Students in Wake and Durham counties seek end to school resource officers

A group of about 200 students rallied at the Capitol on Friday night to call for school resource officers to be removed from Wake County schools.

The newly formed Wake County Black Student Coalition protest followed the Wake County school board renewing the SRO program with the county’s law enforcement agencies earlier this month. The renewal is for one year, instead of the usual three-year renewal, The News & Observer reported.

“I’ve never smoked a day in my life and I’m getting profiled, especially in my own school,” said Yakob Lemma, an Enloe High School student and one of the coalition’s founders. “I’m already getting profiled at the gas station.”

The protest began with speeches from the coalition’s founders and leaders from N.C. BORN who came out to support the students. The group then marched down Salisbury Street.

Victoria Smith, another student at Enloe, decided to start the coalition after seeing people coming together and asking for changes in policing. She called one of her friends and asked, “What if we gather all the students in Wake County to fight against systematic racism?”

“It hurts to see that Black men are still being hung,” she said. “We read about that in our text books but it’s still going on.”

The number of school resource officers has increased over the past 20 years following mass school shootings, The News & Observer has reported. Having law-enforcement officers in schools makes them safer., supporters say.

But the students’ demands go beyond SROs.

The coalition also wants to see more Black student unions in schools and student advisory boards to check students, staff and administrators for racial biases. Members also want more more Black history taught in Wake schools, said Justin Sanga Bull, another co-founder.

Two other co-founders, Reagan Razon and Jasmin Benas, have started a petition to remove SROs from Wake County schools. More than 5,000 students have already signed.

Smith talked about her experience with SROs as a Black student. Whenever she was out with other students who looked like her, SROs would aggressively ask her for a pass, she said. But when she was with her white or Asian friends, they were a lot more understanding.

The students are want more funding to go toward nurses and counselors instead of SROs.

Durham SRO Protest

In Durham students held a March for Black Students in Durham this month and are planning a summit this fall calling for the school system to end its SRO agreement with the Durham County Sheriff’s Office.

The group wants more dialogue with school district leaders, who seem unconcerned about the issue, said Elijah King, a 2020 Riverside High graduate and one of the organizers.

On Thursday morning, King, Aissa Dearing, a 2020 J.D. Clement Early College graduate, Chris Fowler, a 2020 Durham School of the Arts graduate, and Jay Rahim, a current student at the School of the Arts, were at the Durham Public Schools central offices on Cleveland Street to raise awareness of the SRO issue before that evening’s school board meeting.

The group wants more counselors and social workers to replace all SROs next school year, saying more mental health services would eliminate some of the problems that SROs deal with. King said he would like to see more emphasis on restorative justice and more counselors trained in those practices.

Fowler said when he was a freshman, there was a fight in the cafeteria, which was traumatic enough, but when the SRO’s taser came out, it just elevated the level of violence.

“It’s a scary thing, I’ll tell you,” he said.

In an interview this month, school board Chair Mike Lee, who has three children in the Durham Public Schools, acknowledged the students’ concerns but said SROs are needed until the school district finds other ways to protect them.

This story was originally published June 27, 2020 at 5:10 PM.