What is the Alternative to Police in Schools?
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person — ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
--James Baldwin, "No Name In The Streets"
Introduction
For decades, we have policed our schools based on fear.
Fear that has rarely been substantiated with evidence but rather myths of how police prevent ‘disorder’ in our schools. Yet, the social forces that cause harm are far more complex. As abolitionist Black feminist Mariame Kaba writes, “a system that never addresses the why behind the harm never actually contains the harm itself.” SRO Programs do not address the why behind the harms that exist in our education system. Now that we have the data, we should implement comprehensive alternatives to policing in our schools and communities.
Readers may not know this, but police haven't always been part of the education system or worked in schools with our children and youth. As historian Tamara Gene Meyers shows in her 2019 book Youth Squad: Policing Children in the Twentieth Century, police agencies have actively sought for many decades to insert themselves further into the lives of youth in the name of protecting children and doing crime prevention. Youth-oriented and community policing strategies, which include revisionist histories of the "friendly cop," go hand in hand to shape acceptance of a status quo of School Resource Officer Programs.
Significantly, evidence of police having positive effects on actual or perceived school safety remains inconclusive. What is conclusive are these programs' negative consequences on the most marginalized students (see Samuels-Wortley 2021, US & Canada based, and Research for Action, US Based).
Another thing readers may not know is that police forces in Canada originate as agents of the colonial state focused on dispossessing Indigenous people and slave patrols. In Canada, the RCMP operated as a military unit. This fundamentally influences our understanding that removing police from schools is a necessary step towards true decolonization and divesting from colonial laws and policies that expand the prison industrial complex.
The Alternatives
Municipalities and school districts can implement alternatives to SRO Programs that create healthy, caring, and safe schools for all members of the school community. For example, the Province of Alberta already outlines restorative practices for use in education, calling these a "set of strategies that can transform learning environments and help school staff respond more effectively to unacceptable behavior." Restorative practices involve:
Building community and emphasizing trustful relationships as a preventive measure.
Mediation rather than punishment that focuses on accountability and repairing harm.
Providing a "wraparound" supportive environment for students
Addressing racist and ableist school policies and practices, which must be done in tandem with other restorative practices.
SRO Programs attempt a "quick fix" of crime prevention through policing, rather than addressing the complex social issues and needs children, youth, and their families face in their lives. SRO Programs also divert school district resources away from alternatives and toward police. The following list of alternatives can replace almost all activities that SROs are said to carry out in schools and would address diverse student needs:
Hiring more school counselors to identify and address student needs, including mental health and referrals to other forms of care.
Hiring social workers grounded in anti-colonial and anti-oppressive practices to serve students, including addressing issues like bullying and addiction.
Hiring more Educational Assistants to support disabled students and foster inclusive pedagogies and classrooms.
Hiring school nurses to provide health care on site and to make presentations on important issues like sexual health, consent, drug consumption, and safety.
Hiring or consulting with lawyers and/or paralegals who could counsel school administrators on the uses of particular disciplinary actions. They could also conduct presentations for students on legal topics such as traffic rules, bylaws, the Charter of Rights and freedoms, treaties and questions of Indigenous sovereignty.
Hiring coaches and funding sports and afterschool programs. Such programs improve educational and employment outcomes, while reducing the likelihood of students becoming involved in activities that produce harm (aka "crime").
Creating smaller class sizes so teachers have the capacity to address the range of student needs they face in the classroom, for example in applying the most holistic, up-to-date pedagogies that are anti-colonial, anti-oppressive and caring, and that stimulate engagement among all students.
Investing in anti-oppressive education and training as well as treaty education for all school leaders, teachers, and other staff.
Ending the carceral practice of seclusion rooms and design alternative ways to maintain safety for students and staff.
Demanding alternatives to police that build actual caring and safe schools for all students could unite various communities concerned with maintaining strong public education in Edmonton. Demanding alternatives could help us all hold the provincial government accountable for the negative effects of defunding public education. The data shows it is also necessary to hold school boards accountable, as they have always been reactive rather than proactive when dealing with policing in our schools.
A case study of Toronto’s post-SRO world
Efforts by community organizations, advocates, students, and families in Toronto led to the termination in 2017 of the School Resource Officer Program in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Canada's largest school district (see also Morgan 2017). A 2019 TDSB Caring and Safe Schools Annual Report 2018-2019 examined data from the years before and after the SRO Program. The report showed a 24% reduction in suspensions and a 53% reduction in expulsions between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 school year.
This shows that removing SROs from schools helped contribute to the reduction in punitive measures and criminalization of students. Importantly however, the report also shows that the TDSB implemented other initiatives and practices over the three years to create a caring and safe environment for students. Efforts of the TDSB include a number of key actions:
Identifying trends, patterns and opportunities in past suspension data for improvement;
Supporting the Caring and Safe Schools team to examine bias, power and privilege as they relate to student discipline process;
Supporting school administrators in the application of human rights, anti-racism and anti-oppression principles to student discipline;
Providing learning opportunities for more staff to be trained in restorative Practices
Actively addressing educational streaming, which contributes to inequitable outcomes for students. (Streaming is the practice of separating students by academic ability and/or comparable skills into groups for all subjects or certain classes within a school).
This demonstrates that the creation of caring and safe schools takes a range of efforts where removing police from schools is a significant first step. Education systems must also develop practices that dismantle school cultures rooted in policing, surveillance, sorting/streaming, and criminalization of students, especially those who are Black, Indigenous, racialized, immigrants, refugees, undocumented, queer, and/or disabled.
To be clear, hard work remains to be done in the TDSB to address punitive disciplinary measures and dismantle the culture and policies that create ongoing disproportionate rates of suspensions and expulsions for these groups.
Nonetheless, the data we present and the results from other jurisdictions like Toronto show that canceling the SRO Program in the Edmonton Public School Board helps address youth criminalization and the school-to-prison pipeline. This step is only the beginning and should be followed by robust funding for non-police alternatives.
Solutions and The Way Ahead
This project, and our work on SROs, is simply one part of the work yet to be done. We acknowledge the multitude of voices who have spent years of their lives advocating for decriminalized schools. This includes the many dozens of people who testified publicly about this issue to the Edmonton Public School Board in the spring of 2020.
Without the dedication of many, our work would be incomplete.
With this in mind, we have identified a few key solutions that can be implemented right now to reduce and potentially eliminate the criminalization of Edmonton students.
Suspend the EPSB review and immediately terminate the SRO program
Removal of SROs from the Catholic School Board
Provincial investment in the personnel and infrastructure to wholeheartedly implement restorative practices in schools
More comprehensive data on school discipline. Even if programs end we need to understand the effects these programs had and continue to have on students