Aurora Public Schools in Colorado. He added that educators usually expect students to fall into a routine and follow rules by September. “We weren’t hitting that until spring break.”

The education department is expected to update its policy in two parts. One will focus on students with disabilities, who are significantly to be suspended and expelled than non-disabled students. The other will address racial gaps in discipline — a reality that persists in many districts despite over the past decade to keep students from being removed from school and often referred to police.

Advocates for students’ educational rights are eager for the department to make a strong statement against discipline that keeps students out of the classroom.

“Discipline is inherently an authoritative tool used to punish students for being what an adult has decided is disobedient,” said Denise Stile Marshall, president of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, which focuses on the rights of students with disabilities. “There is a lot of research on this, but simply put, punitive school discipline does not improve student behavior or academic achievement.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s not accidental. The person leading the department’s effort is Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary at the Office for Civil Rights, the same position she held under President Barack Obama. Seth Galanter, who worked with Lhamon during the Obama years, has also returned to the civil rights office after four years at the National Center for Youth Law.

In 2014, the Obama administration issued a saying that schools where Black and Hispanic students were disproportionately removed for disciplinary reasons could be in violation of federal civil rights laws — even if those students misbehaved at higher rates. 

Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded that guidance in 2018, siding with those who called the move and said it misinterpreted meant to prevent discrimination.

The Biden administration comes to the issue not only more sympathetic to the idea of restorative justice, but in the midst of a pandemic that has seen an increase in student misbehavior. One said student behavior was so “abysmal” that educators were afraid for their safety.

‘A year of disrupted schooling’ 

That’s one reason why Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, that the department should hold off on new guidance, arguing that districts shouldn’t have to fear a federal investigation for removing disruptive students from the classroom. 

The pandemic, he noted, was worse for low-income Black and Hispanic students, who were more likely to attend schools that had been closed longer. 

“The very same students that have more catching up to do after a year of disrupted schooling are also facing the prospect of a more challenging learning environment if schools are hesitant to remove problem students,” he wrote. 

Others say the pandemic shouldn’t interrupt the administration’s efforts to revisit the issue of bias in school discipline.

“It is always a good time to say that racial discrimination is wrong [and] that children with disabilities have the right to be alongside their non-disabled peers,” said Liz King, the senior program director for education at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 

She thinks the guidance should reflect showing police in schools don’t reduce gun violence but do increase suspensions, expulsion and arrests of students — especially for Black students. She wants the department to take a stand against seclusion and restraint of students and “lean in” to the rights of Black and Hispanic girls and LGBTQ students.

Black girls are five times more likely than white girls to be suspended from school at least once and four times more likely to be arrested at school. A 2016 from advocacy group GLSEN found that LGBTQ students are suspended at higher rates than non-LGBTQ students. 

‘Absolutely a dance’

The Obama-era guidance embraced so-called restorative justice practices that aim to give students a chance to build stronger relationships, work out their grievances and make amends for their actions in lieu of suspension. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have passed laws supporting the model, according to the at Georgetown Law School. 

on such programs was mixed, but a more from California showed restorative practices can shrink Black-white discipline disparities and are associated with higher grade point averages in high school.

But “good discipline is very expensive” and hard to implement with the “regular teacher allocation in the school,” said Elliott Duchon, former superintendent of the Jurupa Unified School District, near Los Angeles. 

His district launched a multi-year effort to reduce suspensions and expulsions after federal officials found that Hispanic students were more likely to be suspended than white students.

Los Angeles Unified’s restorative justice program costs $13 million a year, according to the district, and funding for the Oakland district’s program — considered — was almost cut until the city and private funders stepped in to pick up the cost. 

Critics of alternative discipline practices argue the Obama-era guidance created tension between teachers who make discipline referrals and administrators who send students back to class without any consequences.

“It’s absolutely a dance,” said Jacqueline Shirey, at-risk coordinator for the Beaumont Independent School District in Texas. “If we are going to say that students can’t leave, what are we doing to help the teachers?”

With that in mind, Shirey began training teachers last fall to set up “de-escalation” spaces in their classrooms — a desk with a box that includes stress balls, 500-piece puzzles and writing materials. 

“I saw a way for students to learn how to manage their own emotions before it became disruptive, and I didn’t want students to leave my classroom to do that,” she said, but added that ground rules are necessary. “If you don’t implement it with a purpose, then it really does become supplies in a corner that students can play with.”

When students returned last fall, some administrators decided it was important to take a business-as-usual approach to discipline. 

In Nashville, Hunters Lane High School Principal Susan Kessler said her teachers “enforce dress code this year and every year” and that it helps in “maintaining school culture, enforcing building security and reducing distractions in the classroom.”

Other school leaders factored in the impact of school closures on students’ behavior.

Aaron Eyler, principal at Matawan Regional High School in Aberdeen, New Jersey, brought his staff together in September for a frank conversation about what to expect when students returned. 

He told them not to worry about trying to “win the battle” against students wearing hoodies and hats. And he wasn’t surprised to see more of what he referred to as insubordination, like students wearing Airpods and being late to class. The point, he said, was to keep students from missing even more instruction.

“With 
 what happened last year and the lack of consistent structure,” he said, “there was no way we weren’t going to have greater instances of discipline than what we’re accustomed to in school.”

Ronn Nozoe, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said any guidance from the department is likely to “ruffle feathers,” but he added, “You never want to tie the hands of folks who are actually doing the work.”

Viral videos of the incident show disturbing interactions between police and students, one of whom appeared to be a Black male teen who was and as he lay unresponsive on the ground. Some students as the pepper spray filled a school hallway. Another video appeared to show an officer pulling a girl across the hallway by her hair.

The incident at Little Elm High School unfolded during a Friday morning protest after a student claimed on Snapchat that she was sexually harassed by another student on a bus and disciplined for coming forward. On social media, teens at the 8,300-student district accused administrators of mishandling sexual misconduct complaints. A city spokesperson that police mobilized after students acted “aggressively” toward an administrator. 

School resource officers and how they interact with students, particularly students of color, have been under fierce scrutiny since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. Amid national Black Lives Matter protests, dozens of districts ended longstanding ties with school-based officers, although several districts have recently reversed course, citing student safety concerns. 

Andrew Hairston, director of the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy group, called the viral videos “such a harrowing thing to witness,” and accused police of preventing students from checking to see if their classmate was OK as he laid on the floor after getting tasered. 

“The police officers are the violence,” Hairston said. “They are the threat in that video.” 

Two students were arrested for assaulting police officers, Little Elm Mayor Curtis Cornelious . 

“When a third student attempted to interfere with the arrest, the officer was forced to use pepper spray, and then a taser when the student would not stop advancing toward the officer,” he said. “A fourth student spit on an officer, which Texas law deems as an assault.”

In an initial statement on Facebook that was deleted but later reposted, the school district said a student demonstration caused “some students to behave in a way that caused a major disruption.” 

“The demonstration was a result of a social media post the day before that contained inaccurate information regarding an incident that happened a month ago,” the district said in the statement. 

Superintendent Daniel Gallagher said Monday the events leading to Friday’s student demonstration “hits us at the core of who we are and we have to find a way to restore the trust you need in order for all of us to move forward.” In a statement, Gallagher said the district “immediately launched an investigation” after a student made an allegation against a classmate. 

Though no students faced discipline for reporting sexual misconduct, misinformation that claimed otherwise proliferated on social media, he said. 

School and police officials were prepared “to accommodate a peaceful walkout,” but the protest “was not peaceful and caused a major disruption,” Gallagher said. “In one incident — not currently being shown on social media — a large group of students attempted to break into an administrator’s office in pursuit of targeted individuals who were in genuine fear for their safety.” 

Gallagher said school officials will hold a “listening session” on Nov. 30 to allow parents “an opportunity to voice their concerns, thoughts and provide suggestions to the district administration.” He also announced plans to create a committee to review the district’s sexual harassment reporting and investigation process, an “after-action review” of Friday’s clash between students and police and “an independent investigation” into the sexual harassment allegation that led to the student protest. 

Cornelious said the city will review the incident to ensure the officers followed proper police department procedures, but maintained that social media videos often lack necessary content to understand the full situation. 

“Whenever an officer arrests someone who’s acting aggressively or resisting, it’s hard to watch,” Cornelious said. “But Texas law gives police the right to take steps necessary to make an arrest. Those steps include the use of tasers and pepper spray as safe, non-lethal methods of subduing someone who is being aggressive and refusing to respond to requests.” 

Meanwhile, Hairston said the incident should reenergize national efforts to remove police from schools and encouraged Little Elm administrators to display “political courage.” 

“Dozens of districts have taken significant steps toward police divestment but so much more work needs to be done to get police out of schools,” he said. “More and more people are understanding that it’s an irredeemable institution. School policing can’t be reformed.” 

This time, the conversation has centered on an armed Long Beach Unified School District safety officer accused of fatally shooting an unarmed 18-year-old girl as she fled in a car near the high school where he worked. The safety officer was once a police officer, but at the time of the shooting, he was working directly for the school district handling security and did not have the status of a sworn school resource officer employed by the police department and assigned to Long Beach schools. School policing proponents were quick to highlight the distinction and advise educators against arming school staff who lack badges.

But civil rights advocates said said the difference is meaningless and the case reinforces a need to eliminate school security officers who serve police-like functions and carry guns.

After the shooting, the National Association of School Resource Officers sought to set apart school-based police from safety officers, noting in a statement that the trade group “strongly recommends that armed personnel on school campuses” be sworn law enforcement officers who are “carefully selected and specifically trained in school-based policing.” The group, which offers a training course for school resource officers, has advocated for armed officers but opposes policies that allow teachers and other school staff to carry guns — a scenario that is often put forth after mass school shootings.

Mac Hardy, the association’s director of operations and a former school-based officer in Alabama, said the stress of carrying a gun inside a school “took years off of my life.”

“Every day, I put on that gun belt to wear inside the school and knew I was going to be in a school with 3,000 adolescent children and another 200 staff members. It was a lot of pressure,” he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, explaining that he underwent regular firearms training. “It’s a huge responsibility to carry a weapon and we just believe it’s best that a trained law enforcement officer carries the weapon.”

The since-fired Long Beach safety officer, 51-year-old Eddie F. Gonzalez, and charged with murder in the shooting of Manuela “Mona” Rodriguez near Millikan High School a month earlier. Gonzalez was reportedly patrolling an area near the school when he observed a fight between Rodriguez, who was not a student, and a 15-year-old girl. Gonzalez, on the job for less than a year, shot Rodriguez in the head as she rode in the passenger seat of a fleeing car, authorities said. The incident was captured on video and went viral online. The shooting left Rodriguez, the mother of a 6-month-old boy, brain dead and she died Oct. 5. 

The district’s unsworn but armed safety officers are required to complete a 664-hour basic peace officer training academy that includes firearms instruction, district spokesman Chris Eftychiou said. They’re also required to complete a firearms course through the Long Beach Police Department twice per year. Gonzalez was up to date on those requirements at the time of the shooting, Eftychiou said in an email. Officers also receive training in de-escalation techniques, how to work with adolescents and suicide prevention, he said.

Though the school safety officers , they can detain suspects pending a police investigation. Following the shooting, the Long Beach Board of Education voted unanimously to fire Gonzalez for violating the district use-of-force policy. His attorney didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

School policing has been a topic of national discussion since Floyd was murdered in 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, which caused a reckoning on police brutality and led dozens of districts to cut their longstanding ties with police departments. Some districts, including Minneapolis, replaced the officers with unarmed security staff. Some critics have worried, however, that the approach swaps campus police for district officers who serve a similar policing function.

The Long Beach district its school resource officer program in 2020 but local activists have to cut ties with all armed security staff and redirect funding to student support services like counselors.

One Long Beach activist, Najee Ali, told a local newspaper the shooting is a deadly example of the harms of armed safety officers “who are one step above a security guard and don’t have the training of a police officer.” 

“It’s a recipe for disaster,” Ali . “Unfortunately, Mona Rodriguez paid for it with her life. Until Long Beach Unified takes a second look at these flawed policies, we believe there will be another shooting.” 

Eftychiou, the district spokesman, said the school system continually examines its school safety practices and the criminal case against Gonzalez may spur reforms. 

“We have also heard from many community members about what school safety should look like going forward,” he said. “We have, and will continue to provide opportunities to listen and engage in critical discussions with our local community and national experts about safety and well-being.” 

As districts across the country examine police presence in schools, armed security must be part of the discussion, said Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania whose advocacy focuses on campus cops. The national resource officer group’s efforts to draw a line between Gonzalez and campus cops is “patently absurd” because school resource officers and school safety officers are “a distinction without a difference.” Both are required to complete peace officer training, carry guns and have law enforcement duties. 

“The central element of what led to this young woman’s death exists no matter what his job title is,” Jordan said. “He’s able to carry a firearm because he is a school safety officer with probably the most serious power that an officer — sworn or unsworn — can have: That is the power to carry a firearm and discharge a firearm.”

Jordan said that armed officers — whether they work for school districts or as sworn police — shouldn’t be stationed in school full time and should only be called to campuses during rare emergency situations.

“It creates an inherently threatening environment,” he said. “It sends the message that the kids are the problem there and it increases the expectation that something may go wrong in a school.”

Prior to becoming a district safety officer earlier this year, Gonzalez served as a cop with two nearby police departments between January 2019 and July 2020. Details about his departure from those departments remain unclear, but Eftychiou said he passed a district background check that explored issues such as previous excessive use of force, consistently poor judgment and dishonesty.  

Floyd’s murder resulted in some districts cutting ties with police, but another recent tragedy — the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida — led some to bolster the presence of armed security. In Florida, a law required school districts to station at least one armed official, including civilians, on every K-12 campus. Some districts created their own police departments and others hired armed “guardians” without law enforcement backgrounds. Several of them have gotten into trouble involving their official duties. In 2020, was arrested and charged with stashing cocaine inside his vehicle on a high school campus. A year earlier, police accused of pawning his service pistol and body armor for gas money. The allegations came to light following the guardian’s arrest on domestic battery and false imprisonment charges. 

After the Long Beach shooting, retired emergency management specialist Ted Zocco-Hochhalter was among those who sought to distinguish Gonzalez from school resource officers. To him, the issue comes down to mentality. Zocco-Hochhalter’s two children survived the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, but his daughter was left paralyzed after being shot during the rampage. 

Gonzalez previously worked as a police officer, but it’s important not to lump in school resource officers with “rank-and-file police officers,” Zocco-Hochhalter said in an interview. Simply having law enforcement experience shouldn’t be enough to get a job inside a school, he said. Though there are no national training requirements for campus police officers, he said it’s critical that officers receive specialized instruction before working inside schools and must approach the job with a mentality that places mentoring and relationships first. Gonzalez’s decision to fire at the fleeing vehicle, he said, suggests he lacked “the proper mentality going into that job.”

“If his first reaction on a fleeing vehicle like that from the scene of a fight was to fire his weapon, that tells me that he was a rank-and-file law enforcement officer before he became this safety officer,” Zocco-Hochhalter said. “That’s what kicked in instead of trying to de-escalate or call for help.”

The proposal’s defeat by a 12-point margin is likely to carry national implications for the debate over policing and racial justice, including in schools. After a Minneapolis cop killed Floyd in 2020, the city school district ended its longstanding contract with the police department and replaced campus officers with non-sworn “public safety support specialists.” Dozens of school districts nationally took similar action in the aftermath of nationwide protests. Yet, in a whiplash move as students resumed in-person learning, education leaders in and have since voted to bring back the police.

Minneapolis Question 2 — voted down by 56 percent of those who turned out in an — would have amended the city charter to replace the police department with a Department of Public Safety focused on a “comprehensive public health approach,” including an emphasis on mental health — reforms that shared similarities with efforts in the city’s schools. The ballot measure would have removed from the city charter a minimum required number of police officers and the new agency “could include” cops “if necessary.” How the new department would have looked in practice, and the number of police officers it would employ, remained uncertain as voters headed to the polls.

Local parent advocate Khulia Pringle has long fought to remove police from schools but opposed the ballot question, which she noted was divisive among the city’s Black community. A found that white voters were more likely than Black residents to support the ballot question.

Floyd’s murder made police reform politically safe, Pringle said, but reform efforts were led primarily by white progressives who didn’t seek sufficient input from the African-American community before saying, “Hey, we’ve got this great plan for Black folks.”

“A lot of Black folks are pretty woke to when the wool is being pulled over their eyes,” said Pringle, the Minnesota-based representative of the National Parents Union. “They got caught up in the moment and threw something out there that had no plan, no nothing. It was inevitable to fail from the beginning.”

About 44 percent of Minneapolis voters sought to replace its police department, an unprecedented shift that highlights in recent years in support of criminal justice reforms. , Yes 4 Minneapolis communications director JaNaĂ© Bates said her group, which campaigned to get the question on the ballot, has no plans of giving up. 

“We took a lesson today that we need to knock even more doors, that we need to talk to even more neighbors, that we need to bust through the disinformation campaign and the big money that says ‘No’ when we say ‘Yes,’” Bates said.

More measured police reform efforts found success elsewhere during an election cycle generally seen as a win for conservative causes. Voters in Cleveland, Ohio, for example, that gives citizens greater oversight over police misconduct. In Austin, Texas, a proposal to bolster the city’s police force. 

Had Minneapolis residents voted to terminate the police department, the school board may have been more likely to form an alliance with the new public safety agency, Pringle said. But without substantive reforms, board members are not expected to resume the police department contract anytime soon, she said. 

“If it’s the same agency and there’s been no major overhaul,” she said. “I don’t think that Minneapolis Public Schools is going to go back.”

In a recent interview, former Minneapolis school resource officer Charles Adams III said he opposed the ballot question because the city lacked a firm plan for the future. Adams, who left the police department last year after the school district ended its policing contact, was among former school-based officers included in a recent investigation by ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ exposing how many had faced disciplinary actions and allegations of civil rights violations, including police brutality, racial discrimination and domestic violence.

As Minnesota residents reckon with this year, the public safety support specialists who replaced school resource officers are “stretched thin,” said Adams, who remains the football coach at North High School. The school board took a “social political stand” when it ended its policing contract but “jeopardized the safety and the lives of kids in North Minneapolis,” Adams told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. 

“Black lives matter 100 percent,” said Adams, who is Black. “But right now what we’re doing, the crime is destroying our community.”

The Minneapolis school district didn’t respond to a request for comment. Minneapolis Police Department spokesman Garrett Parten said his agency would support future efforts to resume the $1.1 million-a-year school resource officers program. 

The police department “would eagerly continue the program should the opportunity be granted and the resources be available,” Parten said in an email, adding that the former contract offered “a vibrant, vital program that embodied the essence of community-based policing.” 

School district leaders might deny that they’re openly teaching critical race theory, but the nation’s largest teachers union is launching a campaign to have them do just that.

Delegates at the National Education Association’s annual meeting last week a calling for a campaign to implement the theory in curriculum and oppose efforts to ban it. Other items approved include researching organizations “attacking educators doing anti-racist work” and naming Oct. 14 — George Floyd’s birthday — as a national day dedicated to teaching about oppression and structural racism.

On Tuesday, the leader of the nation’s other major teachers union joined the fray. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said critical race theory is not taught in schools, but pledged to back any teachers who address topics the laws seek to exclude from classroom conversations.

“Mark my words: Our union will defend any member who gets in trouble for teaching honest history. We have a legal defense fund ready to go,” she said at the opening of the union’s annual professional development conference. She added that “culture warriors want to deprive students of a robust understanding of our common history.”

It’s unclear whether the NEA is encouraging members in states that have already passed anti-critical race theory legislation to violate the law. At the very least, it is arguing that teachers shouldn’t gloss over “unpleasant aspects of American history” according to the union’s adopted statement.

The theory — bitterly dividing communities across the country — teaches that racism is an integral part of U.S. systems and institutions that purposely disadvantage people of color. The unions’ stance comes as nine states have already banned instruction that references structural racism, white supremacy and other key principles of the theory. More than 20 other states have considered similar bills.

The union was “forced to some extent” to enter the fray because of how volatile the debate has become, said Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Their members, particularly those who wish to instruct on elements of critical race theory, want to know that they have a union behind them if their jobs are jeopardized by their classroom instruction,” he said. “This is not a new role for teachers’ unions in the broadest terms but is also somewhat unique in that this one is tied so tightly to instruction informed by a single theory.”

Like the conflict over reopening schools, the clash over critical race theory is pitting parents who want a say in what schools teach against unions seeking to protect teachers’ autonomy, Marianno said, adding that they “will continue to butt heads throughout this school year.”

Weingarten, in fact, predicted that this coming school year could be even more challenging than the last.

“It won’t be easy, and some people will try to make it harder, like those who have disparaged educators, scapegoated our unions and blamed us for things outside our control, like school closures caused by a pandemic,” she said.

Marianno said the NEA’s action could be an effort to preempt any further bans on instruction related to critical race theory, but that the union has also “opened up the avenue for litigation” in the nine states with existing restrictions.

Not all teachers, however, agree with the focus on race and racial oppression in the classroom. The conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation is representing a Chicago-area teacher in , filed last week, that argues antiracist training for teachers and students is unconstitutional. Stacy Deemar, a middle school drama teacher, argues that the Evanston/Skokie School District 65 is violating prohibitions on discrimination by race, color or national origin. According to the lawsuit, the district has organized both teachers and students into racial “affinity groups” and required them to participate in “privilege walks” where they are segregated by color.

Meanwhile, teachers are receiving increasing support from civil rights groups, who are drawing comparisons between the current uproar over critical race theory and the struggles of the 1960s. One group, the , a nonprofit seeking to preserve the history of a student-led organization that participated in the civil rights movement, penned an open letter to teachers.

“We who resisted the laws of segregation by sitting at ‘White Only’ lunch counters, and organized voter registration campaigns among those historically denied the right to vote, stand now in support of those teachers and professors who today defy this new form of McCarthyism by pledging to continue writing, speaking, and teaching about systemic racism, structural inequality, and institutionalized white-supremacy past and present,” the letter said. “To all the courageous teachers who won’t back down from teaching their students the truth, we stand with you.”

Editor’s note: Reporting for this story was based partly on “business items” that the National Education Association passed at its annual meeting last week, but which no longer appear to be on the union’s website.

An item referring to critical race theory in curriculum appeared under prior to its approval and reads that the union will support and lead a campaign that results “in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, Critical Race Theory, and Ethnic (Native People, Asian, Black, Latin(o/a/x), Middle Eastern and North African, and Pacific Islander) Studies curriculum in Pre-K-12 and higher education.” The news of its passage also no longer appears to be on the union’s website, but was .

As our country wrestles with the murder of George Floyd, Daunte White and far too many other Black individuals at the hands of white police officers, as a public school educator, I wrestle with how to help my fourth-grade students make sense of the violence they see being perpetrated against people who look like them.

I teach at Rocketship Rise Academy, an elementary charter public school east of the river in Washington D.C., where 98 percent of our students are Black and 83 percent are at-risk. At Rocketship, we believe in the potential of all students, and our school is intentionally designed to help our students understand their value. One way we do that is by giving them what we call windows and mirrors. We give them mirrors with a teaching staff that looks like them and understands them — 86 percent of our staff are educators of color. And we give them windows by helping them envision a life beyond what they currently know, while celebrating their culture and community.

For my students, the trauma of police brutality stretches beyond high-profile incidents that they see in the news and on social media. In their own daily lives, my students struggle with the dissonance between being told that the police are trusted adults, while already having witnessed — despite their young age — countless examples of the police mistreating their family, friends and neighbors.

It’s the ultimate responsibility of our public education system to prepare students to be engaged and informed citizens. Our democracy literally depends on it. For that reason, understanding modern society through the context of history should be a critical part of every student’s education.

But the same structures of systemic racism that have made the type of police accountability we saw with the Derek Chauvin trial incredibly rare have also allowed the history books and social studies curriculum that are mass produced for use in public education to be told, almost exclusively, through a white, male lens. History stories often treat the white actors kindly, while failing to recognize the contributions of African-Americans or actions that have undermined their well-being. We can’t teach Black students how to become active citizens if we’re not giving them a true understanding of how 400 years of history has shaped their lives today.

So last summer, as protests against racial injustice spread throughout the country following the murder of George Floyd, our school community felt the pain of this injustice deeply — and we knew we needed to do more. Our school principal asked me to develop our own social studies curriculum. We call it Seeds of Civil Power.

The idea is that we are planting the seeds of a civic education for students so they will one day be able to convert that understanding into power. The definition of “civil” is, “relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns.” But since history is rarely taught in a way that relates to ordinary citizens and their concerns, our public education system is preventing the masses from truly being empowered. While elementary students may not fully embody the learning that they’ll need to change society, we can at least plant the seeds. We’re doing this by helping them learn, think about and question the world around them.

The curriculum is designed as a series of five units, starting with a study of community and how our students fit in. The units build on each other. After community, the units cover culture, economics, government and activism, all through the lens of the Black experience. Too often, students are taught history and culture as something that only happens to others — that was definitely my experience growing up. I was never made to feel, as a Black person, as an American, that I had a culture. I want my students to understand that their lives as Black people are part of a rich, historic culture that’s worth studying.

Lessons are implemented once a week, during our regular community meeting time. Each lesson involves both discussion- and project-based learning, and includes a series of guiding questions that open the floor to discussion on the topic we’re exploring in depth that week. This format is designed to encourage critical thinking, so students can reflect on their own experiences as well as information about societal structures and the experiences of others, and begin to envision how they can influence the world in which they live.

Some of the first lessons were about family structure. We looked at the history of families in the African-American community and discussed how they are similar and different today as compared to the 1800s, when many Black people in our country were enslaved.

Part of the discussion included students sharing what their own families look like. One student, who I know lives with his single mom, intentionally misstated that his dad lives with him as well. We discussed that there’s no right or wrong family structure, despite what the dominant narrative in society tells us, and by the end of the lesson, the student felt confident in sharing with the group that he actually just lives with his mom. He may not even realize it, but his perspective about himself changed that day.

By design, the curriculum we’ve developed is equal parts social studies and social-emotional learning. If we start by getting students to think of themselves as social beings within a specific culture, we’re not only improving how they view themselves, we’re also laying a foundation for them to understand and accept other cultures. Most importantly, they begin to understand that all cultures and societies have been shaped by individuals throughout history, and it’s something they can work to shape, as well.

Seeds of Civil Power in its current form is really just the beginning of what it can be, and where I hope to take it. All students should be learning history and civics through a variety of perspectives. But for now, at our elementary school, our Black students are seeing themselves in these lessons and, therefore, know that they matter.

Riah Williams is a fourth-grade humanities teacher at Rocketship Rise Academy in Washington, D.C. 

This story is published in partnership with

A jury found Derek Chauvin guilty of murder on Tuesday following a closely watched trial that centered on the former Minneapolis police officer’s use of physical restraint that prosecutors said killed George Floyd.

Now, the brutal manner of Floyd’s death is highlighting how the practice of restraining children with similar techniques remains commonplace in Minnesota schools — and in districts across the country.

Even though state policymakers have worked for years to reduce the prevalence of “physical holds” in Minnesota schools — including a on the face-to-the-ground “prone restraint” used against Floyd — educators employ the tactic thousands of times each year to subdue students, state and federal data show. Such restraints often come with devastating consequences for children including injury and, in rare cases, death.

Floyd died after being restrained for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, with shocking video of the murder spurring massive national protests and a painful, ongoing debate over police brutality, particularly against Black Americans, who are disproportionately subjected to officers’ use of force. But it also calls out the need for rules that curtail the use of restraint in schools, said Lauren Morando Rhim, co-founder and executive director of The Center for Learner Equity, a national nonprofit focused on improving educational outcomes for children with disabilities.

“We know it’s happening, we know it’s happening more than we’re aware of, and we know that children are dying as well.” —Lauren Morando Rhim, co-founder and executive director, The Center for Learner Equity

Pending state and federal legislation would place new restrictions on schools’ ability to restrain students, including a Minnesota provision that would explicitly prohibit school-based police, who are not typically district employees, from placing students in a “prone restraint,” a change officials said was a direct response to Floyd’s death. While some education leaders have long held that physical restraint is critical in dire emergency situations, critics say the practice is used as a routine discipline tool, especially against Black children, and have called for a complete ban.

Distinguishing prone restraint from other physical holds, Morando Rhim said, is “like splitting hairs.”

“Restraint is a problem across the board and we shouldn’t be surprised that we’re seeing it in schools if we’re seeing it among trained police officers that are not able to de-escalate [situations] and they end up restraining and killing people,” she said. And unlike the millions of people who watched the video of Chauvin press his knee into Floyd’s neck, the use of restraint in schools, she said, often goes under the radar.

“We know it’s happening, we know it’s happening more than we’re aware of, and we know that children are dying as well.”

Even as the pandemic shuttered schools nationwide last spring, more than 2,800 students were subjected to more than 12,600 instances of physical restraint during the 2019-20 school year, according to . That’s a significant 25 percent drop from the year prior, which state education officials believe is due in large part to campus closures during COVID-19, but also recent statewide efforts to reduce educators’ reliance on the practice, training them instead how to de-escalate conflicts using preventative techniques, like .

Yet the use of restraint remains far too common in Minnesota schools, said Daron Korte, the state assistant commissioner of education who oversees the office of student support services.

“Schools don’t want their staff using restrictive procedures” like physical restraint that could open them up to legal liability if a student or teacher gets injured, he said. But as state officials urge districts to reduce their use of restraint, he said it’s critical that they’re given other tools to manage student behaviors or else “they’re going to be relying on law enforcement for those interventions more often, which is the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish here.”

Korte acknowledged that while restraint is supposed to be a last-ditch effort in emergency situations where the student is at risk of hurting themselves or others, school disruptions that fall under that umbrella are “always open to interpretation.”

Mirroring national trends that have existed for years, students of color, and Black boys in particular, are disproportionately subjected to restraint in Minnesota schools, according to state data. White students represent 63 percent of the special education population and 52 percent of those restrained, while 11.8 percent of special education students are Black but they account for 27 percent of those subjected to physical holds.

The years-long racial disparities in student restraint, Morando Rhim of The Center for Learner Equity said, highlights the fact that “racial bias and institutional racism is very real.”

“The level of comfort that we have systematically with restraining and discriminating against Black boys, in particular, is a symptom of a huge problem,” she said.

Minnesota schools are currently only required to report to state officials their use of restraint on children with disabilities, but federal education data, which includes all students, highlight how children in special education are disproportionately subjected to physical holds. Students with specific disabilities bear the brunt of such measures. Children with emotional or behavioral disorders represented 11 percent of Minnesota’s special education population last year but account for 47 percent of students subjected to restraints. Similarly, children with autism were 14 percent of the special education population, but 25 percent of those restrained.

Nationally, in the 2017-18 school year, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. That year, more than 2,400 Minnesota students were subjected to more than 11,600 instances of physical restraint. Minnesota, along with Texas and a cluster of Midwestern states, including Illinois and Iowa, were , according to a 2019 analysis by ProPublica and The Chicago Tribune. In , the news organizations found that Illinois schools frequently put students, most of them with disabilities, in padded “seclusion rooms” for reasons that violate state law, like refusing to complete schoolwork or using profanity.

The data, which is self-reported by local school districts to federal education officials, is likely a significant undercount. A , a nonpartisan watchdog agency, found that the Department of Education’s quality control procedures for data collection are “largely ineffective or do not exist.”

In 2019, then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos launched an initiative to address the “possible inappropriate use” of restraint and make federal data on the matter more accurate, but disability-rights activists remain skeptical that schools have been fully transparent. The DeVos initiative came just months after a Kentucky sheriff’s office reached a $337,000 court settlement stemming from a school resource officer handcuffing two elementary school children with disabilities above the elbows.A judge ruled in 2017 that .

Warning — The following video contains police use of force against a child:

‘There have to be consequences’

Physical restraint’s deleterious effects are clear in the Minnesota state data: 781 educators and 153 students sustained injuries last year as a direct result of the use of physical holds. Those figures, like student restraint data more broadly, are likely a significant undercount, said Sandy Lewandowski, the superintendent at Intermediate District 287 in suburban Minneapolis.

“If you’ve ever watched a fifth-grader being restrained by four or five staff, it’s traumatic to the student, it’s traumatic to the staff and it’s traumatic to any observer.” —Sandy Lewandowski, superintendent, Minneapolsis’s Intermediate District 287

The district, a cooperative of 11 school systems that serves some of the region’s most at-risk students, including those entangled in the juvenile justice system, has worked for years to reform its school discipline practices, including a 2017 decision to remove school-based police from its buildings. And while Lewandowski said that physical restraint is only used as a last resort and that officials have worked to reduce their reliance on the technique, it remains common practice. Last school year, which was interrupted by the pandemic, the district reported 991 student restraints, down from 1,179 in 2018-19 when students were in school for the full year.

In many instances, educators use physical restraints to prevent students from harming themselves and is never used as a form of discipline, Lewandowski said. The district cited one recent example where an elementary school student was restrained after punching a campus wall near an electrical outlet in an effort to electrocute himself.

In recent years, the district has only seen the special education needs of its students grow, Lewandowski said, as mental health providers turn away youth with the most significant behavioral health challenges. Such a reality has placed a significant burden on school staff to address student outbursts. But she isn’t lost to the fact that restraint can cause both emotional and physical damage.

“If you’ve ever watched a fifth-grader being restrained by four or five staff, it’s traumatic to the student, it’s traumatic to the staff and it’s traumatic to any observer,” she said, which is why the district has been working to bring its numbers down. “But we have to have partners in that work because we also can’t have a fifth-grader totally out of control, banging their head against a wall until they settle themselves down. That’s just not something we can do.”

Yet in some cases, students have died as a result of being physically restrained. In one instance in 2018, a after a teacher subjected him to a face-down prone restraint for an hour and 45 minutes at his now-defunct California school. The campus was shuttered after the incident and three school officials, including the teacher, were charged with felony involuntary manslaughter.

Similar incidents have prompted education officials to take a hard look at the practice. In 2012, urged districts to refrain from using physical holds unless a student is in imminent danger of harming himself or others while noting that “there is no evidence that using restraint or seclusion is effective in reducing the occurrence of the problem behaviors that frequently precipitate the use of such tactics.” Prone restraints and other moves that “restrict breathing should never be used,” due to the risk of injury and death.

That same year, a Minnesota Department of Education concerns that “it is only a matter of time before a Minnesota child is seriously injured or killed while in prone restraint,” and the practice was .

State laws on student restraint, including the prone restraint ban, currently center on children with disabilities and “are silent” about the general student population, said Korte, the assistant education commissioner. But would extend the requirements, including data reporting protocols, to cover all students. It also clarifies that school-based police are prohibited from using prone restraints in schools and would prohibit all physical holds on children under the age of 5 years old.

Chris Williams, spokesman for the state teachers union Education Minnesota, said in a statement that the group is concerned about “the ongoing racial disparities that we know exist in the use of restrictive procedures,” and supports rules that prohibit prone restraint in classrooms. He said the union is lobbying the legislature for more funding that would allow schools to “train all educators, not just special education educators, on the dangers and harms” of improper student restraints and how to use alternatives, like restorative justice.

Meanwhile in Washington, pending legislation, the , would prohibit schools from using prone restraints and other procedures that restrict student breathing, and would ban other physical restraints except when necessary to protect students and staff. Officials pointed to an influx of federal education funding because of the pandemic that could be used to implement strategies to improve school climates by reinforcing positive behaviors without restraint.

Morando Rhim said the federal legislation would go a long way to keeping students safe, especially as they return to buildings after a year of remote learning with trauma accrued during the pandemic. But laws curtailing restraint will only be effective, she said, if educators follow them.

“There have to be consequences,” she said, for those who don’t. “We cannot have systems that keep reinforcing that it is OK to kill Black people.”

Lead Image: Darnella Frazier / Facebook