Here’s why some groups want to replace cops with counselors in Wake schools
A coalition of Wake County students and activist groups want to replace police officers in schools with counselors.
The Wake County Black Student Coalition, the Education Justice Alliance, the Youth Justice Project of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the ACLU of North Carolina launched their #CounselorsNotCops campaign on Tuesday. They’re asking the Wake County school system to get rid of school resource officers and use that $1 million to hire counselors trained in the deescalation tactics taught by the PeaceBuilders program.
“People get this misconception that when we say remove school resource officers that we want destruction, that we want chaos in our schools,” said Yakob Lemma, co-founder and vice president of the Wake County Black Student Coalition.
“That’s not at all what we want. All we want is for our schools, for every single student, for an environment, for a place of love because love is the most undermined thing in our education system.”
Police more likely to charge Black students
The proposal comes as the Wake County school board got an update Tuesday on the school resource office program.
Black students account for more than 60% of the referrals from school resource officers even though they’re only about a quarter of the student enrollment. Students can be referred to adult and juvenile court, teen court or diversion programs that keep them out of the court system.
Referrals dropped 59% for Black students between the 2016-17 and 2018-19 school years. There’s also been a drop in referrals among white and Hispanic students.
Russ Smith, the district’s senior director of security, told the board they can discuss with law enforcement about why the numbers are so disproportionate for Black students.
Lloyd Gardner, the district’s chief of staff, also told the board on Tuesday that staff is looking at piloting PeaceBuilders programs in some schools. But the programs wouldn’t be replacing the officers at those schools.
Every Wake County high school and middle school has a school resource officer on campus. Apex and Holly Springs also provide officers to rotate among the elementary schools in their towns.
The school district pays local law enforcement agencies to provide the armed officers, who undergo training before being assigned to work in schools.
The number of school resource officers has increased sharply over the past 20 years following mass school shootings, including at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018.
But some school districts have canceled their school resource officer contracts following this summer’s national backlash over the deaths of Black men and women at the hands of white police officers. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May and the Aug. 23 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, have led to protests nationwide and in the Triangle.
Students call for removal of police in schools
Students in Wake and Durham counties have held multiple protests calling for the removal of school resource officers.
The Wake County school board voted in June to keep the officers for the 2020-21 school year. But school leaders promised to get community feedback before developing a new agreement governing the role of the officers in schools.
“This summer showed us that a lot of students don’t feel they have greater protection when they have SROs in our schools, when they have law enforcement,” school board member Christine Kushner said at Tuesday’s board meeting. “We need that robust conversation with our community.”
On Tuesday, several students talked at a news conference about how they feel minority students are treated more harshly by police than white students. Lemma, a student at Enloe High School in Raleigh, said he and other minority students go to school in fear of the police.
“People are saying, ‘OK we need SROs. They protect us,’” Lemma said. “Sure they protect a certain group of people, but they do a lot more damage to minority groups.”
Speakers said the PeaceBuilders program would make schools safer because of the California-based program’s approach in training school staff on how to promote a positive school environment. Alina Khan, member of the Wake County Black Student Coalition, said counselors trained in mental health issues are more likely to stop school shootings than a police officer.
“Instead of fighting violence with more violence, we’re trying to instill that peace and love in our schools to prevent that violence from even occurring in the first place,” said Khan, a senior at Apex Friendship High School.
In addition to abolishing school resource officers in all district schools, the other four demands given on Tuesday are:
▪ Install accountability systems to deal with “misogynistic, “homophobic” and “racist” comments that school employees make to students.
▪ Create a platform for minority students to speak, such as a Black Student Union at every school.
▪ Create a safe and organized system for Wake County students to report any kind of sexual harassment.
▪ Integrate in-depth Black history in main curriculum.
This story was originally published September 1, 2020 at 4:45 PM.
