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 — 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 .

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 The 74.

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.��

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.’ ”

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