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Mellody Massaquoi at summer demo: SROs make school feel like jail.
New Haven student Jhoaell Ruiz wants police officers out of school buildings. Ruiz’s mother, Sonya-Marie Atkinson, wants them in there.
Both student and parent argued their perspectives not just at home, but at a Tuesday evening forum on the subject held by the New Haven Board of Education’s School Security Taskforce.
“I have personally watched officers cultivate relationships with some of the most unlikely students and help prevent them from becoming part of the prison [pipeline],” Atkinson said.
Ruiz had clearly heard that line of reasoning, the concept that “school resource officers” (SROs) are a positive touchpoint between students and law enforcement that promotes community policing.
“I still don’t feel like that’s a good enough reason to allow other students to feel uneasy,” Ruiz argued. “Having an officer near the school in a patrol car, in case of emergencies, should be what we do instead of having them in school.”
Ruiz was in the clear majority on Tuesday evening. Of the 22 parents, students, teachers and community members who spoke, all but four asked the district to remove school resource officers (SROs) from school buildings.
The New Haven Board of Education put together the School Security Taskforce after students demanded SRO removal in this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.
Task force members have shared personal experiences with SROs, considered school arrest data from different angles and discussed how the program started. (Click here for a story with the SROs’ point of view.)
Tuesday night’s forum was part of a broader effort to get feedback on the question of removing SROs. Surveys of students, teachers and administrators on their opinions and experiences will help the task force make a recommendation to the Board of Education by the end of 2020.
Most of those who spoke at the forum made a data-driven argument for removing SROs. They said that Black and brown students are suspended and arrested at higher rates than their white peers for the same kinds of behavior. They argued that SROs contribute to that exclusion and criminalization. They asked the city to invest in school social workers, counselors and psychologists instead of police officers.
A 2019 Connecticut Voices For Children study found that SROs do not measurably improve school safety or academic performance. The study found schools with SROs disciplined students more for non-criminal misbehavior and they found that Latino students were six times more likely to be arrested at a school with SROs than a school without them.
Recent New Haven Public Schools graduate Mellody Massaquoi spoke about the tension that disproportionate treatment created for her.
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Atkinson (shown at 2019 hearing): Prison pipeline prevention.
“It felt like jail. You know that you have officers in school who have the power to arrest you and criminalize you for minor infractions, while other students will get social workers and help,” Massaquoi said.
Aside from Atkinson, two people asked the district to keep SROs stationed at schools. One was retired Ross-Woodward principal Cheryl Herring-Brown, who represented a dozen other retired administrators. Another was New Haven Academy math teacher Marianne Maloney. (The SRO is not stationed at NHA, but rather “borrowed” on call from nearby Cross.)
Both educators spoke about their positive experiences with SROs and their impact on school safety.
“We had a kid who had a seizure. That officer was right there and made contact with the EMTs,” Maloney said. “As hard as we try as teachers to eliminate bullying, those students [who get bullied] know that they can stand near an officer and be safe.”
Most schools have school security officers, not the uniformed SROs who work for the New Haven Police Department. The schools that do have SROs tend to be large schools like Wilbur Cross High School, James Hillhouse High School and Hill Regional Career High School. Smaller schools like High School in the Community have an officer assigned to them whom they can call if need be.
One parent, Magaly Cajigas, agreed with the vast majority of speakers that city dollars should go to school counselors and trauma specialists instead of police officers. She called for some level of police presence near her child at Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School to prevent school shootings.
One of the students on the call, Abdulrahman Elrefaei, read a statistic on the extremely low likelihood of school shootings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Massaquoi and others spoke about the need for other professionals to fill the roles that SROs often play.
“Schools should have nurses to handle seizures and they should have counselors to handle bullying,” said parent Laura McCargar.
Following is a video prepared to support the school resource officers: