Defund police in Fresno schools? This district kept cops and improved student outcomes
This story is part of The Pipeline, a series of stories written by The Fresno Bee’s Education Lab that explore mental health, students and their experience with law enforcement on campus.
As debate grows over the use of armed police officers in Fresno Unified schools, a school district in Colorado with many similarities to Fresno appears to have found a middle ground between keeping police on campuses and improving outcomes for students.
Ultimately, after years of tinkering, the Aurora Public Schools in suburban Denver landed on a program that keeps police officers on campuses while also focusing on more progressive discipline and safety programs like restorative justice.
Additionally, the police presence in the Colorado schools doesn’t cost the district a cent.
That idea could resonate with some Fresno Unified school board trustees who’ve questioned whether the public is “double paying” to have Fresno police officers patrol schools.
“It’s an injustice that citizens are paying for law enforcement through property taxes and their education dollars,” Trustee Veva Islas told The Bee.
Aurora Public Schools experimented with various law enforcement strategies over the years. In an interview with The Bee’s Education Lab, Aurora Public Schools Superintendent Rico Munn said their most significant breakthroughs came after developing new discipline and intervention policies and redefining the role of campus police officers.
They say the law enforcement strategy changes helped lower the number of campus arrests, suspensions and expulsions. As the Aurora Public Schools district discipline numbers fell, grades, test scores and graduation rates all improved, district officials reported.
However, Colorado school officials also say there’s no “one-size-fits-all solution” that can be perfectly duplicated across various communities with different needs and resources.
How does the Fresno community feel about police in schools?
With most students learning remotely during the coronavirus pandemic, no police officers are working on FUSD campuses. The decision on whether FUSD will renew police contracts is up for debate with the community.
FUSD officials late last year postponed a vote to renew a series of school law enforcement contracts, saying they wanted to gather community input before making the decision.
Supporters of the effort to remove police from campus say they want the district to take the roughly $3 million spent last year on police and put that money into mental-health-related student programs. While FUSD officials haven’t ruled out the possibility of moving funds around, they have noted the district already earmarked more than $42 million for mental health-related services this school year.
They also point to Fresno Police Department data that shows Black students were disproportionately arrested in 2019. That year, Black students made up about 7% of the FUSD student population. However, Black students accounted for about 25% of all school-related arrests.
But critics say eliminating law enforcement funding in schools would jeopardize student and teacher safety.
“In the climate of 2020, 2021, the idea of not having law enforcement on our high schools and middle schools would be paramount to lunacy and insanity,” Trustee Terry Slatic said previously.
The new Fresno Police chief, Paco Balderrama, said he is against removing police officers from schools.
“I’ve seen the positive impact that these school resource officers have on young people,” Balderrama said. “I’ve seen lives changed through programs like the school resource officer programs.”
He said he was inspired to become a police officer because of the school resource officer he met in his school growing up.
In December, FUSD set aside about $48,900 to “research and gauge” how parents, students, and staff feel about armed campus police officers.
Andrew Jones, a sociology professor at Fresno State, is leading the research project. He is working with FUSD’s Equity and Access, Communications, and African American Academic Acceleration.
The district has been surveying parents, police, and faculty members since Feb. 11. The district also has been conducting focus group interviews with small, randomly-selected groups of parents, staff and campus police officers. Researchers are expected to continue gathering data until March 12.
Fresno State will analyze the research and report back to the Board of Education in late April or early May, according to Nikki Henry, FUSD’s chief communications officer.
Black students in Fresno more likely to be arrested, suspended
FUSD Board President Kiesha Thomas said campus police officers in Fresno have a history of “profiling” Black students.
“I’m not saying police are profiling intentionally, but generally, our African American boys are targeted many times more than other students,” Thomas said.
Thomas said she learned of an incident where a teacher wanted police to arrest a second-grade student.
“Really, it’s much bigger than the police,” Thomas said. “It’s how they are used. Sometimes they are used in a manner that they are not supposed to be used in.”
Fresno Police Sgt. Jeff La Blue previously told The Bee that all police officers receive racial-bias training every two years.
Thomas said it’s not only a matter of police “profiling,” but some teachers and school administrators have given out punishment on a larger scale to Black students than other children in the district.
Thomas said she has seen Black boys suspended at higher rates for things like “wearing saggy pants” or for not having a pencil in class.
“I was perplexed on why you kick a kid out of class because he doesn’t have a pencil,” Thomas said.
California Department of Education data shows Black FUSD students had the highest suspension rate during the 2018-2019 school year at 16.7% than all other student demographics by almost double.
Data shows Black students in Fresno County are among the top three groups of students statewide who miss the most days of learning due to suspensions, losing a rate of 105 days of school during the 2018-19 school year.
According to data from the California Department of Education, 38.4% of FUSD students were suspended multiple times, a higher rate than the statewide rate of 30.4% and the county rate of 33.8%.
Studies over the past 45 years have touched on the need to end “radicalized school discipline practices.”
“It’s not police, at the end of the day, that has the greatest amount of authority. Defunding police and moving resources over is critical, but we have to simultaneously remove exclusionary school policies,” Georgetown associate professor and researcher Thalia Gonzalez told The Bee.
Aurora Public Schools redefined campus law enforcement
The death of George Floyd at the hands of police over the summer sparked widespread public outrage and triggered a national discussion about police, including law enforcement on public school campuses.
Schools all around the country ended or significantly changed their contracts with police officers.
But at the Aurora Public Schools near Denver, district officials said few changes were needed. That’s because, according to the school district, they implemented changes years ago that improved the way police are used on campuses.
And, notably, they said, Aurora Public Schools stopped paying for campus police officers more than 20 years ago.
Many of the changes appear to fall in line with some of the things Fresno advocates say they want.
Over the last eight years, Aurora Public Schools invested heavily in mental health resources and restorative justice resources, and changed how students are disciplined.
Munn, the Aurora superintendent, said they changed how police officers are used and fundamentally changed their student discipline process. Munn said in 2013 the district made “heavy investments” in restorative justice and alternatives to expulsion and suspensions. He said the district also invested heavily in mental health supports.
Munn said the new approach fueled academic achievement and increased graduation rates.
Munn said the district saw a correlation between student discipline and graduation rates.
“We have, going back seven, eight years, made a heavy investment in restorative justice and alternatives to expulsion. We’ve also invested heavily in mental health supports,” Munn said.
Before the district implemented restorative justice practices, Aurora Public Schools had some of the state’s highest expulsion rates.
“We were rated as one of the three lowest-performing districts in the state out of 178 districts,” Munn said.
Aurora Public Schools’ 2013 graduation rate was 52%. In 2019, that number reached 79%. In 2013, Munn said there were 159 expulsions. In 2019, that number decreased to 45.
“We saw a dramatic decrease in the number of high-cost student discipline actions, meaning expulsion and suspension. We saw a decrease in the overall referral of police and a decrease in the gaps of ethnic groups and an increase in students and staff feeling safe and an increase in academic achievement.” Munn said.
Although there are still police on campus, Munn said the district redefined law enforcement’s role on campuses.
Munn said it is essential for the school administrators and teachers to have a “clear understanding” of what areas of discipline should involve law enforcement. “We wanted to be in a place where we only called police as a matter of law when we had to,” Munn said.
The district held multiple community meetings and collaborated with local organizations that offered different solutions.
“We didn’t try to give everybody the same tools. We identified a couple of different partners that did restorative justice and had different lenses of perspective and did that, and then we went into our schools to see which of our partners fits into their school,” Munn said.
The district spends $10 million on restorative justice resources, and they partner with other groups to offer those services.
Can it work in Fresno?
Local advocates want Fresno Unified to take the money spent on police and invest in more counselors and mental health resources. Advocates like Fresno Barrios Unidos Youth Advocacy and Leadership manager Marisa Moraza say the stress students face during the pandemic causes trauma, and schools need more trained mental health professionals.
Currently, FUSD has more mental health resources than they have ever had available in the past, Still they are suffering a shortage of counselors. The district has a ratio of 513 students to one counselor, according to CDE data.
With kids learning from home, acquiring social-emotional tools has become a “challenge,” according to the district’s director of the Department of Prevention and Intervention, Rita Baharian.
Baharian said it’s not clear whether they have all the necessary resources.
And while FUSD already employs restorative justice programs, but some teachers, like Heather Miller, question whether such programs have been used properly.
”It’s not working in the sense that it’s messy. I don’t know what the restorative justice model is supposed to look like,” Miller told The Bee’s Education Lab.
Miller said she feels the district needs to work on building more “cultural proficiency and competency.” She said the responsibility of teaching anti-racism practices to other teachers and staff has a tendency to fall on the shoulders of young teachers at FUSD.
“They need to have a long-term plan that the district rolls out rather than throwing to teachers of color,” Miller said.
Miller said the teachers of color leading the work are not receiving enough support from the district.
“The problem with restorative justice is, if you’re not really building relationships and fostering community, what’s the purpose of it?” Miller said.
What’s next for Fresno?
Once the district has taken in the community’s recommendations on law enforcement contracts, the board will once again look at the contracts and vote on what type of security FUSD will have.
Islas said the district is doing the right thing in having a more extensive community discussion involving teachers, staff, parents and students.
“I would be fine if our parents said, ‘I want all these enhancements; here is what I think good school safety looks like.’ Or, if they said, ‘I really do want to see us have (police officers) just patrolling our neighborhoods even if they aren’t on our campuses,’” Islas said.
The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Read more from The Bee’s Education Lab on our website.
This story was originally published February 24, 2021 at 11:39 AM.