As part of a larger battle against racial injustice in the United States, an increasing number of school districts have terminated or are considering terminating contracts with school resource officers (SROs) - sworn law-enforcement officers with arrest powers who work in a school setting. In the first phase of a three-year study, a Penn State College of Education researcher has examined the role that public comments offered by citizens at local school board meetings play in shaping the educational policy process.
"What we see is this assembly of community activists and educators all being able to coalesce around this issue at a particular point in our nation's history where I think the public discourse was ready for this conversation," said DeMarcus Jenkins, assistant professor of education (educational leadership). "What we were able to see is how that played out at a school board meeting."
In fall 2021, Jenkins was awarded a $50,000 research grant by the Spencer Foundation to conduct a three-year study on the efforts of three urban school districts to examine how cutting ties with police departments might lead to better alternative approaches for Black and Latino students. The project was spurred by the ongoing racial unrest that started in May 2020 when George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who has since been convicted of the crime and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
The first phase of the study focused on examining the politics of contemporary policy change related to SROs which included analyzing 42 public comments delivered at a Denver Public Schools (DPS) Board of Education meeting where the termination of the contract with the Denver Police Department (DPD) was under consideration. Jenkins presented his results in his recently published paper, "'Schools Are Not Safer with Police': A Critical Discourse Analysis of Public Comments on the Removal of School Resource Officers." In the article, Jenkins seeks to "anchor and home in on ideas - how are people framing, understanding and arguing for the presence or absence of school police."
Despite the significance of public opinion in shaping the policymaking process, Jenkins said, there has been relatively little research on public comments as a means of interrogating rhetoric that shapes policy change in education. According to Jenkins, school board meetings are currently the best sites to get a wide range of stakeholder input that can influence policy change.
Jenkins' study addresses two research questions: (1) Who participates in the local school board policy process by providing public comments about SROs?; and (2) How do stakeholders frame their arguments to support or oppose the school board's decision to terminate contracts with law enforcement and remove police from schools?
During the summer of 2020, across the nation, local stakeholders gathered at school board meetings and public sessions to voice their opinions about decisions to divest and disinvest in SROs, according to Jenkins. In June 2020, the DPS Board of Education passed a resolution to remove SROs from all schools by the end of the 2020-21 school year. When school board members drafted the resolution, 17 SROs worked full-time across 18 middle and high schools. As part of his research, Jenkins critically examined 42 public comments delivered at a DPS Board of Education meeting where the termination of the contract with the DPD was under consideration.
In addition to DPS, Jenkins said, many urban school districts - including Oakland, California, and Phoenix, Arizona - had been fighting for years for a pivot on school police.
"(The year) 2020 had provided a different landscape and terrain, especially around the George Floyd murder and subsequent uprisings," he said.
The opposition to school police, according to Jenkins, largely centers on arguments that rather than keeping students safe, SROs more often criminalize Black and brown students, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ students. In his paper, Jenkins cites a 2011 study that found that SROs facilitate the process by which students are funneled out of schools and into the criminal justice system, or the school-to-prison pipeline. He also references "Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools," a 2016 book by Monique Morris that "shows how schools rely on exclusionary discipline and SROs to (re)produce schooling conditions that push Black girls out of school and render them more vulnerable to law enforcement contact."
One of the major implications of the study, Jenkins said, is the role that people's emotions play in the policy process. While school board meetings are supposed to be a rational process, he added, that doesn't always play out in real life. He found that people on both sides of the SRO issue at the DPS Board of Education meetings came to the conversation with high levels of passion and conviction.
"My research challenges researchers to think about the invisible dynamics that are involved in the policy process and how we can make those more visible so we can really start to talk about those silences," said Jenkins.
In his analysis of arguments on both sides of the SRO issue, Jenkins said he witnessed "individual versus structural arguments playing out." He found that community members who supported the decision to remove SROs from DPS "drew on realities that police presence does not make all students feel safe and the dividing line between students who feel safe" and felt that students from marginalized groups (e.g. Black, brown, LGBTQ, students with disabilities) are disproportionately impacted negatively by the presence of police. Some of the supporters of the resolution suggested that DPS reallocate resources to other areas, such as restorative justice, culturally relevant curricula, and trauma-informed practices.
On the other hand, Jenkins said, the minority of people who opposed the resolution to remove SROs spoke about how they were positively impacted in terms of having an SRO who also served as a role model. Several stakeholders framed SROs as community members with significant relationships with students and families or as "bridges" who made connections between students and resources, community, organizations and success. Stakeholders' support for the continued presence of SROs seemed largely to depend on their personal experiences working directly with them in different capacities.
"What that showed me was that there were two parallel conversations: a conversation rooted in this idea of police as individual actors who may do good things for a few folks; and a conversation around the broader institution of police and the ways a system of policing works in schools for different groups of people," Jenkins said.
In the next two phases of the study, Jenkins will be conducting research in the Oakland Unified School District in California, the School District of Philadelphia, and Minneapolis Public Schools. In the second phase, he will focus more on school-level dynamics and the impact of removing police from schools. He has also done preliminary work in examining the various alternatives that schools and districts are implementing in the absence of police.
"It's really interesting to see how districts adjust and pivot around police," said Jenkins.
