Mayor, heed the students

They want cops out of schools and they can tell you why

The question of whether or not to retain the police presence in our schools in Chicago is not going away.

So far we’ve seen Minneapolis end the relationship between its schools and police force, followed by Portland, Denver, and Seattle. Students in other cities are agitating for their school districts to do the same.

There are of course schools in CPS where the police presence is not seen as adversarial, terrifying, and harmful. But that there are any schools where this is so should really give us pause. Most of us who wonder quietly what in the world will happen if police are removed from schools, grew up in schools with no police presence at all. We grew up in a setting where it wasn’t assumed that policing was required to somehow keep students in order. Of course, we say to ourselves, we didn’t need it, but what in the world would happen now if these officers no longer roamed the halls of those, well, you know, violent disordered schools?

Look, I wrote Chicago Public Fools for six years all about why “those schools” were “that way.” Let me remind you: it has next to nothing to do with the students. It has to do with steady disinvestment over decades that affected everything, every aspect of student experience—class size, curriculum, extracurriculars, nurses, counselors, lunches, resources, facilities. It has to do with the steady transformation of many of our schools into an extended stop on the school to prison pipeline. All across the country, schools have themselves become little carceral communities where kids as young as 6 years old can be arrested. (Sorry, I mean: just Black students. White 6 year olds aren’t usually arrested.) What about that other stuff—all the resources we had growing up? Nurses? Once a week if at all. Extracurriculars? Too expensive. Libraries? Kids don’t need access to books, they have phones. If we double class size teachers can use personalized learning curricula. Toilet paper? Soap? Schools can, I don’t know, come up with that stuff on their own. Resources? Teachers can do that thing, what is it? Donors Choose?

Teachers can fundraise for resources. But every school is guaranteed a “school resource officer”—or several.

The money CPS has been wasting for two decades on things that aren’t actually school resources could support a small nation.

The spending imbalance is shocking. “School resource officers” cost CPS $33M annually. Can we truly say this police presence was worth maintaining, while simultaneously getting rid of, say, just for one example, most school libraries and librarians?

You can think about that one as long as you want.

Meanwhile, here is something you should know about and from which I guarantee you will learn. A week of conversation and webinars about what it means to remove the police force from our schools. It started yesterday, time’s a wasting. Do check it out—especially if you think the idea of police-free schools is outrageous. This event was organized by students themselves, and they deserve a hearing.

And Mayor Lightfoot, I’m talking to you too. This question is really, really not going to go away.