Among them is the co-owner of a private security firm who previously worked in policing at the Minneapolis airport. Another worked for more than a decade as a police officer in Wisconsin, while several others offer experience from the juvenile justice system. Meanwhile, a larger share bring experience in education, including as special education assistants and deans in charge of student discipline. However, the number with law enforcement credentials has alarmed activists and several job applicants, both intent on breaking from what they called the district’s pervasive policing and surveillance of students — particularly those of color.

“It’s almost like they wanted police officers, but technically not police officers,” said one finalist who didn’t get the job but spoke on the condition of anonymity because they hope to work for the district in the future. The applicant offered years of experience in both education and criminal justice but left with an impression that district officials were unsure how the new hires would function day-to-day. “It was kind of weird.”

The move comes just months after the school board voted unanimously to terminate its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a local officer in May, setting off a wave of unprecedented national protests over racial injustice. The Minneapolis district became one of the first in the country to sever ties with its police department, a decision education leaders said was part of a bigger effort to dismantle what they called a “white supremacist culture” in the school system and improve campus climate for youth of color.

In place of school police, the district hired 11 “public safety support specialists” it touted as a “bridge between in-school intervention and law enforcement.” Though the specialists will serve a security function, the district said they’ll be trained to build relationships with students and defuse conflicts before they become violent and demand a police response. The specialists, whose salaries were advertised at $65,000 to $86,000 a year, begin training Wednesday, the district said in a statement.

Their training “will continue to clarify the focus for these staff is not behavior enforcement,” the statement continued. “Rather, they are critical incident support staff who connect students and other staff to the many resources available to support them,” such as counseling.

Yet many in the community remain skeptical and have accused Minneapolis schools of replacing campus police with “rent-a-cops.” Floyd’s death prompted districts across the country to re-examine the role officers play in schools, and activists fear that the high-profile district’s actions could set back progress in the larger “police-free schools” movement.

Though school leaders rushed to interview, hire and train the support specialists before classes resumed this month, the district failed to meet its self-imposed deadline, and applicants who were ultimately turned down painted a process in disarray. One disgruntled finalist, who currently works for the district but said they applied with ambitions of reforming the school security apparatus, called the lengthy interview process a “sham.” The switch from school-based police to support specialists is simply “cosmetic” and isn’t likely to result in substantive changes in a school system where educators are quick to suspend students, said the finalist.

“It’s fake,” said the applicant, who asked not to be identified because of their current job.

The district for support specialists with backgrounds in criminal justice. Then it backtracked, claiming that the policing prerequisite was an error and that candidates’ ability to build positive relationships with students was most important. Community activists who oppose school policing said that misstep should have prompted the district to restart the selection process, especially since the delay to a return to in-person learning caused by the pandemic gave them additional time.

In August, The 74 obtained copies of the 24 finalists’ résumés, and at least 14 had experience as police officers, corrections officials or private security guards. Finalist Mohamed Ali, a former dean at the Minneapolis district in charge of student discipline, received an offer, he told The 74, but had to turn it down because he had already accepted another job at a charter school. The hiring process dragged on far longer than he anticipated, Ali said.

“I just felt like I didn’t have time to wait,” he said. “I just made the best decision for me and my family.”

The delayed process put finalist Alfred Harris in a bind. Harris worked as a correctional officer for more than a decade before becoming a paraprofessional at a suburban Minneapolis school district. He got laid off from his most recent job as a gym manager when the pandemic hit. Because he got so far into the hiring process with Minneapolis schools, he thought he had the safety support specialist job lined up and stopped applying elsewhere, he said. Then, last week, he learned otherwise.

The district put Harris and 11 others all on the same rejection email — a move that infuriated multiple finalists. After several replied to the email and accused district officials of acting unprofessionally, the district followed up and apologized for compromising their personal information due to the “unauthorized public dissemination” of the rejection letter.

Among those who blasted the error was finalist Micheal Delgado, previously the head of security at a suburban Minneapolis school district who most recently worked in security for a Fortune 500 company. Delgado was furloughed because of the pandemic.

“Usually that’s done on an individual basis, I would assume, so I thought that was pretty tactless,” Delgado said. “I just kind of shook my head and was like, ‘Well, maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that I’m not working for an organization that would do something like that.’”

Of the 24 finalists, 12 were rejected and one — Ali — turned down the job. That would leave 11 remaining, the same number as the available positions. A district spokesman declined to disclose whether the 11 remaining finalists were ultimately hired. An official previously told The 74 they plan to station a specialist at each of the district’s seven comprehensive high schools while the other four will support emergency response across the city. The 74 reached out to each of the 11 remaining finalists; two declined to comment and the others didn’t respond to voicemails.

The district said they “understand people’s concerns with the process — especially its length,” but it was delayed because of an “unprecedented amount of transparency and community involvement.”

About more than removing cops from schools

As the Minneapolis district charts a new path without school-based police, it has promoted the support specialists as a group of racially diverse role models who are supposed to form positive relationships with students. A desire to build strong bonds with teens was a common thread among the finalists.

“I have a passion for helping to rehabilitate our youth of tomorrow,” one noted in a cover letter. “My passion is showing youths another way of dealing with their anger and pain.” The cover letter for another finalist, who offered experience leading youth theater programs, touted a career “dedicated to fostering strong social and emotional skills amongst youth.”

The police contract the board recently dissolved set similar priorities, noting a mission to “support a safe and welcoming environment while acting as a positive role model/informal mentor for students.” Officers were not supposed to engage in school discipline, according to the contract, but were instead directed to perform youth engagement activities, craft safety plans, defuse conflicts and “utilize reasonable discretion in enforcing laws” in schools. The contract required officers to be trained in adolescent development, restorative justice and “bias-free policing.”

SImilarly, the new support specialists aren’t supposed to engage in routine student discipline, according to the district, and are there to help create safety plans, respond to crises and connect with students. Their training is supposed to encompass de-escalating conflicts, restorative justice, dismantling the “school-to-prison pipeline,” “school security 101” and how to restrain children, according to a school board agenda from August. The district document also noted training in online behaviors.

Student activists’ push for police-free schools is about more than removing officers from campuses, said Maria Fernandez, senior campaign strategist at the Advancement Project, a national racial-justice group. It’s about ending a culture of policing and surveillance that she said is pervasive in many schools, especially those where Black and brown students make up the majority.

“This public safety support specialists’ use of surveillance technology like Gaggle,” she said, “continues to perpetuate policing and criminalization.” How Minneapolis responds to the imperative to change student policing is “shaping fights across the country,” she said.

The Minneapolis school district about 35,000 students, roughly 65 percent of whom are youth of color. Meanwhile, more than two-thirds of school staff are white, according to district data. But staff of color often serve in school support roles like special education assistants and deans, one finalist said. To improve conditions for youth of color, the district must do more to diversify teachers and administrators, according to the finalist.

Harris, the finalist who is an ex-corrections officer, questioned the district’s decision to terminate its police contract in the first place. Clearly the district felt its schools could be dangerous if it saw the need to station armed police in the buildings, he said. But those threats “didn’t disappear just because there was social injustice with George Floyd.” He worried that community pushback prompted school officials to hire support specialists without law enforcement experience even though they could be “just as authoritative as a police officer” but without adequate experience in confronting dangerous situations.

“A social worker is not going to break up a fight — they’re just not,” he said. “I’ve been in schools for many years, and they’re not. They may know how to de-escalate one, but once it gets to an area of unsafe environment, they’re not paid to do that, they don’t even have that type of training.”

But Ali, the finalist who turned down the job offer, said he supported the school board’s decision to terminate the police contract because students made their opposition loud and clear. He said he felt the support specialist position would be a marked improvement. Deans and other support staff know what students experience at home and know how to create positive relationships, he said.

Rather than serving as a “person of authority,” the support specialists will offer students someone they “can go to for help and seek out advice,” he said. “It’s more of a person you can see as a mentor, a role model, someone you can get support from.”

Even though the lengthy hiring process led Ali to leave his job with the Minneapolis district, he has just one regret: leaving behind the students he got to know as a dean.

“I just hope whoever got the position that I declined is there for the kids and is there for the staff and the parents,” he said. “I know it’s not an easy job.”

The move has already angered racial justice activists who cheered the district’s swift decision to terminate its police contract after George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis officer. Floyd’s May death led educators across the country to remove police from their campuses, but the Minneapolis district’s plan to replace officers with 11 “public safety support specialists” — touted as a “bridge between in-school intervention and law enforcement” — has activists worried about undoing progress made in the wake of recent protests.

“I’m afraid that they’re going to set a dangerous trend nationally, and that all these districts that have been ending contracts are going to look to Minneapolis and say, ‘Oh, we’ll just create our own internal security force,’ that will continue to perpetuate policing and criminalization,” said Maria Fernandez, senior campaign strategist at the Advancement Project, a national racial justice organization.

Among the district’s 24 finalists, at least 14 have experience as police officers, corrections officials or private security guards, according to the candidates’ résumés, which a source provided to The 74 on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to share the documents.

Six finalists have some policing experience and at least one currently works as an officer — in suburban Minneapolis. Six have served as security guards. Another eight have experience in corrections, including five who worked in the juvenile justice system and a former sheriff’s department officer who listed jailhouse weapon “shakedowns” as experience.

At the same time, more than half of the finalists currently work for the district in capacities that include special education and student discipline. The 74 is withholding the applicants’ names to protect their privacy during the interview process.

Education activist Kenneth Eban, who has worked for years to remove officers from Minneapolis schools, said he was alarmed by the share of finalists with law enforcement backgrounds.

“This is just another way of being able to police and surveil students, especially students of color,” he said. The “oversurveillance of students of color” and an adversarial campus climate would still be a problem in the district if none of the support specialists had policing backgrounds, he said, but the finalists suggest that school leaders aren’t fully committed to less punitive approaches to campus safety. “When I think about a corrections officer, I think about the terrible conditions that people who are in prison experience and how corrections officers uphold that system and that environment.”

Karen DeVet, the district’s chief operations officer, said it was important for the district to have an emergency response and security plan in place before the upcoming school year begins September 8. Despite the national uprising following Floyd’s death, she said the district is “not going to compromise on protecting our students and our staff.” However, she sought to allay fears that the district simply plans to replace school-based police with more of the same.

“These are not licensed law enforcement officials who carry guns and a toolbelt” but instead will be specialists trained to defuse conflicts before they become violent, she said. While they serve an immediate need, they’re part of a larger district effort to improve school climate. “To address those root causes of why our students and our families don’t always feel welcome, heard or seen in our schools is going to take time,” DeVet said.

The specialist position began generating controversy last month after the district released a job posting capable of breaking up fights, providing security at district events and fostering “trusting, nurturing and learning environments.” The posting listed a salary range of $65,695 to $85,790. Following the community uproar, the district backtracked and said the law enforcement prerequisite was an error — and that candidates’ ability to build relationships with students was paramount.

In , the district said an “accelerated schedule” to ensure that the specialists are hired and receive special training before the start of the new school year “did not allow for creation of a perfect job description.”

“We did consider restarting” the hiring process, DeVet said, but after looking at applications, the district “felt like we had a really strong pool,” including educators with master’s degrees and others from the law enforcement realm with crisis experience.

The 11 specialist roles are the first part of the district’s new campus safety strategy, which officials plan to unveil at a school board meeting next week. Once hired, officials plan to station specialists at the district’s seven comprehensive high schools while the other four will support emergency response across the city. After receiving more than 100 applications and conducting interviews with more than 50 candidates, district officials, prioritizing internal candidates, settled on a top tier of two dozen finalists they said were racially diverse.

One applicant leads a youth mentorship program. Another is a military veteran who currently works at a high school where he helps teachers interact with families who have limited English speaking skills. In a cover letter, one applicant noted a career “dedicated to fostering strong social and emotional skills” among students as a key attribute and said that positive relationships are key to generating “a truly safe, inclusive and supportive school environment.”

Many of the internal candidates already work as deans assisting administrators with student discipline and campus security. Yet Marika Pfefferkorn, executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation and an advocate against police in Minneapolis schools, said the deans would be given more responsibilities as support specialists, including the authority to call police for backup. She accused the district of creating the positions without offering to receive community input and missing an opportunity to reimagine its approach to school safety.

“If you don’t actually change the culture of the system, you just replace who’s doing it,” she said.

The teachers union has made a similar argument. Greta Callahan, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers president, has to “rent-a-cops.”

When the union called for police-free campuses, “we did not mean, ‘Hire a bunch of private security officers and put them in our buildings,’” Callahan told City Pages, a local news outlet. “Let me ask you a question. If I order a sandwich, and I say, ‘Hold the mayo,’ does that mean put a bunch of Miracle Whip all over it?’ They’re missing the point.”

One applicant, who is currently the head of security at a suburban school district, is a military police veteran who served combat missions in Iraq. Another works for a private security firm at an Amazon distribution center. A third finalist currently is employed as a corrections officer at a suburban jail where responsibilities include mediating disputes, enforcing rules and checking cells “for contraband and signs of security breaches,” according to the candidate’s résumé, which also notes training on “the impacts of trauma and institutional racism.”

Rashad Turner, executive director of the Minnesota Parent Union, said he was happy that so many of the applicants already work in education, but he also sees value in candidates with law enforcement experience coming to work for the district.

“Having that familiarity with the law enforcement system, but leaving it to serve students, I’d say that could be a good thing,” said Turner, who went to college for criminal justice before losing faith in policing as a career. “To have that understanding of the injustices in the law enforcement system, I could see that being valuable” in a role centered on student discipline. He said the district’s plan to begin the upcoming academic year remotely because of the pandemic could allow additional time for the specialists to receive training that ensures that they’re “serving students’ best interests” rather than working as a “souped-up hall monitor that is targeting the students.”

Eban, the community activist, took a more aggressive stance. He said the district should restart the hiring process altogether because the job posting that sought applicants with criminal justice experience could have prompted some qualified applicants to opt out of the process.

“I don’t understand — now knowing that we’re also going into distance learning to start the year — why this process cannot be restarted to get a better pool of applicants, to get a better pool of finalists that could help support students in our communities in a different way,” Eban said.