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 .

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

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

“This is the George Floyd effect,” said criminal justice researcher Shawn Bushway, who pulled up a calculator during a telephone interview with The 74 and crunched the federal survey data against that removed cops from their buildings, which collectively served more than 1.7 million students. 

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

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

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

“Their loved ones deserved better,” he said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Safety threats on the decline

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think the evidence is increasingly supporting the notion that police don’t belong in schools,” report author Ben Fisher, an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The 74. Removing officers who have been there for years, he said, may cause problems of its own. “If we’re going to get police out of schools, which I think is the right long-term vision and short-term vision, I think we need to do it thoughtfully with plans in place to make schools welcoming and supportive.” 

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

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

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

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

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