There is a narrative that is being pushed, misleading The LAUSD Board Members and Superintendent Carvalho to believe that all or most parents want school police back on our campuses. This is a false narrative, and is simply not true.
We want to unequivocally state that school police DO NOT make schools safer and that they should not be returned to LAUSD campuses. Instead, LAUSD must fulfill its commitment to implementing community-based safety programs like safe passage, peace-building, gang intervention and more, both at BSAP Schools and throughout the district.
There is a long history of LA School Police disproportionately targeting, criminalizing, and harming Black students and students with disabilities especially, but also Latinx students, Indigenous students, and other students of color. Indeed, LAUSD has acknowledged this fact and responded to calls to reimagine school safety by defunding school police by $25 million ($62million remain in their budget), removing them from permanent on-campus posts, banning the use of pepper spray against students, and committing to implementing community-based safety initiatives. Even after these cuts, LA School Police have continued to criminalize, target, and harm students and community members. In 2021, LASPD shot a man who was likely experiencing a mental health crisis outside Carver Middle School in South Central. Earlier this year, LA School police broke district policy by pepper-spraying students after a Roosevelt-Garfield basketball game on the East Side. And earlier this school year, LASPD shot a 17 year old student after a football game at Legacy High School in Southeast LA. Clearly, even though LASPD has been defunded and removed from campus, they still pose a serious safety threat to students and community members throughout the district.
While we acknowledge that certain parents have come to Board meetings to make their plea for the return of school police, these parents are on campuses that are still lacking in community-based safety initiatives like safe passage, wrap-around services, mental health supports, and the same transformative learning opportunities and environments that drastically improve school safety while refraining from criminalizing and abusing students on our campuses! If their students were privileged to the many supports of our Community Schools model and our BSAP (Black Student Achievement Plan) built-in services, and if safe passage and other community-based safety programs had been fully implemented on their campuses, they too would see the impact that servicing the whole child has on academic success, attendance, and campus safety, versus criminalizing our youth for typical adolescent behaviors.
In 2016, LAUSD committed to converting as many schools as possible to the Community Schools model, and in February 2021, The District heard the hearts of over 17,000 surveyed youth loud and clear, and as a response, adopted the Black Student Achievement Plan, which - if fully and effectively implemented - includes all of the elements we need to not ever need school police on our campuses ever again. The People's Plan for Police-Free Schools
Instead of trying to return school police back to our campuses, we need to implement the use of community-based Safe Passage partners and assist them in making it through the RFP (Request for Proposal) process, and ensure that our mental health support systems that address the whole child are in place and readily accessible to students and families in and beyond our schools. The District needs to create a plan to fill the vacant PSW positions, hire more BSAP College Counselors, and release funding to each school site dedicated to transformative learning experiences that keep students engaged in the learning process. In addition, we need to adopt the Universal Design for Learning as the framework district-wide, and not just in certain pockets.
Instead of returning school police to our campuses, we need to be following the District’s Restorative Justice model that was made mandatory in April 2013, and utilizing the SWPBIS Tier II and Tier III Interventions, which specifically requires that schools, administrators, and teachers refrain from misusing school police and further traumatizing our students, and removes the pathway to the school-to-prison pipeline. Widely throughout the District, these interventions are not being practiced, and a large number of administrators still claim to not even know they exist, let alone have been trained in them.
When school police are the “go-to,” the opportunity for mediation is automatically removed, and there’s no chance for restorative practices. Now, there’s a disciplinary record that begins for not only our Black and Brown students, but also one of our other most vulnerable populations - our SPED students. School police are inadequately trained to deal with our SPED students altogether, with special emphasis on our neuro-divergent students. They too, have been unfairly criminalized on top of already being the number one targets for peer-to-peer bullying. We have also watched the permanent harm that has been committed against so many of our students who suffer from multiple childhood traumatic events because, instead of being triaged, they’re arrested for again, typical adolescent and/or trauma-informed behaviors such as “willful defiance,” which school police are inadequately trained to deal with and sometimes deem as attacks on their position of authority.
Furthermore, it has been proven that in the most critical situations where school police had the opportunity to truly save the lives of children, they failed to do so. Some parents have been misled into believing that the presence of school police will prevent more severe acts of violence like school shootings, but after Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde, we know that this notion is far from the truth! We also know that certain schools in LAUSD have never had school police on their campuses, and their students have traditionally had optimal academic and behavioral outcomes.
We, the Students Deserve Black Parent Group, and the parents of our community partners, who are also LAUSD parents, implore you to let the system that we’ve put in place - that you have committed to, have a solid chance to actually work. The evidence is in the handful of campuses where true implementation has occurred. Let’s honor Superintendent Carvalho’s commitment and not only allocate but actually spend $60 million on community-based safety programs and help organizations get back on our campuses. Let’s support the work of our School Climate Advocates, and commit to hiring more. Let’s fill the vacant PSW positions. Let’s build those Well-Being Centers on each campus. Let’s truly work together as stakeholders to create healthy, happy, culturally-supportive, transformative, restorative learning environments for all students, instead of reneging on the commitments that have already been made and defaulting back to fear-based strategies that only cause harm to our youth!
In closing, we demand the following:
That LAUSD NOT return school police to permanent on-campus positions, and instead continue to divest from the still astounding $60 million annually in education dollars that are being spent on school police2. That LAUSD fulfill its commitment to improving implementation of and expanding the infrastructure to support community-based safety programs like safe passage, gang intervention, and peace-building throughout the District.3. That Superintendent Carvalho rescind his call to return school police to on-campus posts, and re-commit to working with students, parents, the BSAP Steering Committee, the School Climate, Culture and Safety Task Force, and community-based safety practitioners to build a plan to fully and effectively implement community-based safety initiatives throughout the District - as stated in the “Community-Based Safety Analysis and Expansion” resolution unanimously passed by the Board on June 13, 2023.ff
If you agree that students need care and not cops, want to help eradicate the school-to-prison-pipeline, end the trauma and criminalization of our youth, and press Superintendent Carvalho to honor the commitment to community-based safety and safe passage programs district-wide, please sign our petition!
