Change must begin in our schools. Imagine being a 15-year-old Black student who has just spent this past week protesting the lives lost due to police brutality, because of the color of their skin. Now, imagine the start of next year, when you see your school police officer. How would you feel? Would you feel safe? I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t feel that this police officer was there to protect and serve me, because that’s not what this past week has shown me. So what do we do?
In order to dismantle a system, we have to stop acting like schools are prisons. We have to change the narrative that’s been written for our Black and Brown children. We have to take care of their social, emotional, and mental health and take the first step of many steps in ensuring that our schools will never be a breeding ground for prisons.
[pullquote position=\”right\”]Let’s remove police from all schools and replace them with more counselors and behavior interventionists.[/pullquote] In my own city of Denver, statistics show that Black students, who make up 13% of students in the city, are far more likely than White students to be suspended, expelled, handc￭ or referred to law enforcement. What message are we sending to our Black and Brown students whose schools have a police presence?
The message is the same that I hear all the time as an educator. “They don’t like us. They don’t care about us here.” Just let that sink in.
We need to focus on dismantling systemic racism by evaluating who is being suspended in our school, how frequently and questioning if it’s effective. According to a report by the ACLU, students who experience out-of-school suspensions are more likely to drop out and to be arrested. Of all the out-of-school suspensions in 2015-2016, only 3% involved any weapons. This means that 97% of students lost eight hours or more of academic time due to non-lethal actions.
When I think back to Shawn, I imagine what his future could have held if systemic barriers didn’t define his narrative. So I ask, are we going to continue the school-to-prison pipeline or are we going to interrupt it?
Following the death of George Floyd, Minneapolis Public Schools announced that it is cutting ties with the city’s police department. I challenge us to do the same. Every student deserves a place to feel safe and right now the world is telling us, this safety does not exist for our Black and Brown students. Let’s stand up for justice and take police officers out of our schools.