In 1975, only . Today, 44% do. A large reason for the increase is the , which led to the creation of the federal Community Oriented Policing Services to oversee funds for the hiring of police in schools. Another reason is the in 1999. From the federal government down to individual districts, the idea that schools need police officers to keep kids safe is prevalent.

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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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. 

Just two days before students returned to classes at the coastal district east of Orlando, Ivey plans to equip his team of school-based deputies with collapsible rifles strapped to their chests. The move was a direct response to the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers and brought a tragic end to the last school year. Now, as students file back into classrooms across the country, this back-to-school season has come with a heightened focus on school security, with districts increasing the presence of police, installing new and, in one district, bringing in a gun-detecting dog. 

Ivey took the back-to-school security rush further than most, arguing in the video that “if you do not meet violence with violence, you will be violently killed.” 

To help campus cops fight back against any would-be gunmen, Ivey announced that his department with collapsible stocks. Kel-Tec, a Brevard County-based firearm manufacturer, says semi-automatic 9mm rifle “picks up where handguns leave off,” utilizing a folding carbine with “more pistol magazine options than a cat has lives.”  The weapons retail for about $600 each. 

“Sun Tzu says in The Art of War that every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought,” said Ivey, a group of extremist law enforcement officers with . “What Sun Tzu meant was that you must outsmart, out strategize, outtrain and out prepare your opponent long before the battle is ever fought.” 

Mass school shootings have long motivated efforts to bolster the ranks of campus cops and school security, yet as the tragedies continue unabated, there’s little evidence to suggest the strategies are effective in mitigating or preventing bloodshed. Ben Fisher, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin whose research focuses on the intersection of education and criminal justice, questioned the efficacy of rifle-toting school resource officers and other school-hardening measures.

“It seems to me like yet another overreaction to the issue of gun violence in schools, one that feels like putting a Band-Aid on a problem that keeps happening rather than addressing the source,” Fisher said. 

In Uvalde, a close-knit, predominantly Hispanic town still reeling from the May rampage, to buildings with 8-foot “non-scalable” perimeter fences, new surveillance cameras and upgraded doors and locks after the security apparatus at Robb Elementary School was criticized for a fatal collapse at multiple levels. Meanwhile, the state Department of Public Safety in Uvalde schools at the district’s request.

The changes come after a into the Uvalde shooting found “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making,” including a culture where doors were routinely left unlocked and a disorganized, chaotic police response. In total, 376 law enforcement officers from the local, state and federal levels — many of them heavily armed — descended on the campus but failed to subdue the gunman for more than an hour, a delay that may have cost lives. Last month, the Uvalde school , the disgraced chief of the district’s tiny police force, and officials “intruder detection audits” at every district across Texas. Last week, state officials announced an investigation into the actions of five Texas Department of Public Safety officers who responded to the shooting, two of whom have been suspended. 

The school security rush this summer stretched across every corner of the country. In Ohio, lawmakers passed a policy that allows teachers to carry guns in class after just 24 hours of training. In Marion County, Florida, the sheriff’s office — a German short-haired pointer that was trained to sniff out firearms and ammunition on campuses. At America’s largest school district, in New York City, officials last week and training of additional unarmed school safety agents and enhance emergency preparedness training for school leaders. It also conducted audits of 1,400 campuses, identifying some 1,300 issues with security features like door locks, panic buttons and public address systems, pledging all would be fixed when schools opened Sept. 8. 

In late June, President Joe Biden signed into law the nation’s first new gun control measures in 30 years, which include an additional $300 million in federal grants for campus security while also allocating more money for student mental health services. 

Meanwhile, Ivey said the in-your-face weaponry being deployed in Brevard County Schools was meant to send a message, offering a “tactical appearance that clearly signifies that we mean business.” 

Yet, the rifles were nowhere to be found on students’ first day of school on Aug. 10. Activists with the local group Families for Safe Schools surveyed parents from across the county about whether they’d seen school-based officers with the new rifles and “so far it’s been a resounding no,” said Jabari Hosey, the group’s president and a father of three elementary school-aged children in the district. 

“It’s just a joke,” said Hosey, who favors armed police in schools but believes the move to equip them with rifles is a step too far. “He put the cart before the horse. Apparently they don’t have all of the equipment they need.”

In an interview, sheriff’s office spokesperson Tod Goodyear acknowledged the rifles hadn’t yet been implemented but will “probably roll out in stages.” 

“It may have been announced out a little bit before everything was really ready,” said Goodyear, who blamed the delay partly on the need to train deputies on how to use the weapons. “All of the rifles weren’t produced and all of that, so that may be a little bit of the holdup.”

‘Do something’

The rush to harden schools post-Uvalde is, in many ways, the continuation of a decades-long trend. Mass school shootings — which are devastating but statistically rare — have consistently prompted increases in school-based police and security infrastructure. 

School security and policing measures generally see widespread support from the public. A recent poll by the education nonprofit PDK International found a resounding 80% of adults favor the presence of armed police in schools, including 94% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats. 

Whether such efforts make kids safer, however, remains a contentious debate. Existing research “does not, as a whole, yield support for school policing as an effective strategy to improve safety and security,” the National Institute of Justice, the Department of Justice’s research arm, . Similarly, there’s a dearth of research to suggest that school hardening efforts have made schools safer, of security technology by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. As the tragedies generate headlines and fierce political debates, local education officials often face significant pressure to act — often on quick timelines. 

“If horrific enough, these incidents can lead to increases in funding with a short spending window,” the Johns Hopkins report notes. “This curbs the ability of districts to conduct even limited evaluation and frequently results in the purchase of technology to demonstrate a strong commitment to ‘doing something.’” 

The school security industry was with business growth largely dependent on the frequency and severity of mass school shootings, according to a recent report by the market research firm .

While armed police have become a regular presence in U.S. schools, officers are generally equipped with pistols, a reality their proponents argue leaves campus cops at a tactical disadvantage during active shootings. That has led to a push, in Brevard County and elsewhere, to fight firepower with firepower. Leading supporters of school-based police say the development is necessary to ensure officers aren’t out-gunned, but critics say it’s the latest escalation of school militarization and could put students at greater risk of harm. 

The collapsible stock on the rifles being deployed in Brevard County schools puts the deputies “on par with what we’re facing,” without being overly cumbersome, sheriff spokesperson Goodyear said. Goodyear went a step further in contemplating the everyday drawbacks to arming school police with heavy weaponry, including AR-15s, the assault-style rifle favored by many mass shooters. 

“Unless you go down to a submachine gun, maybe you could carry that, but then now you’re talking about putting an automatic rifle into somebody’s hands,” Goodyear said. “But with an AR-15 or along those lines of that type of weapon, it’s a fairly large weapon and the only way you can carry it is on a sling over your shoulder. It’s not practical, your hands aren’t free, it’s going to get in the way.”

In Madison County, North Carolina, the sheriff found a compromise, AR-15 rifles in safes at each of the county’s six campuses — a move that gun control advocates “absolute insanity.” But Sheriff Buddy Harwood said the semi-automatic rifles were critical to keep kids safe. 

“Having just a deputy armed with a handgun isn’t enough to stop these animals,” Harwood said in . With the AR-15s, “my school resource officers will not have to wait, retreat or have to leave the situation to get the weaponry to deal with the threat.”

The approaches in Brevard and Madison counties each have pros and cons, said Mo Canady, executive director of the Alabama-based National Association of School Resource Officers. 

“I’m not sure that, as a society, we’re generally ready to see law enforcement officers on a consistent basis walking around with a long gun strapped onto one shoulder” while patrolling school hallways, he said. Storing rifles in safes gives school-based police additional weaponry during an active shooting — but only if they have a chance to retrieve them. While he opposes giving school-based officers an “overly militaristic look,” he said a collapsible rifle like the Kel-Tec could be a “happy medium” if it’s “not something that’s sticking out there obvious all of the time.” 

But he said that rifles, which are generally more accurate than pistols, could grow more common as schools continue to be confronted by heavily armed gunmen. 

“If you have to take a shot in a school environment,” he said, “you’d darn well better hit your target.” 

‘A militarized vibe’

Kel-Tec markets its collapsible SUB2000 rifle for its convenience, noting on the company website that “it tucks away nicely in situations where space is limited, but it’s quick to deploy in situations where time is of the essence.” 

But the same features that could make it an attractive option for school-based police could be exploited by mass shooters. In fact, the weapon has already made an appearance at . After a gunman opened fire on an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois with an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle, authorities found the suspect also had . Last year, a student at Daytona’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University — just 60 miles north of the Kel-Tec headquarters in Cocoa —  was to “enact a Columbine” on campus. When police stopped the suspect outside his apartment, he reportedly had a SUB2000 concealed in his backpack that he’d recently purchased on Facebook Marketplace. 

Kel-Tec executives didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Hosey, of the Brevard Families for Safe Schools group, said he generally supports school-based police, but he and other parents were caught off guard when the sheriff announced the new Kel-Tecs. 

“It gave us a militarized vibe,” he said, and could lead students to fear their school resource officers because people often associate heavily armed police officers with active-shooter situations. “What we don’t want is kids to see this and assume that they’re in danger and that there’s an imminent threat.” 

When asked about the presence of rifles in Brevard County schools, district spokesperson Russell Bruhn said in an email that “the sheriff’s office is our security expert,” and declined to comment further. 

School-based police have long been positioned as members of school communities who foster positive relationships with students. But having a rifle so visibly present on deputies’ chests sends “messages about aggression and the potential for violence when we know that violence in schools, especially with guns, is exceedingly rare,” said Fisher of the University of Wisconsin.  

In fact, there’s a lack of research to suggest that a school shooting was particularly fatal because campus police lacked “military weaponry,” said attorney Miriam Rollin, a director at the National Center for Youth Law. Despite the police failures in Uvalde, she said the push to arm school-based officers with rifles is just the latest escalation in campus hardening and isn’t a far leap from “tanks going down school hallways.” 

“Generally with an arms race, nobody wins,” Rollin said. “I have to say, this is no exception.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A year of disrupted schooling’ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Absolutely a dance’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The task force released a to accompany the policy statement. It is dense reading, but its purpose is to formalize NEA’s support for “evidence-based behavioral practices centered in the philosophy of restorative justice over the criminalization and policing of students.”

To achieve that goal, the union demands an end to supplying military weapons and technology to school police, and to the construction of “prison-like school environments that employ metal detectors, random searches, and other building and design elements that diminish a thriving and nurturing school climate.”

While the policy does not call for an outright ban on police in schools, it makes numerous arguments against their presence, and demands limits on the growth of the school resource officer (SRO) workforce.

NEA sees this as a racial justice issue, stating that “Native, Asian, Black, Latin(o/a/x), Middle Eastern and North African, Pacific Islander, and Multiracial students, including those who identify as LGBTQ+, have disabilities, and/or are English language learners are in greater jeopardy in schools with a presence of police and law enforcement.” (NEA communications policy requires the listing of these groups in this exact order, rather than using a collective term.)

The report states specifically that the presence of uniformed, armed law enforcement and security personnel on school campuses has the effect of criminalizing students. The task force asserts that “there is no proof that SROs prevent school shootings,” and that “SROs have shot and killed students, tasered students, tackled and punched students in the head, sprayed students with pepper spray, choked students, thrown students to the ground, and thrown students against walls and lockers.”

How did the situation reach this point? The task force reports that in the 1990s false or exaggerated reports of rising juvenile crime prompted politicians to pour millions of dollars into school policing programs.

The report doesn’t mention those politicians by name, but one of them was , who, in introducing a multi-year appropriation for the federal Cops in Schools program in June 2001, said, “Let’s give school resource officers to every school that wants one. Let’s give parents a little peace of mind that their kids are safe when they get on that school bus and head off to learn. Let’s give teachers a hand in maintaining order in their classrooms.”

Sen. Biden said his amendment was endorsed by the National Education Association.

Nowhere in the NEA task force’s report will you find any mention of the union’s role in advocating for efforts to put more cops in schools. Laudatory stories NEA staffers wrote about SROs were long ago. One such post, from 2011, noted that “so-called ‘hard’ responses are sometimes necessary. These include metal detectors, surveillance cameras, evacuation drills, and allowing police officers to work on campus.”

In January 2013, after the Sandy Hook massacre, President Obama proposed legislation which, among other things, appropriated $150 million to hire SROs. .

NEA wasn’t simply an observer when it comes to school resource officers. An estimated 4,000 of them are NEA members, and the .

Just as the NEA has apparently changed its mind about police in schools, it has also started promoting the idea that schools are unsafe environments for its members. cites a study claiming “one-third of teachers report that they experienced at least one incident of verbal harassment or threat of violence from students during the pandemic.”

The task force report does make one small nod toward accountability. It notes that educators show a tendency to use SROs to handle student misconduct.

“Most often, it will be educators — administrators, counselors, teachers, ESPs, and other adults on campus — who precipitate the criminalization of school behavior,” the report states.

Finding a proper security balance that keeps students and teachers safe, while greatly reducing abuses, is a daunting task. But we should be skeptical about recommendations from the same folks who helped bring us to this pass.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

“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  – 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 .

“Not very good aim,” responds Randy Boyden, a school resource officer with the police department in South St. Paul, Minnesota, called in for backup that day by school staff.

“What are you going to do?” the brash fourth-grader spits back before taking another shot. 

Sydney, a victim of child abuse and neglect whose real name The 74 is shielding, suffers from multiple disorders and, as a result, struggles to regulate her behavior and emotions. She fell into an hours-long fit of rage that day after not wanting to go to Spanish class, including wielding a pair of scissors, throwing a chair against a classroom window and biting and kicking her teacher. She landed blows on several of the adults in the room and by the time the cops arrived, school staff had already restrained Sydney in an effort to de-escalate the situation.

“If you get it into my mouth, I’ll eat it,” Boyden tells the overwrought girl in an exchange that student disabilities experts saw as taunting and one called “really disturbing.”

Sydney throws two more crackers before she climbs onto a high cabinet, rips a speaker off the wall and flings it to the ground. At this moment, it seems most likely the student could hurt herself, yet it isn’t until she scampers down and jabs a SMART Board with a marker that the adults move in.

Special education teacher Tony Phillips and school Principal Terry Bretoi grab her by the elbows, force her to walk in circles and then lower her to the ground. As they press down on her arms and shoulders, Boyden and another police officer, Mellissa Cavalier, join in. The officers hold Sydney to the carpet by her kneecaps as she tries to break free, squirming and whimpering in distress. Eventually, she lets go of the marker, stops resisting and her 75-pound body goes limp. 

The final physical struggle inside her elementary school involving the police lasts for nearly six, difficult-to-watch minutes. Students like Sydney, Black and in special education, are among the most likely in the U.S. to be physically restrained in school. Except for the occasional cell phone video, however, the highly controversial tactic is rarely witnessed by outsiders. In Sydney’s case, the video documentation recorded on police body cameras is even more remarkable because it captures the second time in little more than a week that educators and those same two officers physically restrained the disabled girl during a mental health crisis.

Just eight days earlier, after she ran out of school, six adults dragged her by the limbs and forced her into the back of a police car where they locked her inside as she put words to her misery. 

“I hate school, I hate work and I want to die,” she says. “That’s what’s wrong.”

This story is based on records provided exclusively to The 74 by Sydney’s adoptive parents, including the police body-cam footage, audio recordings, police reports, special education reports, disciplinary records and other documents. The videos, after being edited to obscure Sydney’s identity, were shared with experts who commented for this story. The 74 sought out the officers and school staff in the videos, some of whom have since changed jobs or plan to soon. They either did not respond or declined to be interviewed.

After watching videos from both incidents, special education attorney Wendy Tucker said they reaffirmed ’s opposition to police presence in schools, particularly when it comes to their interactions with children who are disabled. When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in nearby Minneapolis, it generated a national conversation about police use of force. Dozens of districts nationwide cut ties with the police, who

“This video demonstrates front and center the problem of mixing kids with disabilities and police officers,” said Tucker, the national nonprofit’s senior policy director. “This girl is the poster child for removing law enforcement from schools.” 

Imminent danger vs. property damage

For Sydney’s adoptive parents, whose real names were also changed to protect their daughter, the video footage from the two incidents in the winter of 2019 spurred a years-long campaign to hold officials accountable for the girl’s cuts, bruises and mental scars. In response, the Minnesota Department of Education found that school staff violated state law, but officers never faced similar sanctions. In late February, the education department sent a letter notifying Sydney’s parents that they would investigate an allegation that she “may have been mentally injured” by school staff.

Robert, the girl’s father, said that educators and police had only intensified his daughter’s struggles — a reality he said reflects America’s bleak mental health system. Rather than understanding the girl’s disabilities and calming the situation, he charged, they responded with excessive force and a desire to take control. It remains unclear the degree to which the two school resource officers were trained in how to de-escalate situations involving children with disabilities.

“Police aren’t designed to respond to this type of thing, it’s not their job,” Robert said. “Their job is to find the killer, it’s to stop the speeding car that robbed a bank. It’s not necessarily to respond to the school for a 9-year-old that’s having a mental health crisis.” 

Educators and police were clearly placed in a volatile situation with Sydney. Federal law requires school officials to accommodate Sydney and other children with special needs, but some educators have acknowledged they struggle to support students with the most significant behavioral health issues. Sydney’s case highlights those complexities and the challenges educators face when thrust into these highly fraught interactions. 

Sheldon Greenberg, a former police officer and education professor at Johns Hopkins University, offered a different assessment of how the police interacted with Sydney. Good officers have “an incredible sixth sense about people’s behavior” and follow a “use-of-force spectrum” that begins with verbal persuasion and moves up to physical confrontation. Officers can generally de-escalate situations without physical force, Greenberg said, and in responding to Sydney, the officers “followed the spectrum beautifully.” 

“They were patient, there was gentle talk in the beginning,” he said. Ultimately, he said that officers must assess crisis situations and prevent them from escalating. 

Sydney, already debilitated by childhood trauma, said she tries hard to forget about the times school staff and campus cops grabbed her arms and legs and held her down — at times in violation of state education law. 

“I just feel comforted knowing that I’m out of that school,” said Sydney, who switched elementary schools just weeks after the incidents and is now in middle school. She reflected on the source of her outbursts, which have grown less frequent. “I feel unloved and stuff, and a lot of sad and dark feelings.” 

Thousands of students in Minnesota and across the country are despite efforts to curtail a practice that’s led to injuries and, in rare cases, death. In Minnesota, state law only allows educators to restrain disabled children in emergency situations where someone is in imminent danger of physical harm. Experts questioned whether Sydney’s behavior had reached that threshold and said that school officials appeared more concerned with preventing property damage. 

During the part of the incident inside the special education classroom captured on video, officials didn’t use physical force until she stabbed at the costly SMART Board. The state banned student in 2013. 

Robert believes that physical restraints are necessary when children present imminent danger to themselves or others. But in their interactions with Sydney, he believes the adults responded excessively. Rather than protecting Sydney, the police and school staff assaulted her, Robert alleged, and falsely imprisoned her when they secluded her in the back of the squad car.

“It wasn’t just the police trying to force her into the back of a police car,” Robert said, adding that school staff were similarly at fault. “Why, in this case, are they saying to the school employees, ‘Yeah, let’s force her into the back of the car — you can help.’”

The South St. Paul Public Schools acknowledged that they changed their practices after the state Education Department found they violated the law in restraining Sydney. The district said student privacy rules prohibited them from discussing the case further. The South St. Paul Police Department cleared the officers of any wrongdoing, the police chief said.

‘Such an extreme’

Both of the officers had interacted with Sydney before and knew at least some of her history. One of them, Cavalier, was there on one of the worst days: When the little girl was placed into foster care. Yet in the footage, she dismisses the girl’s distress as a desire to stay home and watch movies. 

“That’s the whole thing,” Cavalier says while Sydney is locked in the car, “she doesn’t want to be in school today.” 

Sydney was born with fetal alcohol syndrome to a mother whose losing battle with addiction had forced the family into homelessness. A victim of physical abuse and neglect, she was placed with her adoptive family after school staff watched her biological mother hit Sydney with a belt during a February 2017 meeting on campus, according to police records. Though school officials called police — including Cavalier — to the scene, Robert said their failure to immediately intervene shattered his adopted daughter’s trust in them.

“Nobody in the room made attempts to stop that from happening,” he said. “The principal was there and didn’t stop it immediately.”

On the same day Sydney was beaten by her mother and humiliated at school, Robert and Julia, who had begun the process to become foster parents, got the call: Sydney was in need of emergency placement. The couple scrambled to open their home as refuge to a child they knew little about. They fed her McDonald’s, collected her belongings — a teddy bear, hair brushes and clothes that had grown too tight — in a small pink bin and introduced her to their dogs Lucy, Finley and Lola. Lucy, a Pomeranian seemingly aware of the girl’s recurring nightmares, slept in Sydney’s bedroom every night for a year. 

By that time, Sydney, then 6, already had a history of school suspensions for aggressive behavior. First-time parents, Robert and Julia learned almost immediately that Sydney was struggling to identify and control her emotions. 

“Her body doesn’t know what the emotion she’s feeling is,” Robert said. “If you’re having this emotion and you don’t know what it is, she would tend to panic and freak out. Instead of going, ‘I feel sad, I feel happy,’ she didn’t know what those emotions actually were.” 

In addition to fetal alcohol syndrome, Sydney was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, ADHD and , a serious condition that results when children’s basic needs for comfort, affection and care are not met. She was placed in special education, but Sydney’s parents said that school staff failed to fully comprehend the root causes of her outbursts, and instead wrote them off as willful misbehavior. The can mimic misbehavior, and Tucker, of The Center for Learner Equity, said it’s critical for educators to recognize that such actions are a form of communication. 

“When they’re communicating that they’re struggling or they’re having a hard time, the worst thing that you can do is exacerbate that by physically holding them down and taking more control from them,” she said. 

Sydney, who attends myriad therapies, said she’s “just matured a little bit” since the incidents in the video. Her parents say she’s made significant progress and they are not aware of any restraints in school since then. To her, there was no confusion about the source of her meltdowns. 

“I guess some trauma,” the self-aware 11-year-old said in an interview, adding that her biological mother was frequently absent and in jail. “So I guess, kind of neglect.”

Once in her new home, Sydney’s outbursts continued and Robert and Julia were getting beaten up as they tried to calm her, including the time Julia had to get stitches after getting hit in the lip. Such scenes may have deterred others, but for the couple, who would adopt Sydney in 2018, the bond had already been forged.

“We fell in love with her the first week she was here,” Robert said. “It was ‘This kid is so cool, I love this kid.’ Part of me didn’t want her to ever leave.”

Still, her behaviors were a force to be reckoned with, so they signed up for a training program on crisis prevention, which included instruction on de-escalation and how to use physical restraints. Parents don’t generally enroll in the program, which is designed for special education teachers and emergency responders. The course, Robert said, was “one of the best things that we have done.”

Ironically, at the same time the couple was attending a December 2019 , school staff called to report that Sydney was in crisis. Once they obtained the police body-cam footage of her getting pinned to the floor in the special education classroom, Robert and Julia said it was their training that allowed them to conclude that the restraints placed on their daughter differed drastically from what they had been taught.

‘Nowhere in [the training course] does it say ‘hold down their kneecaps and their elbows and their wrists, and twist them up,’” Julia said. “You have four adults on her already. Why do they go to such an extreme?”

‘Do we need to handcuff you?’

On the day she would find herself locked in a cop car, Sydney had been struggling in math class, so she fled. Overwhelmed, she bolted from school and stood in a nearby street, where she attempted to get struck by oncoming traffic. 

Yet officials don’t use force until she throws what her suspension report describes as “landscaping blocks.” One block comes close to striking Phillips, the special education teacher. Another clobbers a parked pickup truck. 

That’s when officer Cavalier gives Sydney an ultimatum — go back to school or wait in the back of her squad car — before tugging on the girl by her arm. 

“We can’t damage people’s property and we can’t hurt anybody,” Cavalier says before the girl tries to kick free and drops to her knees in the middle of the street. Together, Cavalier, Boyden and four school employees grab her arms and legs and force her into the car, where she puts up a fight. As she tries to escape from the back seat, Sydney at one point reaches for Boyden’s gun. 

“Do we need to handcuff you?” Cavalier asks Sydney in response. “I don’t want to do that but you can’t just start grabbing things that don’t belong to you.” 

Greenberg, the Johns Hopkins professor, said the public generally sees police use-of-force during extreme, worst-case scenarios. Though he said the video footage involving Sydney provides a limited window into those incidents, he felt the officers “showed incredible restraint before applying restraint.” 

“You can tell when someone is reaching a point that harm to self or harm to others is about to occur,” he said. “You just know it, you feel it and you know you have to do something to minimize that harm.”

Police officers who are stationed inside schools full time generally are given much greater discretion than educators in how they respond to disruptive students. Just last year, efforts in Minnesota to adopt modest regulations to officers’ restraint practices in schools fell short. State legislation would have prohibited cops from placing students in the face-down “prone restraint,” — like the one used on George Floyd — and would have required them to receive the same training as school staff. The state education department, which endorsed the reforms, will continue to promote the changes, assistant commissioner Daron Korte, who oversees student support services, told The 74.

“We just wanted to make sure that there’s at least a minimum level of training,” that officers know how to use safe restraint techniques and understand “that this should be used in a last-ditch emergency situation,” he said. 

While some advocates oppose all forms of student restraints, Robert and Julia believe that physical holds are necessary in some emergency situations if done properly. When Sydney was in the street, for example, school staff could have used a brief hold to move her to the grass. They also could have moved her to a room in the school with a padded floor and a mini-trampoline. Instead, they dragged her by the limbs and locked her in the back of the police car.

“Why would you let a child who says ‘I’m going to kill myself’ and ‘I’m going to go sit in that street and I’m going to get hit by a car,’ why wouldn’t you restrain them at that point so they don’t commit suicide?” Julia asked. “We’re not necessarily against restraint, but you have to have trusted people who are well trained, who are doing it with dignity and have the right intentions.” 

Similar situations have come up in the past. In 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union sued a Kentucky sheriff’s deputy for handcuffing two elementary school students above the elbow who were acting out as a result of their disabilities. One incident was captured in a viral cell phone video. That case ended with . In 2020, the city of Flint, Michigan, a lawsuit accusing an officer of excessive force when he handcuffed a disabled 7-year-old boy for roughly an hour after he ran around on school bleachers and kicked a supply cart during an afterschool program. 

In Sydney’s case, West Resendes, a legal fellow with the ACLU’s disability rights program, said school staff used improper restraint techniques in both incidents to control the girl’s disability-related behaviors and shouldn’t have called the police for help. In their interactions with Sydney, he said that officials treated her “not as a human being but as an object” and were unclear about why she was being restrained.

“Seeing the male officer egg her on about not having good aim or wasting crackers was really disturbing — and it predictably and directly led to an escalation of the situation,” Resendes said.

‘Make sure that this doesn’t happen again’

Sydney is Black and her adoptive parents are white — a reality the couple said gave them a new perspective on the police and racial bias. On multiple occasions, her outbursts have prompted aggressive police responses. 

During one episode at the Mall of America, officers accused Robert of trying to abduct his daughter, he said. On another occasion, Robert had a gun pulled on him by a cop who mistook an exchange in the family car between him and a distraught Sydney as an assault. 

Though officers backed off once they understood the context, Robert thought the cop might shoot him. In 2016, that same officer was involved in the fatal shooting of a man in crisis outside a McDonald’s restaurant. He was shot 15 times. 

Sydney’s parents and special education advocates said that race was a likely factor in how educators and police responded and believe she may have been treated differently if she were white. 

Dave Webb, the district superintendent, declined to be interviewed but said in an email that the district does not use physical restraints to discipline students. He acknowledged they had to update their restraint procedures to match state law after the two incidents with Sydney but said they had not been held liable for using the tactic in a way that is racially discriminatory. 

“The district takes its obligation to comply with the laws governing restrictive procedures very seriously and provides ongoing training to its staff to comply with those legal requirements,” Webb said. 

Years of federal education data have found that students of color — especially those with disabilities — are disproportionately restrained in schools. In Minnesota, Black students were 11.8 percent of students in special education during the 2019-20 school year but were subjected to 27 percent of the physical holds documented in schools, . 

That school year, the latest for which state data is available, student restraints dropped by 25 percent, a change officials attributed to the pandemic as students learned from home during the second half of the year.

Initially, educators’ responses “looked textbook” when they talked calmly and tried to comfort Sydney, said Joshua Ladd, a staff attorney at the Minnesota Disability Law Center, but he faulted school staff for allowing police officers to take the lead in both situations as if they “had given up and just decided to start watching.” Ladd said that school staff were clearly unable to support Sydney’s needs and that her behaviors — such as bolting from class — were a form of communication. 

“I would describe her communication as saying ‘I’m not safe here and I can’t trust adults because adults have let me down my entire life,’” he said. “‘I have learned to protect myself and take care of myself because the adults around me have failed me.’”

After acquiring the body-cam footage, Sydney’s parents filed a formal complaint and a state education department investigation found that school staff broke the law when they restrained the girl in “non-emergency” situations, among other violations. The officers never faced any repercussions. Both incidents were investigated but no disciplinary action was taken against the two school resource officers, South St. Paul Police Chief William Messerich wrote in an email. He declined to comment further.

District officials were required to undergo training and update school policy to make clear that staff could not restrain kids to “prevent serious property damage” consistent with state law. They also required school staff to reassess Sydney’s special education services. 

“It already happened, there’s nothing you can do to go back in time to stop that from happening,” Korte, the assistant commissioner, said of the incidents. But moving forward, district staff were required to develop a strategy “to make sure that this didn’t happen again.”

Sydney’s parents were left longing for more. The interventions did little to help their daughter’s suffering, they said, or to hold officials accountable for pinning her to the ground. Robert, a mechanic, and Julia, a teacher, considered suing the district and the police, but were discouraged by the cost of hiring an attorney. 

A could result in educators losing their licenses. Robert said he filed multiple complaints against the educators who restrained Sydney but the state initially declined to open an inquiry. He said that changed just weeks ago after Sydney’s therapy team submitted a report stating that she suffered trauma directly related to the restraints at school. 

The investigation raises the possibility that Sydney’s parents may get confirmation of something they’ve long maintained — that their daughter was abused in a manner that went beyond poor training or outdated policy.

They realize ​​other parents of disabled children never get near that level of resolution — and believe they may not have either without video evidence.

“How many kids, how many nonverbal kids, does it happen to?” Robert asked. “Kids that can’t go home and tell their parents ‘Yeah, there were four adults pinning me to the ground today.’ They just come home and destroy the house and the parents are left wondering what is going on.”

Alberto Carvalho, who took over as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District just two weeks ago, wasted little time in setting ambitious goals for his new administration. In a unveiled last week, he said he would focus on academic recovery and consider shifting funds from the district’s expensive COVID testing program to pay for it. 

He also wants to reduce class sizes, expand early learning and streamline hiring to address staff shortages. The agenda, which he discussed during a virtual welcome reception Thursday, came after an already jam-packed two weeks in which he attended his first school board meeting, met with each one of the district’s union presidents and taught two biology classes. 

The nation is watching whether the success Carvalho had as the 14-year superintendent of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools will follow him to the nation’s second-largest school district. In December, the school board to hire the award-winning leader, with board Vice President Nick Melvoin calling him “the right person to lead L.A. Unified students out of this pandemic into a better future.”

On Friday, he spoke to The 74 about his plan to live up to those high expectations. “I’m very optimistic about the possibility in Los Angeles,” he told The 74’s Linda Jacobson. “If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I chose L.A. as much as L.A. chose me. I have never failed. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve erred. I’ve tripped. I’ve fallen, but failure is not in my DNA.” 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Talk a little bit about declining enrollment, which fell by in Los Angeles this year. What’s on your agenda for getting families to come back and attracting new families?

Alberto Carvalho: That’s not unique to L.A., nor New York or Chicago — or most urban centers across America. Affordability has been significantly diminished and wages have not kept pace. That has forced families to move, and when the family moves, they don’t leave the kid behind. There has been significant internal mobility that has shifted membership in and out at the school system. 

Then there is this third arena that really concerns me — families and students that have completely disappeared. Calls have been met with disconnected phone lines and knocks at the door. The neighbor does not know. We are beginning to learn anecdotally that some of these families may have had a fragile immigration status. They made decisions as a result of prior immigration protocols and obviously have not returned. It’s a complex issue. Other parents have pulled students from the public school system and moved to their second home because they could afford a second home and pay for private tuition.

Now the solution: In L.A., if you want choice, you have magnets and you have charters. Then there are district-affiliated charters and independent schools. Whoever decided to restrict choice on the basis of those parameters? There are single-gender schools, career academies. Choice does not need to conform to magnet or charter. Where are the programs in L.A. where we see long waiting lists of parents? Why aren’t we expanding more of those programs to where the demand is?

You’re talking about more of those programs in neighborhood schools?

Correct. Have we done an analysis about the amount of time a child is on the bus to get to that one program that really motivates him or her — that great engineering program, fine arts, performing arts, cybersecurity, robotics, STEAM, STEM, dual language, dual enrollment, International Baccalaureate, Cambridge, whatever?

I can fill an entire wall with a repertoire of options for parents. Why aren’t we offering all of that? L.A. Unified is a much bigger district than Miami. L.A. Unified has about 300 magnet programs. Miami-Dade offers 1,100 choice options. We have work to do. If we don’t do that, we will continue to bleed out students because parents are living in a reality where they have an entitlement to choice. If we don’t do that, it is tantamount to burying our head in the sand as a tsunami of choice washes over us. I choose to ride the top of it. I think it’s better for kids, it’s better for communities, and that is one of the key elements of reenergizing interest in our public school system.

On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance on masking, saying schools can drop mandates when COVID-19 risk is medium or low. Any reaction?

We learned that the state of California and the CDC are relaxing protocols with one significant exception — . But conditions have improved significantly in our community as a function of good weather, but also because of the insistence on vaccination, on masking, on testing. We are waiting now on additional data from the county but also guidance from Sacramento specific to school protocols. One of the elements that we are carefully analyzing right now is the possibility of relaxing testing protocols particularly at the secondary level. It’s a very costly proposition. The frequency and cadence is churning through financial resources.

Do we need to continue to invest at this level? We have an opportunity to reinvest those dollars in educational programs, in tutorial, acceleration and social-emotional programs.

Is that something you think the union would oppose?

We will need to have an open dialogue with the bargaining units. I will not surprise our collective bargaining representatives. But if we are a science-driven district, we follow the science not only when things are getting bad; we also need to follow the science as conditions improve.

Many parents say that they want , especially small-group and one-on-one tutoring. Why was that not spelled out in your 100-day plan?

It was. When I speak about an augmentation of educational opportunities, before and afterschool programming, that is inclusive of tutorial services. When I speak about the concept of year-round schooling opportunities, I’m not singularly speaking about schools being open. I’m speaking about before- and afterschool tutorial services that can be provided by the school system, but also by private entities, not-for-profit entities. When I talk about maximizing these educational opportunities, that’s exactly what I’m describing. It was not ignored. It is actually very much part of the strategy moving forward.

I think when parents hear terms like expanded learning opportunities and afterschool, they just think of large groups. They don’t think that means the high-dosage models that have received a lot of attention.

It’s both and. 

I was struck by how David Turner [manager of ] challenged you on the issue of school police. He said he was disappointed to see the under your tenure in Miami. What is your position on that, considering the Los Angeles district took a last year on redirecting funding from school police officers to improving school climate and the achievement of Black students?

I have inherited a policy position that has reduced the budget and implemented a different methodology of protective actions around schools. Rather than the presence of a school resource officer on campus, it’s more of a mobile unit that provides someone support for safe passage to and from school and is able to rapidly respond to emergencies. That is a decision made by the board, supported by a significant sector of this community. 

Now that we’ve moved in that direction, have we stood up the appropriate personnel, with the appropriate training in schools from a prevention perspective? Have we identified restorative justice practices, been effective at avoiding, preventing and or resolving and managing a crisis that would have otherwise been addressed by a police officer? We’re not there yet.

My concern is that [police] have been removed, and the element that will in a more systemic and more preventive way benefit our kids has not fully been fleshed out. That, too, is part of the 100-day plan.

Alicia Montgomery, executive director of the , watched your presentation and reviewed the plan. She mentioned to me that the school system’s six local districts and all the smaller communities of schools each have their own goals and objectives. She said she has been struck in the past by the “sheer resistance to consistency across the district.” You talked a lot about alignment in your plan. Where would you like to see a more universal approach and where should there be room for autonomy?

I’m a huge believer in the concept of earned autonomy, implementing a model that strikes the appropriate balance, that sweet spot. The board’s equity-driven agenda should be ubiquitous. That requires clear communication, continuous monitoring of student performance, attendance data, critical incidents of absenteeism and a universal guarantee of the appropriate resources. That cannot be left singularly in the hands of local leaders. That said, there is room on the other side of the balance for leadership that works best closer to the school. I do have some concerns where it’s working well versus where it’s not working well.

Can you give an example?

I would rather not. There are many different areas in Los Angeles where local leadership has navigated this balance fairly well. In other areas, it is not as clear to me that the coherence is where it needs to be. 

Your plan mentions creating a collective bargaining strategy, and I know some would like to see a lot more transparency in negotiations with the union. Should that be a more open process?

I’m a huge believer in transparency, so let’s begin there. There is no way that we’re going to maximize opportunities for students through the existing collaboration with labor partners. [We need to be] developing and executing a sound, reasonable strategy that’s based on compensation philosophies that support recruitment and retention of a highly qualified workforce. That’s huge for me. It’s needed for the school system right now. We’re having a difficult time recruiting teachers. Fifty percent of teachers across the country are leaving the profession before retirement. That is shocking and that’s the first time that has happened in the history of our country.

The typical negotiation process begins with management declaring that there is no money and labor providing a list of demands. Sometimes lost in that chasm is the answer to the simple question: What do the kids need and can we rally around a common set of goals? 

I’ve been here about a week now and I’ve had conversations with every single labor president, and I did that in advance of the 100-day plan because I don’t believe in surprises. This work is too complex, too difficult and too important, particularly as we continue to navigate the tail end of this pandemic. That’s going to be my approach to the labor negotiation process that we are rapidly going into.

The U.S. Department of Education recently that they are responsible for providing students with disabilities the services they did not receive during remote learning. Are you evaluating what the district is required to do and have a plan for providing those services?

During the pandemic, students with disabilities were among the most impacted, the most fragile communities of students, and have lost the most ground. We need to start from that perspective. By what means shall we accelerate and where have we fallen short in terms of providing the best educational environments? Where do we need to increase inclusion rates across the district? Where must we contemplate additional improvements for parents of students with disabilities who have maintained them in a virtual environment? Are there opportunities for us to speak with the parents and demonstrate that perhaps the option they selected is not adequately addressing the needs of their children?

This is an ongoing process with the federal government. I am aware of the issue and I’m currently engaged in discussions with federal entities regarding this topic. At the end of the day, this is a fragile community of students and I think we recognize two years into this pandemic some of the detrimental impacts that these students have suffered.

How often will you teach? Do you want to run your own school like you did in Miami?

I have now taught two high school biology classes since I’ve arrived. That’s as much fun as anybody in my position can ask for. I need to remain connected to what happens in schools, at a leadership level, in a supportive role. But if I am to remain real, I need to have access to students through meaningful instructional opportunities. That’s what sustains me. This can be a difficult role, and I don’t know how to do it from the comfort of the ivory tower, or the safety of backstage. I need to be on the edge of that stage, feeling the warmth and the social interaction from students and schools. I’m going to be very active and engaged with school principals, with teachers and in the classroom. It’s actually a topic of negotiation and conversation with my own team, how we make that feasible on a very regular basis.

Finally, when the news hit that you were coming to Los Angeles, I spoke to a long-time parent advocate who said even the most talented leaders have been driven away from this job. I know you said you’re here for the long haul, but what is your reaction to that statement?

Why would anybody want to do this? Because we cannot abandon two elements of America — the importance of public education and the viability of cities and urban education, where the needs are heightened. Are there easier ways of impacting children? You can go be a superintendent of a very affluent, small district where you don’t have that diversity, you don’t have kids who are children of immigrants. 

I think we need to paint a picture of hope. I’m very optimistic about the possibility in Los Angeles. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here. I chose L.A. as much as L.A. chose me. I have never failed. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve erred. I’ve tripped. I’ve fallen, but failure is not in my DNA. When we decide to accept failure for ourselves, we are condemning kids to the same fate, and that’s not me.

It isn’t true. 

In fact, county juvenile court data tell a completely different story — one in which police actually carried out nearly 500 arrests in Pittsburgh schools that year, disproportionately against Black students and children with disabilities, often for minor offenses. That’s by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which found that school districts in Allegheny County had dramatically underreported interactions between kids and cops to the U.S. Department of Education. Student arrest rates in the county exceeded the state average, the ACLU analysis found, and among the county’s 43 districts, Pittsburgh Public Schools played an outsized role in shuffling children from campuses into the criminal justice system. 

The underreporting combined with the high student arrest rates, the report argues, raise serious questions about whether Black students and those with disabilities, who are disproportionately subjected to school-based arrests in Pennsylvania and nationally, receive “the protections from discrimination guaranteed by law.” 

School leaders “have to realize that connecting young people to the justice system is harmful” and understand that “how educators choose to deal with students is a responsibility that they have,” said report co-author Harold Jordan, the nationwide education equity coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. 

“The conversation is really about the harms to Black children” Jordan said, and while the Pittsburgh district “does not want to be seen as anti-Black or insensitive to the concerns of Black parents,” leaders have failed to adopt sufficient student interventions that don’t involve the criminal justice system, he said. 

The Pittsburgh district attributed the underreporting of its data to the federal government to an error. After taking heat for racial disparities in arrests, school leaders in 2020 to study arrest data and created a task force focused on improving school safety. 

The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Outside southwest Pennsylvania, federal education data suggest the issue of underreporting student arrests is widespread nationally. The Education Department’s is key to enforcing federal civil rights laws, but advocacy groups say inconsistencies and underreporting by local districts could weaken its utility.

School policing has become increasingly fraught in recent years, and dozens of districts cut ties with local law enforcement after a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd in 2020. Yet in the wake of destabilizing pandemic-induced campus closures, schools across the country have in student misbehavior, including fights and weapons possession, and some districts have beefed up campus police to combat the mayhem.

By underreporting campus arrests, however, districts could give parents an inaccurate picture of campus safety and the effects of school-based police on the young people who interact with them. 

“The harms of having police in schools are much more widespread than districts report,” said Jordan, who called Allegheny County a “hot spot” nationally for youth arrests. During the 2018-19 school year, Pittsburgh students were arrested at nearly eight times the state rate, the ACLU found. 

Black and disabled youth face the brunt of arrests

Attorney Kara Dempsey, who represents children in education and juvenile delinquency matters, knows firsthand the long-lasting effects of school-based police on Allegheny County youth — especially Black girls. 

In one instance, a middle school girl who said she took her teacher’s credit card as a joke ended up getting arrested, Dempsey said. Due to probation violations, she wound up in a secure detention facility. Youth often struggle to comply with probation guidelines, Dempsey said, and school-based arrests can then grow into a yearslong cycle of juvenile justice involvement.

“Because she has trauma, she runs from these facilities,” said Dempsey, a supervising attorney at the . “That just continues this cycle. It’s just really insane.”

Local activists have been sounding the alarm for several years. In a 2020 report, the local Black Girls Equity Alliance found Pittsburgh school district police were the for Black girls, accounting for a third of all referrals countywide. Black girls in Allegheny County were referred to the juvenile justice system at a rate 10 times higher than white girls, researchers found. 

In response, a consultant group, RMC Research Corporation, to study the drivers of school-based arrests. Black students accounted for about 80 percent of district arrests, RMC found in its report, but just 53 percent of the student population. 

Part of the problem can be explained by in which adults view them “as more culpable, less innocent and less in need of help and support” than their white classmates, said Sara Goodkind, an associate professor of social work at the University of Pittsburgh who helps lead the equity alliance’s juvenile justice work. 

“These really high rates of referrals of Black youth are not because there’s a problem with young people. It’s that there’s a problem with the adults who are responding to them and with the systems we have in place,” she said. 

The number of police officers stationed inside public schools has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and research suggests their presence precedes an increase in student arrests. More than two-thirds of public middle and high schools had at least one school-based officer during the 2017-18 school year, according to the most recent federal data, and while suspensions and expulsions have declined in recent years, arrests have grown. 

Police presence has long been bolstered by high-profile yet statistically rare mass school shootings, yet research is mixed on their ability to improve campus safety and civil rights groups have often warned their presence could do more harm than good. 

To better understand student arrests in Pittsburgh, ACLU researchers analyzed data reported to the federal and state government, as well as internal district figures obtained through public records requests and those produced by the RMC Research Corporation. The results were perplexing, Jordan said, because each source produced different numbers. 

During the 2017-18 school year, the Pittsburgh district reported 86 arrests and 395 law enforcement referrals to the state education department. That same school year, the district reported zero arrests to the U.S. Department of Education while the county juvenile court tallied 499 school-related arrests. 

“For a district in which the arrest rates have been high for a very long time, why should they be so inaccurate,” Jordan asked. “I can’t speak to intentionality, but they are in the position to know that what they have put out to the public is inaccurate. They are well aware of that.”

During the 2017-18 school year, Black children made up 15 percent of the country’s students but 31.6 percent of those reportedly arrested at school, according to the most recent federal data. Black students with disabilities accounted for just 2.3 percent of the total student population but 9.1 percent of those subjected to arrests. 

In Allegheny County, the racial disparities were far starker: During the 2018-19 school year, Black students were arrested nearly nine times more often than their white classmates, according to juvenile court records. That year, 1 in 51 Black boys and 1 in 69 Black girls were arrested at school compared to 1 in 316 white boys and 1 in 894 white girls. Black girls were the only demographic group where more than half of juvenile arrests stemmed from school incidents. 

“The numbers speak from themselves,” Dempsey said. “There’s obviously bias in decision-making from people in power who have the ability to decide whether to either charge these individuals or not.”

Racial disparities were most severe in the 1,500-student South Allegheny School District, where a quarter of Black middle and high school students were arrested during the 2017-18 school year. 

ACLU researchers found about half of arrests countywide were for simple assault or for drug charges, primarily involving small amounts of marijuana. 

The drivers of racial disparities in student arrests and other forms of discipline, including suspensions and expulsions, have long been the subject of research and passionate debate. One study, , attributed nearly half of the discipline gap between Black and white students to actions by teachers, suggesting that the “differences in punishment may be due to racial bias.” Just 9 percent of the disparities could be explained by differences in behaviors between Black and white children, researchers found. 

Ted Dwyer, the Pittsburgh district’s chief accountability officer, said in a statement the arrest data it reported to the Education Department was inaccurate “due to an employee illness” that hindered fact-checking but didn’t learn about the problem until it was too late to submit a correction. He said the district has worked to improve data reporting processes, including those related to student arrests.

Dwyer said school police “have demonstrated their commitment to working with the school staff to curtail arresting students,” and noted that arrest rates have dropped in the last several years. However, he said arrest rates have decreased more quickly for white students than their Black classmates, therefore making the disparities even larger.

“The district has convened a task force to conduct deep listening sessions, review of the School Safety Manual and evaluate the effectiveness of current school safety and well-being,” he said in the statement. “The group continues its work.” 

Questionable zeros reported nationally 

By matching education data to juvenile court records, Jordan and his co-author Ghadah Makoshi, a community advocate at the civil rights group, took an unconventional and labor-intensive approach to expose the extent of school-based arrests across Allegheny County. School districts don’t generally compare their data against the figures collected by juvenile courts, Jordan said. 

On a few occasions, journalists have done similar investigations. In , The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, found that the local school district failed to report hundreds of arrests to the state. In 2020, Illinois Public Media reporters found that had underreported student arrests to the U.S. Department of Education for years. 

The issue plagues districts across the country. reported zero school-related arrests during the 2015-16 year, according to a report released in 2020 by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, a figure that suggested “a widespread failure by districts to report data on school policing despite the requirements of federal law.”

Three of the country’s 10 largest school districts — including those in New York City and Chicago, , according to a recent analysis by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news outlet. Yet in New York City, for example, police department records that year.

For years, the federal Civil Rights Data Collection has faced scrutiny for offering incomplete data on highly sensitive topics other than school-based police, including on instances of sexual misconduct and educators’ use of physical restraints. In , the Government Accountability Office found that 70 percent of school districts reported zero seclusion and restraint incidents during the 2015-16 school year but the U.S. Department of Education lacked tools to fact-check the data’s accuracy. The department’s quality control processes, the government watchdog found, were “largely ineffective or do not exist.”

Advocates combating sex-based discrimiation have long accused districts of underreporting campus misconduct. In an analysis of federal civil rights data from the 2015-16 school year, the nonprofit American Association of University Women found that serving students in grades 7 to 12 reported zero incidents of sex-based harassment or bullying. 

Given the data’s role in enforcing civil rights laws, Jordan said the U.S. Department of Education should be more aggressive in ensuring the numbers are reliable. With better data, he said, researchers can better understand the impact of police in schools. 

“The data doesn’t answer the whole question,” he said, “but it gives you the opportunity to drill down, to see what can be changed to improve the overall school environment without involving police and the criminal justice system.”

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

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

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

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

“Every day, I put on that gun belt to wear inside the school and knew I was going to be in a school with 3,000 adolescent children and another 200 staff members. It was a lot of pressure,” he told The 74, explaining that he underwent regular firearms training. “It’s a huge responsibility to carry a weapon and we just believe it’s best that a trained law enforcement officer carries the weapon.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s reignited a raging debate over what role, if any, cops should have in classrooms, at a time when many children are especially vulnerable and anxious as the city slowly emerged from the COVID crisis.

Last summer, following mass protests against over-policing, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to shift oversight of school safety agents from the NYPD to the Department of Education by June 2022 — a move by the agents and decried by advocates who want them removed altogether.

Now, two years since the last “normal” first day of school, the argument over what keeps kids safe is being heated by physical-distancing and pandemic-related mental-health concerns, a historic reckoning on police brutality and a spike in shootings as the economy and social programs falter.

“We’re really concerned about the emphasis on return to ‘normal,’ because what was considered normal really wasn’t working well for a lot of kids,” said Johanna Miller, director of the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Educational Policy Center, which has long fought to remove police from schools.

“We’re really worried that there’s not enough energy spent on thinking about how to make the system safer, better, kinder for every kid,” said Miller.

Disparities in Who Gets Policed

According to the NYCLU, Black and Hispanic children were the subject of nearly 90% of police interventions at schools in the 2018-19 school year, the last full pre-pandemic academic year, and 90% of arrests in 2019. Black and Hispanic students, meanwhile, made up .

Overall, arrests and restraints of schoolchildren had been falling before the pandemic, according to and .

Much of that can be attributed to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who despite his to completely disband the school police force, has supported a few reforms.

In 2019, City Hall, the DOE and the NYPD signed to limit the circumstances under which school staff should call safety agents or when those agents could make arrests. The mayor and previous Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza also pushed for limiting and taking a “restorative justice” approach to discipline.

Social justice advocates note that, despite these reforms, use of force by school safety agents continues to be disproportionately leveled against children of color. The NYCLU’s analysis of the NYPD data points out that “since the implementation of the new MOU in summer 2019, the proportion of [school safety agent] incidents involving Black and Latinx students actually slightly increased.”

And this past June, a of city policing data by the nonprofit Advocates for Children showed that police involvement in “child in crisis” incidents — where students are taken to hospitals in response to emotional distress — were on the rise pre-pandemic. They’d risen from 2,700 incidents in the 2016-2017 school year to about 3,500 incidents in the 2017-2018 school year, the Daily News first reported.

There were particularly high rates for Black students and for those in schools that serve youth with special needs.

But proponents of school policing still say that safety agents are necessary to protect students from harm.

‘Walking Into a Jail’

to a particularly terrifying moment of violence in April when 17-year-old Devonte Lewis was and killed outside Urban Dove Charter School in Midwood, Brooklyn. As a charter school, it does not employ NYPD safety agents.

Jai Nanda, the executive director of Urban Dove, contends that the shooting should not be a part of the school safety debate.

“Because the people who shot the student were not students in our school, it didn’t happen in our school, it didn’t happen during school. So it’s a little bit misleading,” Nanda told THE CITY. “We could have had five police officers in our building and they wouldn’t have been at the scene of this.“

Urban Dove does bag checks, and uses metal-detecting wands, but only employs one outside security guard, according to the school.

Liyah Rivera, 19, a senior who was there the day of shooting, initially appreciated the lack of NYPD safety agents.

When the Brownsville teen first transferred to Urban Dove, it was a relief not to feel “like walking into a jail,” she said.

Rivera previously attended Brooklyn’s Franklin K. Lane High School, which has a heavy presence of police officers at its Cypress Hills campus.

There, Rivera and her peers had to constantly “check your back” because they believed safety agents played favorites, even “allowing children to fight, kind of amping it up,” she told THE CITY.

Since the shooting, Rivera said she’s “50/50” in terms of whether safety agents should be present in schools, but she’d like to see a more community-oriented strategy toward stemming violence.

‘A Sanctuary of the Mind’

In a June survey of city youth by the nonprofit Citizens’ Committee for Children, nearly 45% of young New Yorkers surveyed said police made them feel safer — a sign that despite protests, students’ opinions on school cops .

Still, another of New Yorkers 21 and under in April by the Urban Youth Collaborative found that 76% of respondents ranked security officers as the last area they would invest in at school, and nearly two-thirds wanted school cops removed.

In that same survey, 78% of Black students reported having or knowing someone who had a negative experience with school police.

Dariel Infante, a 17-year-old high school student in Queens, told THE CITY in Spanish that his own experiences as an immigrant in a heavily policed high school made him decide that safety agents are more harmful than helpful.

“When we immigrants see the police, we get scared, sometimes we panic … if we do something and the police don’t like it, if we disrespect them, our immigration status in this country could be at risk,” the Dominican Republic-born teen said.

Infante said he’s seen incidents where calm students were driven to panic by gruff treatment from school safety agents at his school. He wishes there were more counselors than cops.

“School should be a sanctuary, a sanctuary for the mind,” he said, adding that’s why he’s participated in multiple protests against school policing.

De Blasio Refunds the Police

After the city exploded into protests against police brutality in May 2020 following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop, from protesters like Infante grew louder than de Blasio could ignore.

Unlike some other major cities like and , which disbanded their school safety programs in the wake of the Floyd protests, de Blasio left New York’s safety agent budget, staffing numbers and limited oversight largely untouched.

But the mayor did pledge to move the oversight of school safety agents from the NYPD back to the city’s Department of Education for the first time since 1999.

He also promised to fund an additional 500 social workers at city schools in his new budget unveiled in July, as well as create 100 new so-called for high-needs children, where students would have direct access to social services by local nonprofits. De Blasio also used federal dollars to boost tutoring programs.

But the mayor has been criticized for making the transition slowly — and the program’s ultimate fate will with Democratic mayoral candidate Eric Adams, a former police captain.

The mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment, but a DOE spokesperson said the moves are in progress.

“We are well on our way to hiring over 500 new social workers and adding over 100 more community schools to ensure every student has a caring adult to go to when in crisis,” the spokesperson, Nathaniel Styer, wrote in a statement to THE CITY.

Styer did not say whether the social workers would be in place by Sept. 13, the first day of school.

“Our years of focus on the social, emotional, and mental health of our students means a safe and welcoming reopening for all students,” he said.

School safety agents themselves have already seen some changes since the mayor’s announcement: They were required to undergo training in conflict resolution, restorative justice and implicit bias last spring — part of the eventual transition, according to the education department.

But the coming new school year presents “many challenges,” said Gregory Floyd, president Teamsters Local 237, the union that represents safety agents.

He pointed to a shortage of 650 agents compared to the last full school year and uncertainty over coronavirus mandates that “are viewed as inadequate by some,” he told THE CITY.

His members are dealing with “critics who contend that they have no place in those buildings,” fueling mental stress in an already demanding job, he added.

“School safety agents will try to ignore the critics and meet the challenges to help recover, return, and restore a sense of normalcy to the more than one million public school students,” said Floyd.

The NYPD said it’s “working with City Hall and the Department of Education regarding staffing vacancies of school safety agents,” but referred questions on the logistics of school safety work in the time of COVID to the Mayor’s Office, which did not respond.

Opting Out

At least one young Brooklynite won’t be present on the first day of school because of the policing question. His mother felt that the way school cops harshly interacted with her second-grader in a local public school was enough to remove him from the public school system completely.

“I used tovolunteer in a prison, and it’s a horrible place, and the schools really, in a lot of ways are not so different,” said Camille Acey, 40, the director of a tech company who has now joined a Brooklyn homeschooling resource center.

She said while friends’ children in private school reported getting a warm reception and bagels when starting school, her son’s experience was starkly different.

“These children just [are] getting normalized about someone sort of barking orders at them and making demands of them, that sometimes even defy the wishes of their parents,” she told THE CITY. “It’s just really scary to me, so I just wanted to keep my kid close and away from people like that.”

For the second consecutive year, the National Education Association was compelled to organize a virtual representative assembly in lieu of the mammoth in-person convention it customarily holds. Last year’s agenda was extremely limited. Delegates could only listen to speeches and presentations online, and then vote by mail on union officers and the budget.

This year, improved technology enabled NEA to schedule a full slate of business. Delegates were able to wait in a phone queue to debate or ask questions, and an online system allowed instantaneous up-or-down voting on all measures. Pursuant to federal law, voting for officers cannot be conducted online, and so delegates will choose union officers by mail during the summer.

Certainly there were difficulties in trying to manage such a large crowd online, but the proceedings were no more confused than is the norm at the union’s annual in-person events, and overall, the technology seemed to work satisfactorily.

Other problems, technology couldn’t fix.

Delegate attendance at NEA conventions has been falling for years, from a high of almost 10,000 at the 1998 assembly to the low 6,000s more recently. Without the need for travel, out-of-pocket expenses or even a brief absence from home over Independence Day weekend, the time was ripe for attendance to improve. The numbers looked good initially, as 6,702 delegates signed up.

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But when opening day arrived, only 5,591 logged on. Even this number was inflated when it came to debating and voting. .

At least publicly, NEA chose to ignore the relative lack of interest.

“Nearly 8,000 delegates from across the country gather to fairly and democratically elect officers, approve resolutions and consider amendments, paving the way forward for our union,” .

That’s making “nearly” do some heavy lifting.

Delegates submitted 160 new business items in 2019. It wasn’t surprising that a June 15 deadline this year reduced the number to 66. However, considering the ultimate outcome, one wonders if the money and time spent on the technology to hold a virtual assembly was worth it.

Of the 66 items, 11 were ruled out of order or withdrawn. Ten were voted down. A full 22 were referred to an NEA standing committee without a recommendation. That left only 23 that were approved. Of those, nine called on NEA to use its print and social media outlets to publicize something.

The substantive policy initiatives were generated by the union’s board of directors and executive committee. NEA formed a “” and released a set of five principles for “ensuring that all students have access to an equitable, robust system of designed by educators in partnership with stakeholders that values the full breadth of their knowledge and skills.”

Evaluate NEA’s principles for yourselves, but I think the key phrase is the one seeking a system that “decouples student assessment from tracking, promotion/retention and graduation decisions.”

Another new business item created a task force to identify criteria for “safe, just and equitable schools, including exploring the role of law enforcement in education.” It also called for a campaign to teach critical race theory in classrooms and oppose efforts to ban it. That resolution was posted on the NEA website delegate page but later taken down, along with the budget document, membership reports and everything else.

Perhaps the task force will do some good work, but initiatives like these are also a way to forestall more immediate and radical measures. from an Oregon delegate called for NEA to form a committee to “make recommendations to the labor movement on what role we should play in putting an end to police unions’ ability to protect violent cops, harmful policing practices and racist policies that too often lead to the terrorizing and deaths of our students and their family members.”

NEA has been riding the fence on the question of police unions and the presence in schools of sworn officers, many of whom are NEA members.

It’s also useful to note that back in 2015, NEA passed a new business item . Six years later, I defy any education policy person to identify a single NEA accomplishment relative to it.

It won’t be the policies coming out of NEA headquarters or from delegates that will determine the immediate future of public education. It will be whether 1.5 million K-12 students return to the fold after missing more than a year of school. Not a single new business item mentioned this startling enrollment drop or what to do about it. As long as the teacher hiring continues, the unions are not worried.