An incident where schoolchildren were hit with pepper spray at an Oʻahu school has added momentum to calls for counselors, not cops, on campus. 

In late February, a Honolulu police officer deployed pepper spray against Kapolei Middle School students while trying to break up a fight, a rare use of force against Hawaiʻi minors in an educational setting. 

Emily Hills, senior attorney with the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, said she would like to see more counselors and mental health professionals addressing issues on campus rather than police, who can sometimes escalate tensions.

“We are talking about kids in school and concerns about criminalizing behavior that really should be better dealt with through school officials or authorities,” she said. “Aside from whether or not this is constitutionally excessive force, was this really necessary?” 

A police officer told attendees at a neighborhood board meeting that the officer used the pepper spray because he was outnumbered. 

School safety is an ever-present concern and high-profile fights in recent years led parents and politicians to  in some OÊ»ahu schools. School resource officers were  in KaimukÄ«, Kapolei and WaiÊ»anae in January. 

There was no SRO present during the February middle school incident but some advocates, say is was nonetheless a sign there should be less police presence in schools, not more. They want to instead see a focus on getting more counselors and therapists in schools to help address student mental health and behavioral issues to prevent problems such as fights and bullying. 

“It’s shocking to think of pepper spray being used with children that age,” said Deborah Bond-Upson, president of the organization Parents for Public Schools. “I just think we need to do everything we can to make the atmosphere in our schools more peaceful and positive.” 

Bond-Upson was pushing this session for passage of , which would be a first step toward requiring licensure for school psychologists in HawaiÊ»i. HawaiÊ»i is the  that doesn’t require its school psychologists to be licensed by the state board of psychology. 

The Education Committee deferred the bill last week, which generally kills a bill’s chances of making it through session. Committee Chair Donna Kim did not respond to a request for comment on why.

The Department of Education is also asking the Legislature for , who are school psychologists assigned to work with students with the highest levels of mental health needs. 

The interventionists would focus on assessing a student’s risk of self-harm or harming their peers and also help with transitions if the student is referred to an educational placement outside of a traditional classroom setting. 

Bond-Upson said she wishes more mental health support could help prevent fights and serious bullying from happening in the first place. She fears the use of pepper spray in response to the fight at Kapolei Middle School will lead to more negative consequences for students. 

“I’m afraid it alienates them from the police. I’m afraid it makes them less comfortable being in school,” she said. “So I would just want to see that we do everything we can to avoid that kind of situation, and one of the biggest things we need to do is to really fund psychological support in our schools.”

Three Students Arrested 

The fight at Kapolei Middle School broke out around 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 24. A group of girls had attacked another girl, Honolulu police Cpl. Roland Pagan shared at a public meeting. 

A responding officer, who would be the only officer on scene, grabbed one of the girls who was assaulting the victim and attempted to arrest her. A group of girls then grabbed the officer and other kids grabbed ahold of the girl he was trying to arrest, Pagan said. At that point, the officer used pepper spray. 

The incident occurred after school near the back entrance of campus, according to a statement from Department of Education spokeswoman Nanea Ching. School officials didn’t know how many students were involved, but she said no serious injuries were reported and those who were affected by the pepper spray were near the officer. 

One girl was arrested on a charge of third-degree assault, and two others were arrested for resisting arrest. Police declined to provide the ages of the girls and said they would not release further information.

Christine Denton, spokeswoman for the Honolulu Prosecutor’s Office, said the office is prohibited from discussing juvenile cases. Criminal justice records involving minors in HawaiÊ»i are shielded by law from public view. 

In a letter sent home to parents, Kapolei Middle School Principal Daryl Agena said the pepper spray was deployed to “disperse the crowd and restore order.” 

Leslie Keating, the parent of an eighth grader at Kapolei Middle School, brought up her concerns about the incident at a Makakilo-Kapolei-Honokai Hale Neighborhood Board meeting in February. She said her son was not present during the fight, but she was worried about the use of pepper spray on young students. Kapolei Middle School includes grades 6-8, and students could be anywhere from 11 to 14 years old. 

“These are chemical weapons that have chemicals that we don’t know the long-term effects of,” she said. “I’m not okay with it.”  

Pagan said he is unaware of any long-term effects of pepper spray. 

“Pepper spray is one of our lowest-level uses of force,” Pagan told the neighborhood board, “and he used it because he was outnumbered.” 

‘Extreme Force’

Keating told Civil Beat she doesn’t agree with the use of pepper spray on students or adults, but she is especially concerned about its use at a middle school where some children may have asthma or other breathing issues that make them particularly sensitive. 

“I mean, some of these kids weigh 80 pounds, they don’t have adult bodies yet,” she said in an interview. “So using pepper spray on them, I don’t know, it very much irked me.” 

Jannet Lee-Jayaram, an emergency pediatrician and clinical associate professor with the University of Hawaiʻi’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, said pepper spray isn’t known to have long-term effects, but it can cause injuries to the lungs and eyes, including corneal abrasions from people rubbing their eyes too hard after exposure.

In the short term, pepper spray can cause intense pain in the eyes, irritation in the nose and lungs and burning of the skin. 

The use of chemical agents, like pepper spray, sits in the middle of the spectrum in . The policy ranges from techniques with the lowest risk of injury to those with the highest risk of serious injury or death. 

The first three options are officer presence, verbal directions and physical contact. Chemical agents, including pepper spray, are listed as the fourth option. The options escalate from there, including using physical strikes, canines or even firearms. 

The policy states that the use of chemical agents on a crowd should be directed by an incident commander on scene unless an officer believes someone is in immediate danger of serious injury or death. 

Wookie Kim, legal director of the ACLU of HawaiÊ»i, said it’s difficult to determine whether the officer’s use of pepper spray in this scenario was justified without knowing more of the details. But, he noted of chemical agents should be reserved for the most threatening scenarios. 

In an instance like this one, which involved young people at school, other deescalation methods should have been considered first. 

“We should be very concerned about the use of such extreme force with middle schoolers,” he said. 

‘Counselors Not Cops’ 

Pepper spray has been used at schools before in HawaiÊ»i — and around the country. 

In 2023, Honolulu police officers  to break up a fight at Kapolei High School. Paramedics treated multiple students for exposure but no serious injuries were reported, according to an HNN article from the time. 

In other parts of the country, however, children have been hospitalized from pepper spray exposure at school. 

In February, a 12-year-old in Tulsa, Oklahoma, went to the hospital after  students participating in an ICE protest outside their school. In September, 32 students and faculty members at a Florida high school were hospitalized after school police and administrators  to break up a large fight. 

The incident at Kapolei Middle School brings up the question of whether police officers should be the ones addressing student behavioral problems on campus, Kim, of the ACLU, said.  

“Our whole position is that we shouldn’t have substantial police presence on school campuses,”  he said. “We want counselors, not cops.” 

The focus, many advocates and parents say, should shift to getting more mental health support for students. 

During the last Education Committee, committee members and testifiers discussed HB1889 and debated whether creating a license structure would help or hinder the Department of Education’s ability to recruit more psychologists and fill its vacancies. 

Currently, a psychologist  to work as a school psychologist in HawaiÊ»i. 

While advocates say creating a license structure would create training and ethical standards for the position, Sen. Donna Kim questioned whether adding the requirement would create more bureaucratic hoops for school psychologists to jump through.  

But Bond-Upson, of the Parents for Public Schools group, said requiring licences would allow eligible services in schools to be reimbursed by Medicaid. 

Overall, she said she hopes the pepper spray incident can lead to change in how behavioral issues are handled at schools. 

“I am heartbroken that the police had to enter the situation,” she said. “And that’s why my first responses are, ‘What is it we can do to make the atmosphere of the school such that this kind of alarming behavior does not happen to kids and with kids?’”

Update: The bill was ordered to the inactive file on the last night of the session Aug. 31. It had been amended to keep mandatory police notification requirements if a student assaults or threatens a teacher. The bill would have still let teachers choose to call the police if a student is using or possessing controlled substances, and it would also decriminalize willful disturbance by students.

During Zuleima Baquedano’s first year as a teacher, she faced an important choice. 

One of her students had difficulty controlling her emotions. One day, she had a meltdown and kicked Baquedano down.

The principal asked Baquedano if she wanted to call the police, because the incident legally counted as assault. But not long before, the student had moved in with her family after being in and out of foster care, was beginning the diagnostic process for her disability and had been working with Baquedano on coping mechanisms. 

“Any contact with police would have really put all of that in jeopardy,” Baquedano said. “Calling the police, getting Child Protective Services involved and all that would have completely just ruined any kind of progress she’d made.” 

Baquedano decided against calling the police. “I’m never going to regret advocating for her, despite the fact that several teachers told me I couldn’t let her get away with it, and that she did this on purpose when they didn’t even know her,” she said. 

She had a choice because she worked at a charter school in Los Angeles. Staff at traditional public schools don’t have the same freedom: Under California law, they are required to make a police report if a student assaults them — and can be prosecuted if they don’t. 

A bill before the Legislature in its final week . 

But what supporters see as a common sense bill, opponents see as going too far, raising partisan tensions in an election year in which crime and education are top of mind for many voters. 

A difficult path to the Senate

, a San Jose Democrat, has been trying to get similar legislation passed for four years.

“The data very clearly shows that when law enforcement is required to come onto campus, those that they choose to arrest are disproportionately people with disabilities and students of color,” Kalra said in an interview. 

 found that students with disabilities make up 26% of school arrests, despite being 11% of total enrollment. According to a , students of color are handcuffed by police at a disproportionate rate — 20% of Black students compared to 9% of white students. 

“This bill is really a turning point in addressing issues around school climate,” said Oscar Lopez, an associate managing attorney at Disability Rights California, a sponsor of the bill. 

This is the first time Kalra’s bill has made it to the Senate, and it wasn’t easy. It barely squeaked out of the Assembly by a vote of just 41-22, with seven Democrats voting “no.” 

“It’s unfortunate that a common sense bill like this has struggled so hard to make it through the Legislature,” Kalra said. 

And opposition is organizing.

Last week, Senate Republicans , listing concerns about school safety, drug possession and the relationship between schools and law enforcement. 

“The bottom line is this is going to make our school campuses less safe,” Senate GOP Leader  of San Diego told CalMatters. “It’s going to endanger our students, teachers, administrators and even the law enforcement professionals who have to serve on these campuses.”

Law enforcement officials worry that AB 2441 could open the door to eliminating school resource officers. 

“School officials and law enforcement should work together, especially when it comes to pupils whose behavior violates the law and puts school safety in jeopardy,” said Cory Salzillo, legislative director of the California State Sheriffs’ Association. “Removing requirements just runs counter to that notion.”

If AB 2441 were to pass, there would still still be times when staff are required to call the police. Under federal law, local education agencies must call law enforcement if a student has a firearm or is caught selling controlled substances. 

Some opponents have also raised concerns about school administrators’ ability to discern between students who are selling controlled substances or just possessing them — a task they think should be left to law enforcement, particularly .

“Schools are not isolated in the community, so when there are crimes being committed, even if it’s simple possession of a controlled substance, that’s something that law enforcement should be aware of,” Salzillo said. 

The California Department of Public Health plans to announce a new fentanyl education campaign on Wednesday. 

“Fentanyl is so dangerous that we need to be all hands on deck on dealing with that crisis on our school campuses,” Jones said. “Removing this requirement of reporting is just unbelievable to me at this point in time.” 

Because of an amendment to the bill, staff would also need to notify law enforcement if someone needed immediate medical attention. 

After the Senate Republican Caucus released its analysis — and sent it to its entire press list for the first time â€” supporters of the bill accused them of fear mongering and spreading misinformation. 

“There’s been a lot of untruths shared and promoted by the opposition to this bill,” said Rachel Bhagwat, legislative advocate at ACLU California Action, a bill sponsor. 

Jones denied that’s what’s happening. 

“California voters and taxpayers are fed up with the criminal justice system in California right now,” he said. “They’re fed up with the progressive wing that’s continuing to decriminalize crime.” 

Preventing the school-to-prison pipeline

 that when young people face severe discipline at school — such as police interaction, suspension or expulsion — they are less likely to graduate high school and more likely to go to prison. 

“The interpretation of normal, age-appropriate behaviors as being threatening and criminal and dangerous is leading to a situation where young people are not getting educational opportunities in school, and they’re being funneled into further criminal contact and the criminal system,” Bhagwat said. 

Under current state law, staff are required to try other methods — such as meeting with parents, speaking with a psychologist, creating an individualized education plan or restorative justice programs — before resorting to something more severe. 

“Between counseling and other programs, there are methods to use that don’t involve punitive consequences such as a misdemeanor crime,” Naj Alikhan, senior director of marketing and communications for the Association of California School Administrators, wrote in a statement to CalMatters.

The bill would also get rid of a clause that makes it a crime to “willfully disturb” public schools and meetings. Under this provision, students could be criminally prosecuted for running in hallways or knocking on doors. 

“It’s somewhat of a vague term,” Kalra said, “and it’s been used against students who might have behavior issues. There’s a lot of different reasons why a student may be causing a disturbance and we want to give schools the ability to decide how they want to handle those situations.” 

An amendment to the bill would make it an infraction for someone to prevent a school staff member from calling the police. 

Baquedano — who  before the Senate education committee in July and now teaches in Santa Ana — said that if the bill passes, there are serious situations, like having a deadly weapon or being in possession of drugs, where she would still call.  

“There’s an assumption that we’re going to stop calling the police, and that’s not the case,” she said. “The idea that we wouldn’t have that common sense is a little insulting.” 

It’s a decision Baquedano said teachers deserve to have. 

“People should trust us — the professionals in the situation, who’ve been trained, who’ve gone through education to do this — they should be trusting our judgment,” she said. “We’re the ones who best know our students. We spend all these hours with them a year, sometimes more than parents do.”

Kalra remains optimistic that AB 2441 will pass the Senate this week and make it to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. 

“You would hope,” he said, “that legislators would understand the need for us to support all students, and I’m hopeful that at least we can get this bill through to see that it’s not going to create some doomsday outcome.”

This was originally published on .

With just a few hours remaining until the midnight deposit deadline, West Virginia high school senior Sam Dodson thought he knew which university he’d commit to for the fall but second thoughts were bubbling up. Accepted to a number of prestigious institutions, he had narrowed his final choice down to two: Columbia University and Dartmouth College.

There were multiple considerations at play: academic opportunities; social life; Manhattan’s Upper West Side vs. bucolic Hanover, New Hampshire. And over the past few weeks a new one had emerged: the quickly spreading pro-Palestinian campus protests and subsequent arrests for which Columbia was ground zero.

Dodson was one of these students, watching closely as protesters occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall were cleared from the building Tuesday by the New York Police Department.. 

“All of that made me wait until kind of the last minute to officially decide,” the track runner told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

The class of 2024 has had a high school experience bookended by jarring national news, their freshman year coinciding with school shutdowns and COVID-era virtual learning and their senior year ending amid a volatile movement protesting Israel’s assault in Gaza that has swept up dozens of colleges and brought over 2,000 arrests, according to a tally. As seniors weigh options for their future universities, some are looking to the actions of college student activists and the responses of their respective administrations before making final decisions.

“I do think that all of the turmoil and things that are going on definitely had me reconsidering. It had me having second thoughts about different things and had me, I guess, take second looks at different schools,” Dodson said. “But ultimately I guess I tried to look past anything with that and understand that this is a choice I’m making for the next four years and what I think would be the best experience for me — academically, personally, in terms of just student life. All of those things.”

Dodson’s experiences are reflective of as well. Safa Al-Omari, a senior at NYC’s The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology told she is still deciding between City College and Hunter College. The Yemeni student said she wants to do more research about City College’s response to the protests before she commits.

“Being Middle Eastern, I have a lot of feelings about what’s going on,” Al-Omari said. “I would not want to go to a college that is arresting students based on them speaking for people who are suffering.”

For Sam Dodson’s mom, Sarah, there were also conflicting emotions. “It’s very hard to put the ‘yes’ when you have a lot of 
 chaos,” she said. While she said her son was drawn to the diversity of perspectives on Columbia’s campus, the more heated elements of the past few weeks have given him pause. At the same time, she emphasized the importance of being in a higher education space where free speech is strongly respected and encouraged. 

“You never want your kid to go to a school that is on the national news because of police involvement, right? It just doesn’t sit really well,” she said. “However, I guess I am under the assumption that there’s going to be resolution 
 I’m guessing because this is a college platform that they are going to hopefully have more engaging, open conversations so that there can be some sort of — I don’t know — persistence of everyday campus life that is not so inflamed.”

For now, all academic activities on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus — including finals — have been moved fully remote for the remainder of the semester. On May 6, the school to cancel the university-wide commencement scheduled for May 15 and instead focus on school-level graduation ceremonies. The NYPD had been asked to maintain a police presence until two days after the main commencement; it was not immediately clear how the cancellation might impact that.

Sam Dodson, who began his freshman year of high school in hybrid learning, said it would be frustrating if his first year of college classes also goes remote because of campus unrest. On the other hand, “there’s something interesting about being in the center of the news or the center of exactly what’s happening.” 

Students reconsider and recommit

It was about two week after pro-Palestinian students and activists on Columbia’s campus first erected the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that a group occupied Hamilton Hall, a building with a long history of . Hours later, the cops moved in, arresting, 112 people, including 32 who were not affiliated with the university. 

By this point, the movement had spread across the country, including to Dodson’s other contender, Dartmouth, where nearly were arrested this week. About a week and half before that escalation, Columbia hosted its accepted students weekend and Dodson was there. 

He took some time, he said, to wander around campus and speak with protesting students near the encampment. “They were like, ‘Hey, new Columbia students. Come talk to us!’ You know, I guess, they were very like welcoming. They were very much wanting to talk with the admitted students, which I thought was a nice thing.”

While he was disappointed that many of the accepted student weekend activities had been canceled or modified, he was grateful he got to experience the events on campus firsthand and form his own views.   

Around the same time, another high school senior Lila Ellis, who uses they/ them pronouns, was also closely observing the activities on Columbia’s campus. A Jewish student from Massachusetts, they had committed months before to the dual-degree joint program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Ellis said that because of their religion, they’re concerned there are certain places on campus they won’t be welcomed. “I think that to just stay away from all secular extracurriculars entirely, is a disservice to myself and to the community as a whole,” they said. “And I’m just thinking about, like, how am I going to balance that while also, you know, recognizing that some spaces don’t want me in them?”

Ellis pointed to the example of a protester outside the gates of campus , “Go back to Poland,” at Jewish students. Recently, a January video of one of the student protest leaders, Khymani James, began circulating in which he said, “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He has since been barred from campus and released a of apology. 

Notably, as reported by , protests within the encampment were on the whole peaceful and included Jewish students, though others on campus agreed with Ellis that anti-Zionist rhetoric made them feel unwelcomed. 

While Ellis is sticking with their decision to attend Columbia, they did briefly toy with the idea of a gap year or of moving core curriculum requirements around to stay away from the main campus for a while. 

“I really do want to be in this program,” they said, “And it’s just a matter of thinking about ‘How do we make that work with what’s happening at Columbia?’ rather than ‘Can it work?’ Because I think it can work.” 

As Ellis prepares to enroll for classes — especially literature overview courses on Columbia’s campus — they’re considering a number of factors including whether or not the professors taught from the encampment. 

“Hopefully,” they said, “it’s not an issue in the fall, but just thinking about who were the professors who were willing to do that? And is that an environment that I want to be in for learning and for having an open discussion?”

Their father, Andy Ellis, added his own apprehension. All parents, he said, are nervous to send their first child off to college. But the protests on campus, he said, add an extra dimension, especially for a Jewish student. 

Ellis, a graduate of MIT, has spent significant time in higher education. He said he was on a Harvard visiting committee and in an academic center there for the last decade but resigned from both positions in October, “when it became clear that people were ripping off their mask around anti-semitism.” 

He said that if he were a current student on Columbia’s campus, he would be on the front lines of the counter-protests, displaying footage from Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.

“I think I would be that person,” the consultant said, “But I know that Lila is not that person. But I also know that Lila is not going to just duck [their]head and stay completely quiet, but I think find a balanced view. Listening to what Lila said about, you know, ‘find the humanity’ is an amazing, generous take. I’m really proud that I think we’ve created somebody who has a better moral compass than I do because I’m a lot more angry.”

Back in West Virginia and with time to spare before Wednesday’s midnight deadline, Dodson had finalized his decision: He committed to be a member of the class of 2028 at Columbia where he plans to study political science and government. 

“I think it’ll just be interesting,” he said, ”to go from — to take my perspective from this kind of small town area where like, I mean, I’ve met people from other places. I try to read, I try to keep myself exposed to those things, but it’d be cool to actually meet people from all sorts of perspectives and all sorts of backgrounds.”

A state representative has filed a bill that would require schools to have regularly scheduled lockdown drills involving school resource officers and law enforcement.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Pebblin Warren, D-Tuskegee, would require school districts to include school resource officers and law enforcement in lockdown drills and to designate the days of drills to be “school safety and awareness days.”

Under existing law, school boards are required to have a “comprehensive school emergency operations plan.” Law enforcement personnel help develop the plan but are not required to participate in drills.

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Warren said that the legislation emerged after seeing the events last May at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, when 19 fourth-graders and two teachers were killed by a gunman. Responding law enforcement for a lack of coordination and action.

“What happened in Texas was just totally disorganization,” she said. “Nobody knew who was in charge. Nobody knew how to do this. Nobody knew what to do there.”

Warren said she wants the bill to put everyone on the same page.

“It’s working out a plan between law enforcement and the school system,” Warren said. “So, nobody will be guessing who’s in charge and what we need to do.”

State Superintendent Eric Mackey, via communications director Michael Sibley, said he has not yet seen the legislation. Amanda Wasden, director of external affairs at the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, said Thursday the department did not have a comment on the bill.

“Student safety is paramount, and our members have flagged student and school safety as one of their top priorities for the coming legislative session,” said Ryan Hollingsworth, executive director of the School Superintendents of Alabama, in a statement. “SSA is currently reviewing all pre-filed bills and looks forward to conversations with sponsors and stakeholders.”

In the Alabama State Department of Education’s Manual of State Laws and Regulations, , principals are required to instruct and train students for emergency drills and evacuations. The fire marshal requires at least one emergency drill each month. Emergency drills include but are not limited to safety, security, severe weather, fire and “code red drills.”

Code red drills can be issued “in the event of a perceived immediate threat to a school involving acts of violence, such as terrorism, a person possessing a firearm or a deadly weapon, or any other threat of violence.” Code red drills must be conducted within the first six weeks of the fall and spring semesters.

Warren said that these “school safety and awareness days” will be days for the drills.

“Everybody will be in sync with each other doing the drills, so we know how everything should pull off,” she said.

The 2023 legislative session starts next Tuesday.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

Gonez, who raised $500,000 and major endorsements including the United Teachers Los Angeles,  last month, garnering 51.27% of the vote. Marvin RodrĂ­guez, an LAUSD teacher of 17 years with no previous political experience or major endorsements, raised just over $11,000 and trailed closely behind with 48.73%. In a message to his supporters, he  last week.

LAUSD parents, politically active Angelenos and education policy experts have suggested several reasons why Gonez’s Board District 6 win was so narrow, including her support from charter advocates and dissatisfaction with mask mandates, lengthy school lockdowns while Gonez served as school board president. 

Many of the reasons trace back to a shared theme — that her clear advantages may not have worked fully to her benefit. It’s the money that supported her and her experience on the school board that turned off some voters.

“The most interesting thing is, this is a situation where she’s getting fire from both her left and her right,” said Rob Quan, an activist and founder of Unrig LA. 

On the left, Quan said, there are those who are more inclined to support public schools and had concerns about Gonez’s position on charter schools. On the right, he said there have been two primary concerns — her  and  to scale back police presence in LAUSD schools. 

The anonymous founder of LA Parent’s Union (@UTLAUncensored), a parent advocacy group with nearly 5,000 followers on Twitter, said the group endorsed RodrĂ­guez because “he’s an outsider, right?” 

“So many people in L.A. are feeling like a career politician and the establishment is really just looking out for their own next seat and to keep their group in power,” the founder said.

They also said that for many parents in Board District 6, support for Gonez dropped when she voted to reduce school police. Many parents saw it as a threat to their childrens’ safety — a type of “political grandstanding” they also saw in her leadership through one of the longest Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates in the nation, UTLAUncensored said. 

Wavering faith in Gonez’s alliance with the people stemmed from her hefty funding, too. 

Billionaires Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, and businessman Bill Bloomfield,  of both Kelly Gonez and Nick Melvoin (who was re-elected to represent Board District 4) through the PAC Kids First. 

“I do think voters are paying attention more and more to who is supported financially by the people and who is financially empowered by the very rich,” said Kris Rehl, who voted for Rodríguez. “I believe that Marvin Rodríguez wants to be on the LAUSD board because he wants to make the lives of students and teachers better. I can’t say that I think Kelly Gonez is only running for this position for those same reasons.”

Gonez’s support from pro-charter advocates, like Hastings, as well as her support from the California Charter School Association in 2017, when she was initially elected to the seat, has some skeptical about her resolve in holding charter schools accountable. 

Although Gonez, a former charter school teacher, has attempted to distance herself from the stance of her pro-charter donors in interviews, apprehension remains. Rehl said the primary reason he voted for RodrĂ­guez was his strong anti-charter stance. 

“I really feel like LAUSD needs bold leadership that doesn’t cave into special interests like the charter school association, and I’m a strong supporter of UTLA, so I was really disappointed to see UTLA endorse Kelly Gonez, who in the past has been pretty friendly to the charters,” said Arturo Gomez, a tenant defense attorney.

The Board District 6 race was not the only LAUSD election where the politics of public school versus charter schools came to a head. In the Board District 2 race, candidates RocĂ­o Rivas and Maria Brenes, who ran on similar platforms, vied to represent parts of central and east L.A.

Rivas, who was backed by UTLA and has been more outspoken in her anti-charter stance, won with 52.49% of the votes. Brenes, backed by SEIU Local 99 — LAUSD’s second biggest union — as well as Bloomfield and Hastings’ PAC, had 47.51% of the votes. 

Gomez said he voted for Rivas because of her stance on charter schools: “I wasn’t a big fan of Brenes who seemed to have backing from a lot of charter adjacent organizations,” he said. 

On Nov. 23, Rivas took to Twitter to declare her victory, tweeting that “people power wins over billionaire money.” 

“Her message was certainly tapping into a bit of the charter school narrative, that this was charter school money trying to defeat her and that public schools won,” said USC Rossier professor Marsh. “This has happened in the past in LA Unified, that when outside money comes in, or money that’s perceived to be on one side or the other, sometimes it actually does the opposite and motivates some voters to say ‘we’re not going to let this money influence how we vote.’”

Marsh added that both the District 2 and District 6 elections show a continuation of elections “being a proxy war” for teachers unions and charter interests. She also pointed to another takeaway that stood out to her from the November election. 

“Just because you have the funding doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gonna win the votes,” she said. “That stands out to me in both of these races.”

This article is part of a collaboration between ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Just 43% of parents with children in public schools are in favor of teachers and other school staff carrying guns on campus, conducted in response to the May 24 mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers. That’s , when 36% of parents supported the measure in the aftermath of the mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed 17 people. 

Among all poll respondents, including those without school-aged children, 45% opposed arming teachers. That’s a sharp contrast from other school security measures, like metal detectors and armed police, which have wide support among the general public. Broadly speaking, the public’s opinion on school safety efforts have remained stable over the last four years despite an increase in spending on campus security after the Parkland and Uvalde tragedies. Following the Uvalde shooting, President Joe Biden signed a law that included new gun control measures and an for student mental health care and campus security. 

On the question of arming teachers, respondents’ perspectives varied widely based on their political affiliation, noted Teresa Preston, PDK’s director of publications. Efforts to put more guns in schools mirrors broader partisanship around gun control, she said. While three-fourths of Republicans support arming teachers, just a quarter of Democrats agree. 

“Some of it has to do with how the divisions in our country about the presence of guns in public spaces has sort of continued to inform peoples’ opinions about the presence of guns in schools,” Preston said. “If they are inclined to be against more gun control measures they might be more inclined to say ‘Well yes, I support having guns in public spaces.” 

More than half of states allow schools to arm teachers or staff in at least some circumstances, by the RAND Corporation. In Ohio, a law approved this year made it easier for educators to carry guns in their classrooms by requiring just 24 hours of training. Meanwhile in North Carolina, a school district for a decision to equip campuses with AR-15 rifles for school-based police to use in the event of an active shooting. 

Arming teachers is even less popular among educators themselves, by the American Federation of Teachers. Among union members, 75% of respondents said they oppose arming teachers. In a press release, union President Randi Weingarten said “the answer to gun violence is not more guns.” 

“Educators, parents, administrators, counselors and students want teachers to teach, not engage in a shootout with AR-15s,” Weingarten said. “Especially now, as kids are headed back to school with more stress and trauma, and teachers are facing interference from politicians trying to ban books and single out certain students — we want to be focused on solutions, not sharpshooting. Arm us with books and resources, not guns.” 

Yet the AFT poll also showed high support for armed police in schools — putting educators on the same page as the general public. Despite police failures in Uvalde, and an ongoing debate about their ability to keep kids safe from mass school shootings, the PDK poll found an overwhelming 80% of people support school resource officers, including 94% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats. 

Preston said she was surprised to see such high support for school-based police among Democrats. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, leading Democratic lawmakers embraced calls for police-free schools and some school districts removed officers from their campuses. 

“Perhaps it has to do with people being willing to try anything, being willing to be open to lots of different possibilities,” she said. 

Similarly, 78% of people said they support metal detectors in schools and 80% said they support mental health screenings for students. School-hardening efforts like metal detectors and armed teachers saw markedly higher support among less-educated Americans compared to those with college degrees. Compared to postgraduates, those without college degrees were 29 percentage points more likely to have strong support for metal detectors and 12 percentage points more likely to strongly support armed teachers. 

Despite the overall support for school security efforts, the results suggest that the public does not see the measures as a panacea, with a minority of respondents expressing strong support for each of the measures. Just 21% of respondents said they “strongly support” armed teachers and 45% said they “strongly support” armed police on campus. This dynamic suggests that people are generally interested in a range of strategies that could keep kids safe at school “but they’re not necessarily passionately committed to them.” 

The poll, which has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points, was conducted June 17-25 and includes a national random sample of 1,008 adults. PDK plans to release additional poll results on Americans’ attitudes toward public schools on Aug 29. 

With Ohio passing legislation that will make it easier for teachers to carry guns in school, educators and youth are sounding the alarm that the bill could make classrooms less safe — particularly for Black and Hispanic students.

“I have no doubt in my mind, it increases the likelihood of school violence,” said Julie Holderbaum, a high school English teacher in Minerva, Ohio. “I have no doubt it would lead to more tragedies.”

The law could raise the stakes on disciplinary policies that already target youth of color at rates disproportionate to white students, said Deborah Temkin, a school safety expert at .

“There is very much a possibility for disproportionate use of force in the event that the decision to use a gun has to be made,” she told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “Making a decision in a split second relies inherently on your biases.”

Gov. Mike DeWine the bill into law June 13. It does not require districts to arm teachers, but gives school boards the option to do so while slashing the required training hours from over 700 to 24.

Ohio joins at least nine other states in explicitly allowing non-security school personnel to carry firearms on school grounds, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some of those states set no minimum training requirement for armed teachers, but of those that do, Ohio ties Wyoming for the lowest requirement at 24 total hours. Florida, where in 2017 a teen gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School killed 17 students and staff, requires the most initial training, at 144 hours.

The Florida also mandates that armed teachers must first undergo at least 12 hours of diversity training, a nod to the possibility that educators carrying weapons could be prone to racial bias.

°żłóŸ±ŽÇ’s includes no such requirement. 

In the legislation’s , constituents submitted over 380 written comments; 360 opposed the measure while just 20 favored it. Among the voices urging lawmakers to reject was Kavita Parikh, co-founder of Students Demand Action Toledo. She emphasized that it could harm Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and Asian-American students.

“Arming teachers could lead to a negative culture of fear for students, especially students of color. As students of color are disproportionately disciplined, the notion of arming teachers has also been connected to decreasing high school graduation and college enrollment for these students,” she wrote.

‘You don’t pick threats based upon color’

Nationwide, GOP efforts to “harden” schools in response to the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, have over the negative impact of disciplinary policies and school security staff on students of color. Even in preschool, a disproportionate share of Black students face suspensions, starting a chain of events known as the that increases their risk of entering the juvenile justice system later in life.

Several state legislators who backed the Ohio bill told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ either they do not believe racial disparities to be a possible outcome of arming teachers or that they did not consider the issue in the first place.

“It’s not anything that I’ve thought about whatsoever,” state Rep. Tom Young, who co-sponsored the bill. Like Young, the overwhelming majority of GOP legislators who backed the bill are white. 

“No matter who, a threat is a threat. 
 You don’t pick threats based upon color,” he said.

Ohio, however, is the site of at least two police killings infamous for alleged racial bias. White officers shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 and 13-year-old Tyre King in 2016, both Black boys who were holding toy guns.

At the time, DeWine, then attorney general, called for an of police training on how to correctly identify an active shooter. 

Now as governor, his support for the new measure rolls back the preparation required for teachers to arm themselves on campus and respond to threats. 

“My office worked with the General Assembly to remove hundreds of hours of curriculum irrelevant to school safety and to ensure training requirements were specific to a school environment and contained significant scenario-based training. House Bill 99 accomplishes these goals, and I thank the General Assembly for passing this bill to protect Ohio children and teachers,” DeWine said in a statement to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

The specified 24 hours of training are “ideal” for school staff, said DeWine’s Press Secretary Dan Tierney. He did not comment on whether the omission of anti-bias requirements was an oversight, nor on what changed the governor’s mind since calling for increased police training in 2014.

The legislation comes after a June 2021 Ohio Supreme Court decision interpreted an already existing state law on arming teachers to mean school staff were required first to complete over 700 hours of training before carrying guns. While the new bill drops that number to 24, school districts can set a higher bar if they choose. Districts that adopt the policies will have to inform community members that an adult on campus is armed.

Among those opposed to the bill are the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio and numerous other groups.

The state did not have any known incidents of gun misuse, nor of teachers unfairly targeting students of color before the 2021 court ruling, Rep. Thomas Hall, the bill’s sponsor, pointed out in a message to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

‘Almost instant accessibility’

With a having gone into effect statewide June 13, teachers in districts that allow them to be armed could come to school with their gun tucked into a pocket, waistband or holster.

“What we don’t want, in my personal opinion, is for [teachers] to have to run down the hall to a locker and grab a weapon. That kind of defeats the purpose. 
 I would want to have [guns] in the classroom, if it’s the case of a teacher, so that they have access if somebody were to attack an individual classroom,” state Sen. Jerry Cirino, a co-sponsor of the bill, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ.

“We’re going to have to find the right methods so that we have almost instant accessibility, because that’s how [school shootings] happen,” he continued, “but also not make it possible for a weapon to be grabbed by the wrong person in school, even accidentally.”

Firearms getting into the wrong hands is a concern held by many of the bill’s opponents. In other states, guns brought to school by teachers have ended up . In one case, a loaded gun fell out of the waistband of a Florida substitute teacher while he was on the playground.

Districts may adopt their own individual protocols for gun safety and storage under the guidance of a statewide advisory team, explained Hall.

He emphasized that the legislation includes mandated de-escalation training to avoid gun use as a means for resolving issues like school fights. 

Cirino, however, said he thinks there could be some circumstances where trained personnel would use firearms not on outside intruders, but on students — including when youth bring knives or guns to school.

When a student is wielding “any weapon that would be capable of threatening somebody’s life or serious injury, I think there could be a justification for an administrator or teacher to use a weapon,” he said.

He expects large buildings to have 10-12 staff carrying guns and smaller ones to have “not more than a half dozen” in districts that adopt the policies. Other legislators, like Rep. Young, stressed that he only expects smaller rural districts who do not have school resource officers on staff to move forward with arming educators.

Holderbaum, the Minerva English teacher, has been thinking about the potential real-world implications of the legislation in her 1,800-student district. 

A few years ago, her school did a police demonstration with live gunshots in the gym so staff could recognize the sound. From her classroom, she said, the noise seemed like bleachers being pulled out. It troubled her that the sound didn’t seem out of the ordinary. If teachers were wielding guns, she wondered, how would they differentiate between everyday noises from the gym or cafeteria and gunshots? Would they have to step into the hallway with their finger on the trigger every time they heard something loud? 

Doing so, she thinks, would create a culture of fear at school that undermines learning and student well-being.

“If I’m in the middle of teaching Emily Dickinson poetry and I hear this noise and I decide to draw a loaded gun and go into the hallway, that’s going to traumatize my kids,” she said. 

“I don’t want that to become commonplace where they’re used to seeing a teacher pull a gun out.”

“I know for me and my friends, it was difficult trying to live just as a high school student and live freely and be creative when you have these figures on your shoulders just waiting to get something out of you,” said Payne, a high school junior. 

Amid the uncertainty of COVID-19 and remote learning, the trauma of the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the turmoil of the uprisings that followed, Payne said the school police only intensified the students’ anxieties rather than calmed them. After witnessing what she calls unfair backpack searches and students being pepper-sprayed by police, Payne, with a group of students and community membersin , a youth-led activist group, pushed for the Los Angeles Unified School District to withdraw all funding for schoolpolice and divert it to mental health support for Black students. 

“For Black students, we literally had to sit back and watch the entire world debate whether or not our lives actually mattered,” said Simya Smith,16, a member of Students Deserve. 

After a  from students and community members, the LA school board in February 2021  to cut $25 million – a third of the school police budget – and shift those funds into a $36.5 million initiative called the Black Student Achievement Plan. The mission is to support the mental and academic well-being of Black students in the nation’s second-largest school district, adding 221 psychiatric social workers, counselors, “climate coaches,” and restorative justice advisers to schools with the highest number of Black students. The new staffers especially target campuses with higher rates of suspension, chronic absenteeism, and low student achievement. 

The climate coaches help de-escalate conflicts and provide social and emotional support for struggling students. The district said the coaches would be residents from the communities that their schools serve. The restorative justice advisers help shift the schools’ disciplinary practices to focus on rehabilitation and reconciliation to address conflict and crime.

Payne and Smith say they haven’t seen any police officers at Dorsey this school year and  have seen huge improvements since the mental health staff arrived. They feel relaxed. The counselors talk to them about Black trauma and politics in ways that make them feel safe. 

“As a Black person, as a Black woman at that, there’s a lot in society that we have to face. The color of our skin, especially if you’re dark-skinned, the texture of our hair. BSAP really creates that safe space for you to be unapologetically Black,” Smith said. 

She said she sees other students interacting with the new mental health staffers daily. 

“It looks like positive interactions,” she said. “I feel like a big part of their purpose is to help you feel comfortable in your skin and not to have to modify yourself to fit into the standard.”

Simya Smith (right) talks to other students at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles about their efforts to remove police from the school and bring in more mental health staff. (courtesy of Students Deserve)

When she has an anxiety attack, the psychiatric social worker coaches her on breathing exercises and techniques that help ground her and control her anxiety. 

District leaders plan to release a midyear report on their progress to the school board in February. They’ll measure whether there has been an impact on student discipline, parent engagement, suspensions, and other outcomes.

While the debate over the utility of school police — particularly for Black students — has long existed, the issue has been amplified by the broader debated “defund police” movement that swept the country after the murder of Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. Since then, few city police departments have cut their budgets and among those that did, some have . But several school districts have made strides to remove police from their campuses. 

 November that at least 49 school districts ended contracts with police or cut their budgets.At least a few shifted those resources to mental health support: In , four school resource officers were replaced by restorative justice coordinators. In , the school district hired more school counselors. And in , the district leaders reallocated funds to mental health services. 

Parents, students and educators have continued to debate those decisions. Some have called for schools to reverse course and restaff police in response to student fights and weapons. Others argue that the mental health programs aren’t adequately funded or officials have been slow to fill the positions. 

There have been federal efforts to divest from the police in schools and invest in mental health support, as well. In June 2021, U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and five other senators and representatives introduced the , which would shift federal funds away from school police and invest in culturally responsive social services for students. But the bill stalled in committee.

Los Angeles school district’s mental health services plan has been unique in its focus on Black students. 

According to the American Civil Liberties Union’s , Black students nationwide are arrested three times more often than white students. Black girls specifically are arrested four times more often than white girls. Black students with disabilities also are disproportionately arrested. 

The ACLU reports about 72% of children in the U.S. will experience at least one major traumatizing, life-altering event before 18 years old, yet 14 million students are in schools with police but no counselor, nurse, psychologist or social worker. 

Jared DuPree, the senior director of the office of the Los Angeles schools superintendent, said he wants to separate the Black Student Achievement Plan from debates over police in schools.

“BSAP was funded partially by some of the funds that were received because they defunded the police, but BSAP lived long before the conversation about police being defunded,” he said.

But Students Deserve members said students’ mental health is directly connected to the issue of policing. In fact, Payne and Smith said they want all the money going toward school police diverted to mental health supports in schools. 

Their work in Los Angeles is inspiring other teen activists. In January, 17-year-old Keyanna Bernard met with members of the  â€“ a coalition of student advocacy groups in New York City – to discuss the strategy Students Deserve used to get their district to defund school police. She and other activists in her group, , are working on informing teachers and parents about police-free schools. 

Bernard said adults have told her that restorative justice costs too much and that schools wouldn’t be safe without police presence. But she and others in the organization are pushing for change.

“School policing is taking away from mental health support of Black students,” Bernard said. “And I feel like without mental health support the cycle of internalized harm and internalized self-doubt will continue.”

This piece originally appeared in in February, 2022 and is published in partnership with the .

“That was a rough year,” said Chad Gauerke, the school principal. Lakeland referred over 6% of its students to police, including the two teenagers, whose separate threats shut down the school for a day.

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Lakeland wasn’t the only Wisconsin district which saw a high level of police involvement that school year. Public schools in Wisconsin referred students to police twice as often as schools nationwide in 2017-18 — nine students were referred to police for every 1,000 students enrolled compared to the national rate of 4.5, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of U.S. Department of Education data found.

Just three states — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia — reported higher rates of referral than Wisconsin.

The analysis of data from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico found that school policing disproportionately affects students with disabilities, Black children and, in some states, Native American and Latino children. Nationwide, Black students and students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement at nearly twice their share of the overall student population.

In Wisconsin, students with disabilities and students of color also bore the brunt of school policing. In 2017-18, Wisconsin was more likely than any other state to refer Native students to law enforcement, reporting a rate over three times higher than the rate of referral for their white peers.

Diana Cournoyer, the executive director of the National Indian Education Association, called the numbers “appalling” and “disturbing.” But, she said, “I’m not surprised. Every Native person knows this, whether you’re in Wisconsin or not.”

That school year, Lakeland was at the top of the list in Wisconsin for referring Native students, and near the top of the list for referring students overall. In addition to the threats, Lakeland students were referred to police in 2017-18 for possessing drugs, alcohol and tobacco, Gauerke said.

Levi Massey, Lakeland’s assistant principal, said the district recognizes the disparity and is working to reverse it with “a school culture that creates a greater acceptance for all our students.”

Lakeland, he explained, is collaborating with a top University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher on “culturally responsive interventions” to reduce the school’s disciplinary issues, especially among Native students.

A key element is strengthening the relationship between Lakeland and the Lac du Flambeau reservation, where up to a third of Lakeland students live.

Massey said there has long been a rift between the tribe and the school district, a remnant of the days when Native children were removed from their homes and sent to government-funded boarding schools. At schools across Wisconsin, including one housing Lac du Flambeau members, children were stripped of their language and culture . An immersion school in northern Wisconsin lost over the generations.

Today, Massey said, “Our goal is to create a presence for our school district in the tribal community, so they can see that we’re all working together to do our best for the students.”

The project, which is in its third year, aims to address disparities across the board. “Lowering referrals,” Massey said, “would be a secondary effect.”

‘Racism and racial disparities continue’

In the 2017-18 school year, the most recent year data are available, the school districts reporting the highest rates of referral were Webster, White Lake, Unity and Lakeland. Lakeland, Webster and Unity also reported high rates of referring Native students, as did the Seymour Community District.

Black students, whose rate of referral in Wisconsin is only slightly below that of Native students, were referred most often in the Sparta Area School District, followed by Sheboygan Falls and Portage Community. (Schools referring fewer than five students in any category were excluded from the analysis.)

As for students with disabilities, White Lake reported the highest rate of referral, followed by the Webster, Rhinelander and the Dodgeville school districts.

Milwaukee’s rate of 7.2 per 1,000 students referred to police was below Wisconsin’s overall referral rate of 9 but higher than the national rate of 4.5. Likewise, Madison’s reported 6.2 students referred per 1,000 was also higher than the national rate.

The Stoughton School District ranked in the top 10 when it came to referring Black students and those with disabilities to the police. Stoughton school spokesperson Molly Shea wrote in an email that the district “has come a long way as a community” through “thoughtful work in the past several years to promote all types of equity, including racial justice.”

But, Shea added, “these instances deeply trouble us. Racism and racial disparities continue to be a problem in our schools and in our community.”

‘Criminalizing’ bad behavior 

The repercussions ripple through communities in urban, suburban and rural areas alike. In 31 states as well as D.C., Black students were referred to law enforcement at more than twice the rate of white students, the Center for Public Integrity analysis found.

These sharp disparities come despite years of mounting pressure on schools to stop policing kids.

“They’re criminalizing some ordinary behavior of students and they’re certainly disproportionately referring students of color to the juvenile justice system rather than disciplining them at school,” said Maura McInerney, legal director at the Education Law Center, a Pennsylvania legal advocacy group.

In 2017, a at the University of California-Irvine found that on-campus arrest rates for children younger than 15 increased in areas where the federal government made grant money available in 1999 for school resource officers — a response to the mass shooting at Columbine High School. The funding was available whether a district struggled with crime or not, which helped researchers tease out the impact.

Nationwide, roughly a quarter of law enforcement referrals lead to arrests, federal data show. But students who aren’t arrested may still be issued citations that require them to appear before judges or other juvenile court system officials. The federal data do not specify what the referral was for, nor the result.

The data also showed students with disabilities are among those more likely to be referred to the police.

“These are kids that school districts have traditionally not done a good job of helping,” said Diane Smith Howard, managing attorney for criminal and juvenile justice for the National Disability Rights Network. “They don’t do a good job, the kids act out and then instead of fixing the problem, they call the police.”

Data, approach can be inconsistent

However, some Wisconsin educators cautioned that the data can be misleading. Reporting standards and annual rates can vary widely by district and by year.

The definition of a law enforcement referral is “really wide open,” said Nathan Hanson, district administrator of the White Lake School District in Langlade County. “It’s kind of up to school districts to figure it out.”

Brandon Robinson, district administrator of the Unity School District in Polk County, agreed. He said that the data from Unity was “inflated” due to the district’s broad interpretation of “law enforcement referral.” In Unity, the term also covers outreach to county social services. The “referral,” Robinson wrote in an email, could simply represent “a conversation with a juvenile justice case worker,” or referral for a student in crisis.

Hanson, who has worked in four different school districts and was responsible for reporting data in one, also noted that different counties can take different approaches to the same disciplinary problems. In some, truancy is reported to social services. In others, the police department is notified.

“When I talked to people around here, it wasn’t uncommon (in 2017-18) to give a police referral for swearing at a teacher — things that are disorderly conduct,” Hanson said. “But now we’d look at handling that in house.”

One academic year also provides a small sample size. Hanson said in small districts like White Lake, rates can fluctuate significantly from year to year. In 2020-21, for example, White Lake reported zero referrals, he said.

Decades of policing students

The roots of school policing reach back to 1948, when formed a that grew into a full-fledged school-based law enforcement agency. In the 1950s posted officers borrowed from city ranks in schools to serve as “liaisons” in an anti-crime strategy. School shootings, including the 1999 Columbine massacre, led to an expansion of this policing. for weapons morphed into crackdowns on kids’ behavior.

Between 2006 and 2018, the share of schools reporting the presence of one or more security officers on-site at least once a week grew from 42% to 61%. The higher the enrollment and proportion of children eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches, the more likely schools are to have security, according to a 2020 report from the U.S. departments of Education and Justice.

Federal funds remain available to schools that want to hire police. And because of the specter of school shootings, many parents, staff and children like to know an armed officer is on site.

The UC-Irvine study found that principals in schools with more officers reported lower rates of criminal incidents. But with that decline came an increased likelihood that children accused of disruptive behavior would come into contact with someone in the criminal justice system rather than a principal or dean of students.

Kristen Devitt, director of the Office of School Safety at the Wisconsin Department of Justice, said schools need to think about why they want police in their schools and the goals their presence will accomplish. She said school resource officers (SROs) should be a resource and support students in their educational journeys on issues such as truancy or dating violence.

“If the goal is to simply enforce the law and to arrest the kids, then a patrol officer could do that, if that was their main goal,” Devitt said. “Occasionally, there may be circumstances where behavior dictates law enforcement response. However, the overriding goal should be that they are building positive relationships with students and that they’re supporting the students, and they’re actually acting as a resource to the school community.”

Devitt said the decision to have police in schools needs to be made by the entire school community, including faculty, administrators — and especially students.

“A student should have a part in that, which I think creates a greater path to understanding and sets the tone that the students in this building are important and they’re important enough to be at the table and be a part of this conversation,” she said.

But Ion Meyn, an assistant professor at the UW Law School, sees no place for police in schools. Meyn, who studies racial disparities in the criminal justice system, said schools are often policed as “white spaces” where misbehavior by children of color is treated more harshly.

“They (police) should not be there,” Meyn said. “I don’t think that makes schools more safe. It doesn’t make students of color feel more safe. 
 I also think that if you have someone there, they’re just more apt to use them, and I think you should try much harder not to.”

Ajamou Butler has worked in schools in Milwaukee and La Crosse for 10 years as part of Heal the Hood MKE and a private consulting firm. Violence can be a problem, Butler said, but police are not necessarily the best equipped to handle it.

“There absolutely needs to be a team of responders who deal with violent outbursts amongst youth,” he said. “But that team of responders needs to be trained in conflict resolution as well as trauma-informed care work.”

Added Butler: “I think that there needs to be a significantly more impactful approach to dealing with youth who have adverse childhood experiences and mental health struggles. Police cannot help in those areas.”

Madison cuts police ties

Increasing outcry and concerns that children of color are targeted have prompted some districts to remove police from schools. The trend quickened after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man, in 2020. The Minneapolis, Oakland, Portland, Oregon and Seattle school systems ended their agreements with local law enforcement agencies. Two of the nation’s largest districts, Chicago and Los Angeles, slashed their budgets, the former by half and the latter by almost a third.

Savion Castro, Madison School District School board vice president, was among the members voting in 2020 to end that district’s contract with the Madison Police Department. Castro, who is Black and has a disability, saw the school resource officer (SRO) program first-hand as a student at Madison’s LaFollette High School from 2009 to 2013.

“I didn’t receive any serious behavioral calls that would usually involve the SRO, but I certainly had friends that did,” Castro recalled. “It pretty much manifested from common misunderstandings amongst students and escalated to larger conflicts, and a staff member would usually call the SRO to help de-escalate that conflict, or they would call the SRO to escort a student out of the classroom. You just kind of had to witness that your peer was being removed out of the classroom for allegedly being disruptive or something like that.”

In Madison, a showed three officers from the Madison Police Department . The then 17-year-old boy had mental health issues and had not taken his medication for several days, . After the young man allegedly threatened to harm a school official, he left West and walked home. The teenager was arrested by officers there after reportedly threatening to harm another person doing construction work at the home, records show.

As the young man’s head was being held down, an officer put a bag, or “spit hood,” over his head and punched the side or back of his head at least three times. In a statement, then-Madison Police Chief Mike Koval said the young man , and “one officer delivered several strikes during the encounter in an attempt to gain control of the subject.” Madison365 did not identify the teen or his family to protect their privacy.

The incident was investigated by Madison police. As of Sept. 22, the department had related to it.

Castro said he wanted police out of Madison schools because of the negative impact their presence can have on Black and brown students and students with disabilities.

“I think what an officer ultimately does, it’s the threat of lethal violence, or of the criminal justice system,” Castro said. “I think it’s just another point of entry in our school systems, where students can be kind of whisked off into this school-to-prison pipeline.”

He added, “I think that there are more healthy, more effective means of helping students navigate conflict amongst each other.”

Virginia cuts police referrals

Some states, Virginia most notably, have also taken steps to slash referrals of children to law enforcement for minor incidents.

A 2015 identified Virginia as the top state for referrals in the 2011-12 school year. The commonwealth’s rate of about 16 referrals per 1,000 students was nearly three times the national rate. The investigation revealed that Virginia middle-school students, some with disabilities, were arrested and charged with crimes such as felony assault on police and obstruction of justice.

In 2020, after years of and multiple reforms, legislators approved a bill making Virginia the first state to from charging students with disorderly conduct at school or school-sponsored events. Legislators also removed language from the state code that educators said contributed to driving up referrals because many believed it obliged them to report any potential crime, including a possible misdemeanor.

Research shows that those early interactions can have lasting effects. A 2020 tracking Seattle Public Schools students over time found lingering effects from middle-school interactions with police.

“Black respondents who experience contact with the police by eighth grade have eleven times greater odds of being arrested when they are 20 years old than their white counterparts,” researchers found.

With the advent of cell phone video, the public has seen indisputable evidence that some officers are injuring or threatening students, including some as young as 5 years old. The Advancement Project, a civil rights organization, documented at least 62 cases between 2010 and 2018 where police officers were accused of assaulting students.

Joanne Juhnke, an advocacy specialist in special education at Disability Rights Wisconsin, said when officers are called, “There is the potential for trauma in an unnecessary and unnecessarily escalated police encounter. It’s a harmful sequence that can really snowball.”

A better alternative, advocates say, would be to increase the number of pupil services professionals in schools, like counselors, psychologists, social workers and nurses. “We need to stop spending scarce funding on (school resource officers) and instead increase funding to bring student support staff to the levels that their professional associations recommend,” Monica Murphy, managing attorney for Disability Rights Wisconsin.

Data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction indicate that the ratio of students to such support staff statewide significantly exceeds the recommendations of national organizations.

Des Moines ends police-school contract

Change also came to places such as Des Moines, Iowa, where the school board ended an agreement of at least two decades with the city police department this winter. During the 2017-18 school year, federal data show that Black students represented 42% of all law enforcement referrals in the district, more than twice their share of the student population.

Deborah VanVelzen, an officer with the Des Moines police department, patrolled the halls at district schools for 15 years before taking on a new role in late 2019 as youth services coordinator for the police department, overseeing youth mentoring and diversion programs.

“We don’t want to send kids to court. That’s not our goal,” VanVelzen said.

But in her current role, she has noticed racial disparities in court referrals.

“It’s there, you can see it compared to what our city’s demographics are,” VanVelzen said. “People have said in the past that it exists. Then you see the stats, and you’re like, ‘OK, it does.’”

The Des Moines district acknowledges that school officials help create and sustain the disparities. Jake Troja, the district’s director of school climate transformation, said it’s not as simple as cancelling a contract with the police department.

“The issue is, systematically, the overuse of law enforcement and underpreparedness of our school system to respond to safety violations and violations of law in an equitable manner,” Troja said.

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In late May, when video began circulating of George Floyd trapped under the knee of a police officer, struggling to breathe, it was the latest reminder of America’s failure to address the racism and brutality that pervades U.S. policing. For those who train and educate law enforcement officials, Floyd’s death — along with the recent police killings of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and other Black Americans — was also a moment of reckoning, prompting some of those educators to examine their role in preparing officers for a profession responsible for so much senseless violence.

In Virginia, where community colleges enrolled some 2,200 students last year in programs designed to train law enforcement officials, school system administrators it was time to review their curricula for future officers. Across the country, in California, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the state’s community college system, called for a similar examination of police training. A few college police academies announced their own reviews.

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In Minnesota, where Floyd was killed, the interim director of the state board overseeing police education a “sweeping action plan” for change, while advocates pressed the legislature to pass reforms, including more investment in de-escalation training. Bills introduced in Congress in recent weeks, and the , both called for more training for law enforcement officials.

But any effort to improve police education will have to contend with the reality that America’s system for training officers is a complex patchwork of hundreds of different programs that operate with virtually no standardization and little oversight. At present, police academies, the shorter-term, skills-based programs for officers, a military-style training model whose leaders have often been dismissive of change, say law enforcement experts. There are few mandates to give officers substantive training in anti-bias, conflict resolution and other approaches that some experts say could help mitigate violence. While efforts to ensure that police are educated about de-escalation and racial bias have gained momentum after Floyd’s death, there’s also a growing sense that training cannot reach very far without a more fundamental reimagining of the role of police.

“There is something about policing itself that makes it very difficult and resistant to reform, that makes things like implicit bias training and de-escalation training something of a dead-end,” said Brendan McQuade, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine who favors . “The problems are so entrenched. They say a few bad apples rot the barrel. The policing barrel is so rotten it’s mush, it’s totally toxic, it’s fermented 
 dump it out and start again.”

Police academies began to an aggressive, military approach to training in the 1960s and 1970s, amid the escalating “war on drugs” and electoral successes of politicians campaigning on “law and order.” While the 1991 beating of Rodney King a shift in some departments toward community policing, which emphasizes positive relationships between officers and citizens, the attacks of 9/11 warrior-style training and prompted police departments to increase their reliance on military equipment.

There is scant data on police education programs, which are operated by a mix of police departments, colleges and other agencies. A 2016 Bureau of Justice Statistics , one of the few on police training, found that 48 percent of police academies followed a military model, compared with 18 percent that emphasized academic achievement. A third balanced the two styles.

“The problem is we treat a police academy kind of like we treat a military boot camp,” said Lorenzo Boyd, a former law enforcement official and the director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven. “We should treat it more like a classroom setting where we’re allowed to ask questions and use critical thinking skills.”

Police recruits in basic training spend a median of 60 hours on firearms instruction and 51 hours on self-defense skills, according to a 2006 Bureau of Justice Statistics . A median of 11 hours is spent on cultural diversity, and eight hours on mediation and conflict resolution. Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that between 2006 and 2013, academies increased the time recruits spent on firearms an average of 8 hours, while time spent on community policing rose by an average of one hour, despite calls for greater focus on this law enforcement approach.

In 2014, after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, then-President Obama set up the Task Force on 21st Century Policing to recommend changes to law enforcement. Among its : encourage the state boards that oversee police training to mandate instruction on crisis intervention, implicit bias, cultural responsiveness, “the disease of addiction” and other topics. But Tracey Meares, a professor at Yale Law School who served on the task force, said it’s impossible to know the degree to which those and other recommendations were implemented because of how little data the federal government collects on policing.

John DeCarlo, a former police chief who directs the master’s program in criminal justice at the University of New Haven, said there ought to be a national curriculum for policing, or a national certification and minimum qualifications for police chiefs at the very least. He also said that federal and state governments should incentivize officers to get higher levels of education, and that more non-cops should be teaching future officers.

“Where cops learn to be cops in the United States is sometimes from TV and that’s where we don’t want them learning to be cops. We want them to be educated. We don’t want them to be mirroring the Dirty Harrys of the world,” said DeCarlo. “I want gender scholars and race scholars and criminal justice scholars to be teaching future cops, not TV.”

Some academies have already moved from a “warrior” approach to a more “guardian” approach. In Washington State, under the direction of former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr, recruits in “procedural justice,” which fairly resolving disputes and winning public trust.

Last year, Northeastern University partnered with the Cambridge Police Department to open a police academy for recruits from across Massachusetts, based on a philosophy of valuing people and human life. Ruben Galindo, the university’s director of public safety who spent 31 years with the Miami-Dade Police Department, said he and the university police chief, Michael Davis, proposed the idea for the new academy because of the “dysfunctional environment” in existing training programs.

While the Massachusetts academies’ curricula had evolved somewhat to meet , said Galindo, the way they operated had not. Instructors bullied and demeaned new recruits and referred to people on the street as “scumbags,” “junkies” and “punks,” he said. “They almost want to break [recruits] down to build them up,” said Galindo of academy instructors, “but we are not preparing officers to go to Vietnam.” While Northeastern’s basic curriculum is the same as that of other programs, its culture is starkly different, he said.

Camden, New Jersey, also altered its approach to training officers after the city’s police department was disbanded in 2013 and replaced with a county-led force. The Camden police department and the community college-run academy from which it recruits now place greater emphasis on conflict resolution, de-escalation and developing awareness of implicit bias, police officials said. Complaints of excessive force dropped from 65 in 2014 to three last year, according to department data. “The whole atmosphere of the academy has changed dramatically since these changes were put in place,” said Donald Borden, president of Camden County College.

President Obama the city in 2015, citing its progress in police reform. Kevin Lutz, a Camden police captain who formerly supervised the department and college’s training, in Minneapolis last year as part of a task force on police reform convened by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. Still, as the news media has looked to Camden as an example of police transformation, many people have that the changes are . For example, members of the local NAACP chapter argue that the police force is whiter and less representative of the city than it was before.

Colleges and accrediting boards that are seeking to re-examine how they instruct and oversee police officers are running up against a lack of detailed standards and data. Glenn DuBois, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System, said that a panel of experts would be examining current curricula because little is known at the state level about what is being taught. In Virginia, the college system runs degree programs designed for future law enforcement officers but does not operate police academies. DuBois said he didn’t have the authority to shut down a program but that he could “ask some pretty uncomfortable questions.”

Ortiz, the chancellor of California’s community college system, which operates academies and degree programs for future officers, said that colleges need to “take personal responsibility and personal accountability. We cannot sit here as educators and say the problem is somewhere else.” If the college system determines that any police academies are not committed to making needed changes to their approach and curricula, he said, “then we need to sever that relationship.”

Erik Misselt, the interim executive director of the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training, which accredits the state’s police education programs, said the board had begun an audit before Floyd’s death to examine the programs and how they compare with those in other places. While the board’s ” require that officers learn about racial bias and conflict resolution and how to respond to people with mental illness, there’s no guidance on how those topics are taught or how much time officers spend on them.

“We know there are changes that need to be made,” said Misselt, “and certainly the need for those changes has been nothing but accelerated with recent events.”

Still, Misselt said Floyd’s death was not a training issue per se. Academies and programs do not teach the tactic used by the officer who pinned Floyd to the ground, he said. “You can have the best training in the world but at the end of the day it comes down to morals, it comes down to the culture of an organization, it comes down to what’s tolerated,” Misselt said.

And, in some ways, Minnesota’s system for educating officers is, at least on paper, more progressive than those in many states. Since the late 1970s, it has required that officers have at least a two-year college degree. (Most of the officers in Floyd’s death held college degrees.) Serving in the military also fulfills that requirement.

Part of the problem is that police officers can find ways to secure training outside of what is approved by the state. In 2019, the Minneapolis mayor a warrior-style training course after the officer charged with shooting Philando Castile was found to have attended it. (The training was run by an individual and not credentialed by the board Misselt oversees.) The police union president was that he pledged to find ways to continue making the class available to interested officers.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota and around the country, calls to dismantle the police are growing louder. A majority of the Minneapolis City Council has pledged to disband the police force and create a new system of public safety.

If the role and responsibilities of police narrow, said Misselt, officer training will adapt too.

He noted that some police officers question why their work has ballooned to encompass emergency services like intervening in family disputes and responding to people who are experiencing a mental health crisis. As an officer, he would sometimes respond to 911 calls from parents who wanted help getting their child out of bed and to school. “Why on earth is a police officer being called into that situation?” he said.

“I do push back a little bit when people say it’s entirely a policing or a training issue,” said Misselt. “Society needs to decide whether we are going to put funding and the appropriate resources toward the other social issues that we’re all dealing with. That’s not a place for a police officer. That’s not what a police officer’s job was ever meant to be.”

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