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Some students demanded police-free schools in last summer’s protests.
Police officers should stay in New Haven schools that want them. Those schools should also get more psychologists and social workers.
New Haven Public Schools’ School Security Design Committee settled on this recommendation Thursday evening. Committee members plan to write up the recommendation for the Board of Education to review at its Feb. 8 meeting.
“Everybody wins. We keep the school resource officers (SROs) under these [new] conditions, and we we also get the personnel that we need that hopefully help wean us from ever needing SROs,” said committee chair Carlos Torre.
The Board of Education formed the committee in the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. Student representative Lihame Arouna brought the call from the protests to the board: Switch funds from school resource officers to school mental health professionals.
“Some students are feeling policed by the constant presence of police in hallways, watching them,” Arouna explained on Thursday.
The committee has looked at school-based arrest data and the origins of SROs in community policing. They heard a public push to get rid of SROs and contextualized that with a survey in which the majority of students, parents and school staff said that they would like SROs to stay.
In recent meetings, most committee members seemed to settle on the decision to reform rather than abolish SROs.
Six or so of the 11 committee members present Thursday night approved this approach. While Torre raised removing SROs from schools as an option, no one voiced support for that option.
Still, Assistant Superintendent Paul Whyte said that he plans to work with Arouna to make sure dissenting perspectives are included in the committee’s final recommendation. Arouna was part of the virtual meeting but stayed quiet.
Police leadership has been involved in every meeting to this point. Torre asked them not to join on Thursday to avoid their conflict of interest in running the program.
Some of the reforms the committee suggested include:
- Secure more money for school psychologists and social workers, particularly through a bill proposed by Sen. Chris Murphy, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Rep. Ilhan Omar. New Haven’s Citywide Youth Coalition, which led this summer’s protests, helped push the bill.
- Change school resource officer uniforms to something recognizable but less fear-inducing for students of color — “like a sweater,” Torre suggested.
- Don’t park police cars in front of schools.
- Communicate SRO job responsibilities during student orientations, community meetings and other relationship-building activities.
- Define those responsibilities more clearly, and make the mentorship responsibilities more explicit.
- Make sure all school administrators are holding regular meetings with SROs.
- Document when and why SROs are called in and what everyone involved thought of the outcome.
- Give students a semi-anonymous way to report when they are feeling unsafe.