A Safer City
No More Police in CPS Schools as Chicago Education Officials Approve New Safety Plans
Demonstrators march in Chicago on Wednesday, June 24, 2020 to show their support for removing police officers from schools. (WTTW News)
Chicago Public Schools officials finalized a new security plan Thursday, officially eliminating police officers from school buildings while focusing instead on holistic discipline and safety strategies.
The Chicago Board of Education unanimously approved a new whole school safety plan, which brings to an end the use of school resource officers (SROs) inside district buildings following a yearslong review of CPS safety protocols and procedures.
“By prioritizing and centering the voices of our students and everything we do when it comes to safety, plus the community engagement ongoing with all of our stakeholders — our parents, community members, our staff and our administrators — we believe this is how we’re going to keep schools safe,” CPS Chief of Safety and Security Jadine Chou said Thursday.
In 2020, CPS began allowing local school councils to decide whether they wanted to retain or remove their school resource officers, following a student-led push to eliminate police from schools.
But the board early this year approved a new resolution instructing CPS CEO Pedro Martinez to implement a new whole school safety policy, which “must make explicit that the use of SROs within District schools will end by the start of the 2024-2025 school year.”
District officials have said the new framework is built around three main pillars of holistic safety: the physical safety of students and staff, emotional safety and relational trust.
“How our students feel welcomed every day, how they feel comfortable in the building and how they build relationships with the adults in their building,” Chou said. “We believe that the district can and will take school safety with this new policy to an entirely new level by doing all these three things together.”
That policy will be implemented in phases through a tiered criteria based on each school’s use of exclusionary disciplinary practices such as out-of-school suspensions and police notifications, with a focus on the disproportionate application of those actions.
Beginning next year, CPS will provide all schools with specific data metrics in order to conduct a baseline assessment of their safety, culture and climate. In subsequent years, schools would be required to create individual whole school safety committees based on those assessments and implement their own safety plans.
While police officers would no longer be working in schools, each school must have at least one security officer and should utilize security cameras on their campus, according to the new policy.
There is also an emphasis on training, as all schools must incorporate “climate, trauma-responsive, and social and emotional learning training into their annual school-wide professional development plans.”
Chicago and many other cities across the country began rethinking policing strategies following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.
Students and advocates in Chicago began pushing CPS that summer to remove all police from school buildings, saying their presence had a disproportionately negative impact on Black students and strengthened the school-to-prison pipeline.
The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research last month published a study that found eliminating SROs did not lead to increased disciplinary issues, nor did it make students and staff feel less safe inside their buildings.
At Phillips High School, one of the first to voluntarily remove SROs during the 2021-22 academic year, officials have since seen a 53% reduction in out-of-school suspensions, Chou said.
A steering committee of groups that helped develop the new plan — including Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), COFI POWER-PAC IL, Mikva Challenge, and BUILD Inc. — called Thursday’s vote a “stunning milestone.”
“I’m excited to see how so many years of student and community-led organizing efforts have finally led to the Whole School Safety Framework becoming a policy throughout CPS,” Romya Simone, a VOYCE student leader, said in a statement. “It makes me feel lucky and honored to be a part of this movement as a student leader. I hope we continue our organizing efforts to keep working toward other solutions.”
Board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland thanked the student advocates and stakeholders who contributed to the new safety plan and called Thursday’s vote an “important next chapter in CPS history … and the history of public education.”
“There is not another system policy idea like this in the country,” she said. “We are leaders, and you are leading us.”
A Safer City is supported, in part, by the Sue Ling Gin Foundation Initiative for Reducing Violence in Chicago.
Contact Matt Masterson: @ByMattMasterson | [email protected] | (773) 509-5431
