A year ago, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, activists flooded the streets of Syracuse, New York, with demands for police reform. The Syracuse Police Accountability and Reform Coalition (SPAARC) put forth “The People’s Agenda for Policing,” which included a call to remove school cops, known euphemistically as school resource officers (SROs). Students stressed that schools rely on police too heavily for discipline and cops are too often called in for matters best handled by mental health experts or social workers. The Syracuse school district spends about $1.6 million on policing each year, and activists argued that the district could use some of that money to hire alternative support staff instead.

The push to remove police from public schools is not new, but it gained traction over the last year as racial justice protests swept the country. School boards in places like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Denver, and Portland, Maine, voted to end their contracts with local law enforcement, and in Syracuse, activists pointed to Rochester, a city just 90 minutes away, where the City Council also voted last June to remove school cops. The issue has become a focal point of local school board elections, too, like in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where some candidates campaigned last fall on promises to halt the practice of using armed police in schools.  

Research suggests the presence of cops increases suspensions and arrests, especially for young students, but there’s no consensus on whether they reduce school crime or violence. Student surveys show Black students tend to have significantly more negative perceptions of school police.

In early July, activists met with city leadership to discuss their demands. “I didn’t see that as helpful, I just saw it as a way to spill out our trauma in front of them and get blank faces in return,” said Shukri Mohamed, a leader in SPAARC and an affiliate group called CuseYouthBLM. Overall, Mohamed said she feels the school board and mayor have been very unresponsive to their concerns. “They’re very out of touch with what students are facing, even though we’ve provided them space and time and records to show what [school cops] feel like,” she said.

In light of their frustrations, Syracuse activists have their sights set on the city’s June 22 school board election. Youth have rallied behind Twiggy Billue, a longtime social justice leader and president of Syracuse’s National Action Network chapter. Billue has been pushing to remove cops from the city’s public schools for more than a decade, and in 2014 she published a book on how harsh discipline policies negatively affect students throughout life.

This isn’t Billue’s first attempt at running for the school board. In 2019, she competed against four other candidates in the Democratic primary for four spots and narrowly lost. This time there are four candidates competing for three seats. While the Syracuse Democratic Socialists of America chapter has endorsed Billue, the local Democratic Party has endorsed the three other candidates on the ballot: Karen Cordano, Nyatwa Bullock, and David Maynard.

Maynard, a former teacher and principal, said the issue of school cops “hasn’t really come up much at all” as he’s been campaigning. “It was a big issue last summer. … I believe they wrongly took a look at police officers in schools, but there wasn’t a lot of oomph for that,” he said. Maynard said his 20 years in school administration showed him the value of school police and he believes they really care about students. “They have such a complex set of abilities, and if you look at the Syracuse murder rate, violence doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse door,” he said. Homicides were up 55 percent in Syracuse last year, though no data links this to violence in schools. In the 2017-18 school year, the most recent year with data available, there were 4 incidents of assault with a weapon (not including firearms or explosives) and 43 incidents of assault without a weapon.

Cordano, a parent leader, said voters have asked her about school police as she’s campaigned and says it’s “a very nuanced situation” that does not lend itself to “an easy yes or no answer.” Although she believes school police should not be used to discipline children, she says she wants to  learn how many guns and weapons they confiscate annually. “That information could change my mind in a heartbeat, depending on what the numbers are,” she said. “I feel like I don’t know enough to advocate right now, but I do think once the data is clear to me, then let’s figure it out.”

Bullock, an activist and undergraduate who is a former teaching assistant, did not respond to requests for comment.

Billue told The Appeal that working with SPAARC and the National Action Network has allowed her to look around the country and see “similarly situated” communities “finding success” in identifying school police alternatives. “We know there is potential for violence in schools but other schools have units outside of school to make sure nothing bad enters,” she said. “We also think something other than police could be implemented alongside community partners.” 

The issue of police violence in Syracuse schools came to a head in 2008, when an officer working in a high school punched a 15-year-old girl in the face and broke her nose. The cop said the student hit him first and he ultimately arrested her and charged her with attempted assault. Some parents and students defended the police officer, and others condemned his actions. The superintendent ultimately removed the cop from school, though the police chief had said the behavior was justified. About a decade later, another officer was removed when he broke a 14-year-old’s elbow during an arrest.

Some defenders of keeping police in schools point to violent incidents, like in 2018 when a teenager stabbed two students at a high school.

Most members of the Syracuse school board have been much more quiet on the issue than the candidates.

Three members—Pat Body, David Cecile, and Derrick Dorsey—are retiring, and only Body responded to a request for comment about school cops. “I voted to keep the SROs in our high schools,” she said in an email. “We want to make changes to the role.” Body did not answer a follow-up question about what kinds of changes she’d like to make.

School board commissioners Mark Muhammad and Tamica Barnett also did not respond to requests for comment. But last summer Barnett told Syracuse.com that although she’d like the board to have oversight of school resource officers, she believes they help young people establish positive relationships with police and are necessary sometimes in violent situations. “I’m inside the schools,” she said in July. “I would encourage anybody that’s really pushing for the SROs to be removed to spend days inside the schools.” Commissioner Katie Sojewicz referred media inquiries to school board president Dan Romeo.

Romeo told The Appeal that after having several board conversations about SROs, he and his colleagues have “decided that keeping them in our schools is what we would like to do going forward. There was a clear message in our discussions that we are willing to improve the SRO program and those discussions are happening.” When asked what kinds of improvements specifically, Romeo said in an email that a committee “will look at any opportunity to improve. While I am not a part of the group, I would say the [Memorandum of Agreement] with the city, job description/duties and responsibilities and personnel selection are all things that will be looked at.”

Perrine Wasser, co-chairperson of the Syracuse DSA chapter electoral committee, told The Appeal that committee members  see electing Billue as “the best chance we have at removing SROs” and that she believes some school board members could be persuaded. “I think this is what a lot of the parents want, and I think that will be clear when Twiggy shows up and has a lot of support,” Wasser said. “And she’s just the most consistent in showing up for the community and listening to what students and young people want.”

Sarhia Rahim, a SPAARC leader and co-founder of Raha Syracuse, a Muslim youth group, said she knows that even if Billue is elected “some of the other people at the table may not listen because they haven’t listened to us.” Still, Rahim said “we know where Twiggy stands … and I can’t say the same thing for a lot of the other commissioners.”

Mayor Ben Walsh is also facing a Democratic primary on June 22. His opponents, Khalid Bey, and Michael Greene, did not respond to a request for comment on school resource officers.

In an emailed statement to The Appeal, the mayor’s chief policy officer, Greg Loh, emphasized that the Walsh administration has engaged in discussions over the last year regarding the role of police, but the school board will make the final determination on district policy.  “Mayor Walsh’s Syracuse Police Reform Executive Order stated that he is committed to the implementation of a new model for school safety and security,” Loh said. “His order said the city would work in coordination with the Syracuse City School District which is governed by the Syracuse Board of Education.”

Mohamed of SPAARC and CuseYouthBLM said they’re not going to be deterred even if their goals take awhile. “We’re not stopping any time soon,” she said. “If it means we keep going for 10 years, then so be it.”

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In Massachusetts, those who want police out of public schools are one step closer to making it happen. Lawmakers recently struck down a requirement that all school districts in the state have at least one “school resource officer”—a moniker for school cops. Now just two states—Florida and Maryland—have laws requiring police in schools, and advocates are pushing them to follow suit.

Massachusetts adopted the school police requirement in 2014 in response to the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Connecticut where 26 people were killed at school, including 20 young children. Since then, the number of cops assigned to work in Massachusetts schools has steadily grown, as school shootings nationwide have continued.

Last summer, in response to the racial justice protests sweeping the country after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, civil rights attorneys, parents and students across Massachusetts formed a coalition to press for the removal of the state mandate. Advocates pressured the legislature to address the school-to-prison pipeline, which refers to overly harsh school discipline measures that disproportionately affect students of color. Despite Black and Latinx students representing 27 percent of Massachusetts students  in 2016, for example, they accounted for 64 percent of all school-based arrests.

The coalition’s demands were partially met with an omnibus police reform package that passed in December, which was watered down and full of compromises on issues like police training and facial recognition technology. Lawmakers agreed to remove the school police mandate, though they left it to local superintendents to decide whether to retain police; advocates wanted that power to rest with school boards, which tend to be more accountable to voters. Now some activists are gearing up to make the case for police-free schools to their local superintendents.

The legislation also calls for increased transparency, with annual reporting on school-based arrests, referrals to court, and the amount spent on school cops. “Schools have been supposed to be sharing that kind of information with the Department of Education since 2018, but there has been just a shameful lack of compliance,” said Leon Smith, executive director of Citizens for Juvenile Justice in Massachusetts.

Bay State residents were not the only ones pushing to reduce reliance on school police and redirect funds from law enforcement to restorative justice and mental health services. Last summer, school boards in cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Denver and Portland, Maine, voted to end contracts with local police, and activists in Los Angeles pressed leaders to divest $25 million from the school police budget, and steer the funds to social workers and counselors. On the federal level, Democratic Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar and Senators Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren introduced legislation to end federal funding for school cops. New bills introduced this year in states like Connecticut and Oregon would also phase out police from public schools.

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School police presence has increased sharply over the last few decades. According to federal data, roughly 43 percent of public schools, and 71 percent of high schools reported the presence of armed law enforcement officers during the 2015-16 school year (the most recent year for which this data is available). While states can play a significant role in shaping school police policy, only Florida and Maryland currently have laws that explicitly require schools to have police or a security presence, according to an analysis prepared for The Appeal: Political Report by the Education Commission of the States.

In Florida, the law requires all districts to station at least one armed officer on every K-12 campus, and Maryland’s law requires every school to have either an assigned police officer or a plan for “adequate local law enforcement coverage.” 

Both states passed their mandates after the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, where a gunman opened fire and killed 17 people and injured 17 others in Parkland, Florida. Activists in Florida and Maryland are pushing hard now to repeal those state-level mandates, which they also opposed at the time of passage.

Local efforts to remove police from schools have existed in Howard, Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties in Maryland for several years. But a statewide coalition formed over the summer and made five key demands of lawmakers, among them to remove police from Maryland schools.

Two state delegates from Montgomery County responded with a legislative package to prohibit school districts from contracting with local law enforcement agencies, and to reallocate the $10 million in state funding currently set aside for school police into mental and behavioral health programs. The legislation would also disband the Baltimore City School Police Force, the only sworn school police force in the state.

While it’s unclear whether the bills will pass, Renuka Rege, a staff attorney with the Public Justice Center’s Education Stability Project in Baltimore, noted that past legislative efforts to arm teachers failed to gain traction in Maryland. That could be a sign that the school police reforms have a chance of success. Maryland’s 2018 law, she adds, was a “knee-jerk reaction” not only to Parkland, but also to a fatal school shooting in Maryland that occurred two days before the state’s Senate Budget and Taxation committee took up the bill.

In Florida, activists statewide have been reeling from a widely publicized January video of a school police officer body-slamming and handcuffing a Black teenager at a high school in Central Florida. The teen, Taylor Bracey, suffered memory loss, blurry vision and headaches after the incident, which is under investigation.

It’s not the first time Florida has earned national headlines for viral footage of arrests of young people at school. Body camera footage released last year showed a police officer arresting a 6-year-old girl in 2019 as she cried to be let go. The ACLU of Florida published a study in 2020 finding that the increase in Florida school police since 2018 led to an increase in school-based arrests. The ACLU urged a repeal of the state mandate and a return to local community discretion.

Maria Fernandez, a senior strategist for the Advancement Project’s #PoliceFreeSchools campaign, told the Political Report that the campaign is supporting youth efforts to remove police from school in cities like Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Phoenix, New York City, New Orleans, and Oakland, California.

“Some folks have been working on these issues for a long time, and we also have been receiving more calls for help since the racial justice protests began,” said Fernandez. Many youth activists, she added, are focused on their fast-approaching city council budget fights.

“Money for school police often comes from the city budget, so folks are looking and thinking about that,” she said, pointing to New York City, where the mayor’s newly proposed 2022 budget includes $445 million for school police, compared to $100 million for school nurses and $180 million for school social workers. “You don’t need to be a math genius to do the analysis here,” wrote Alexa Valera, a Brooklyn high schooler and member of the Urban Youth Collaborative in a recent op-ed. “New York City is spending less money on supportive programming to help students than on police to criminalize us.”

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In Massachusetts, advocates say next steps for them will involve ensuring that the transparency and reporting requirements of the 2020 reforms are honored, and they will continue to advocate for enhanced state funding of student mental health services.

“Looking at the pandemic, it’s just irresponsible and unacceptable to continue to throw money at cops when you know kids’ mental and social needs are greater than ever,” said Smith, of Citizens for Juvenile Justice.

Some activists in Massachusetts—including in Worcester, and New Bedford—are working to  pressure their school superintendents to get rid of school police. In Framingham, leaders with the grassroots group Framingham Families for Racial Equity in Education say that after meeting with the superintendent,  Robert Tremblay, he “made it clear he does not intend to remove SROs.” (A spokesperson for Tremblay did not respond to the Political Report’s request for comment.)

Cleopatra Mavhunga, an alumnus of Framingham Public Schools and a member of the Framingham Families for Racial Equity in Education, says despite the superintendent’s resistance, the group doesn’t plan on giving up its push for police-free schools.

“Right now the best thing we can do is rally the public,” she told the Political Report. “We need to have people understand what’s really going on.”

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The criminal legal system is closely entangled with schools and education policy. This article is the first in a three-part series, in the run-up to Nov. 3, about local elections where education issues are at stake.

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Since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody in late May, leaders in Prince George’s County, Maryland, have faced pressure over the 33 armed police officers who patrol the county’s public schools. 

Other jurisdictions are having similar conversations, and school boards in places like Minneapolis, Portland, Milwaukee, and Denver have voted to end their contracts with local law enforcement agencies. “Policing doesn’t solve social problems, it can only disappear people,” says Christopher Rogers, a steering committee member of the Black Lives Matter at School coalition, which backs removing and defunding school police.

In many districts, including Prince George’s County, the November election will reshape these powerful school boards, and the issue of police in schools is paramount in some of these local races.

In June two Prince George’s County school board members—David Murray and Raaheela Ahmed—submitted resolutions to end contracts with local law enforcement agencies that station armed police, euphemistically referred to as “school resource officers,” or SROs, in all of the district’s high schools and some middle schools.

But instead of deciding on the proposals in mid-June, the board—a mix of 14 appointed and elected members, including a student member—voted 8-6 to delay consideration until September, ostensibly to spend more time collecting information and community feedback. But then September arrived, and the board voted, again 8-6, to table the idea until January. 

Now two seats that are up for grabs in November might shift toward candidates who’ve said they would end the district’s ties with police. “The result of this election will literally have an effect on whether we will have armed police officers,” said Ahmed, who is running for re-election unopposed. “It could increase the vote count to eight in favor and the removal will happen.”

The prospect has sparked debate throughout the community. Before the June vote, County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who was elected in 2018 after serving two terms as Prince George’s chief prosecutor, came out strongly against schools ending their agreements with local law enforcement agencies. Alsobrooks did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but at a June press conference she emphasized that teachers and students deserve robust protection from potential mass shooters. “I believe that we cannot afford to withdraw a single resource from our students,” she said. In early July, Alsobrooks announced a new police reform task force whose duties involve recommending how to improve policing throughout the majority-Black county.

The Maryland Office of the Public Defender weighed in on the other side, issuing comments in support of the proposals to remove armed police.“As we see every day in our work, the presence of SROs directly impacts the school to prison pipeline, easily funneling black students into the criminal legal system,” the office’s statement said. “The mere presence of an armed, uniformed officer changes the learning setting and escalates simple disagreements, contributing to a culture of criminalization and antagonism in schools.”

Ahmed thinks Alsobrooks’s opposition influenced the board’s politics. “We had enough information in June, and we had enough information in September to make this call,” she said. Ahmed added that she thinks some of her colleagues are afraid to take action “as opposed to actually believing that we need police officers, and that’s super disheartening.”

One candidate vying to serve a second term is Bryan Swann, who Alsobrooks appointed this year. Swann, a former Obama administration official who now works at the U.S Treasury Department, voted in June and September to postpone consideration of the school police issue. He’s facing off against Shayla Adams-Stafford, a career educator who earned 42.6 percent of the vote in the June primary, compared to Swann’s 26.6 percent.

“I believe that we need to end the school-to-prison pipeline and that includes removing armed officers from schools,” Adams-Stafford told The Appeal: Political Report. “Our county has some of the highest rates of student arrests. … We need to utilize restorative practices, and positive behavioral intervention systems in order to reduce the need for punitive measures within our schools.”

Removing armed police won’t necessarily cut arrests in schools significantly. In addition to the 33 armed police officers from law enforcement agencies, Prince George’s County Public Schools also employs security officers, 66 of whom also have arrest power but do not carry weapons.

During the 2019-20 school year, according to district data, there were 280 arrests of students for alleged crimes committed on and off school properties, and the vast majority of those arrests—204—came from the school district security officers. The armed police, by contrast, made 32 arrests. The top three reported crime categories were fighting, weapons other than guns, and “disruption,” all of which can encompass incidents that schools have historically dealt with through detention and other non-carceral strategies. Advocates concede that cutting ties with law enforcement agencies won’t be enough to end the school-to-prison pipeline but argue that at least the security officers are directly accountable to the district, so advocates can more easily target them for reform.

Another board member who had voted to postpone consideration was K. Alexander Wallace, but he lost his District 7 primary in June. Both candidates facing off for Wallace’s seat say they will vote to end contracts with armed school police officers.

Alexis Nicole Branch, who earned 39 percent of the vote in that primary, told the Political Report that she was “highly disappointed” with the board members who declined to vote against removing armed police.

“I was born, raised, and graduated from Prince George’s County schools and when I entered schools and saw police officers, it was terrifying for me,” she said. “And when I was dealing with bullying, those police officers didn’t help me at all. And when I wanted to see a counselor there was no one available to speak to me.” Branch notes that she has law enforcement in her family and “understands and respects” their work ethic but emphasized that they do not need to be around children “who are already intimidated by police officers on a regular basis.”

Kenneth Harris, who earned 44.5 percent of the vote in the District 7 primary, told the Political Report that he stands with other Prince George’s County school board members who have supported the removal of armed police officers. “As a product of the school system and a proud father, I want the absolute best for my child and others in the school system,” he said. “That starts with investing more in counselors, creating revised safety plans, and removing armed police from our schools.”

There are other school board races this cycle: In District 1, Murray—the other sponsor, with Ahmed, of the resolutions to remove armed police––is running unopposed for re-election. And in District 8 there is a contested but not very competitive race between incumbent Edward Burroughs, who supports removing armed police, and Gary Falls, a long-shot candidate who says armed police should stay in schools.

Alvin Thornton, the appointed Prince George’s County school board chairperson, told the Political Report that although he voted to table the issue until January, he is personally strongly opposed to armed police being in school environments. “I have three grandchildren in the school system, I don’t want any armed officers in those buildings,” he said. “But we need a comprehensive county and statewide response of which the school system will be part.” He pointed to the county task force on police reform and said he felt comfortable waiting until the winter to get its members’ feedback. “I’m the Black chairman of a school district that is majority-Black,” Thornton added. “I’m 72 years old, I know what police brutality is.”

Sonya Williams, an elected board member who also voted to postpone the decision until January, said she supported taking the time to move on this issue more slowly and deliberatively. “Change does not happen immediately and those who believe we were just kicking the can down the road, well I’m sorry they think that way,” said Williams, who represents District 9. “I supported us putting this on pause because it’s a big, big conversation and I wanted to make sure we look at the operational impacts, and the financial impacts.”

Williams noted that the board has directed the district’s CEO, Monica Goldson, to talk with stakeholders—including principals and teachers. “In my opinion, high schools in my district have good relationships with their SROs, they are part of the family of those schools,” Williams said. “But what options are there other than arrest? Diversion programs? Conflict resolution? Mental health, maybe telemedicine? These are things we’ve asked Dr. Goldson to review for us.”

Janna Parker, a former educator and a public education advocate in the county, says board members had “more than enough” information and time to take action already. “They’re trying to play this waiting game, trying to wait it out,” she said.

Other community activist groups, like PG Change Makers Coalition, have been ramping up pressure on leaders to end contracts with armed officers in schools. And the Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization, also came out in support of removing armed police from Prince George’s County schools.

Over the summer, school board members collected dozens constituent responses on whether to keep armed police in schools. Reactions varied with some parents and community members very supportive of removal, while others urged the board to keep SROs in schools for safety reasons.

Doris Reed, the director of the Association of Supervisory & Administrative School Personnel, urged strongly against their removal. “If your proposed actions are carried out, the burden of total school security would then shift to our school Administrators,” she wrote.

The Prince George’s County Police Department told the board that the department “welcome[s] a dialogue with the School Board regarding it[s] concerns about School Resource Officers” and noted that such concerns “have not been voiced previously.”

In terms of existing research evidence, Chalkbeat reporter Matt Barnum found that some studies do suggest that the presence of school police increases suspensions and arrests, particularly for young students, but there is no clear answer from the available literature on whether police reduce school crime or major conflict. Student surveys of school police tend to be generally positive, Barnum found, though among Black students they’re markedly more negative.

Though the debate continues, nearly everyone agrees there needs to be more focus on addressing the root causes of harm and conflict in schools. “We’ve seen the defunding of the essential services of guidance counselors, nurses, and librarians in schools that serve a majority of Black children,” said Rogers of the Black Lives Matter at School coalition. “We believe that reinvesting into these roles which nurture children and families is much more important in fulfilling the objectives of education and the sustaining of community.”

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