Retain or Remove? Factors in Chicago Public High Schools' Decisions Regarding School Resource Officers

• In Event: A Multidisciplinary Examination of School Resources Officers: Discourse, Policy, and Stakeholders' Perceptions

Abstract

Objectives
In June 2020, Chicago’s mayor announced that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high schools’ Local School Councils (LSC) would decide whether to retain or remove assigned SROs from their buildings. LSCs, as partially-elected bodies with limited governing authority over individual schools, held public meetings to deliberate and vote on this issue. This allows us to identify factors that may have influenced these decisions across schools and their attendant racial and socioeconomic compositions.

Perspectives
Despite the growth in SRO programs over the past six decades, there is little evidence that their presence prevents gun violence in schools (Livingston et. al., 2019) or other forms of violent crime (Curran, 2020; Gottfredson et al., 2020). This disconnect between stated purpose and outcomes suggests that the expansion of SRO programs has been driven by political considerations and cultural beliefs at play across local contexts, where most of these decisions are made (Viano, Curran, & Fisher, 2021). Little is understood about how these decisions are made at the local level.

Methods
To understand contextual factors, we ran first a bivariate correlation table to examine the relationship between the percentage of LSC votes to retain SROs and arrests on campus, graduation rate, and other potentially related variables. With our results we used multiple regression to determine how much variance the correlated variables explained.
To analyze the arguments made within LSC meetings, we used an axial coding method (Vollstedt & Rezat, 2019) to categorize arguments as retain or remove and then develop identity nodes to cluster similar arguments. We then used the results of the quantitative analysis to crosstab LSC arguments with contextual factors to seek patterns.

Data Sources
The contextual data set was compiled from publicly available sources with school-level and neighborhood-level variables for each of the public high schools that held a vote (n = 63). LSC meeting minutes (n=21) and comparison city meetings (n=5) were collected from public websites either in document format or transcribed from audio or video files.

Conclusions
We found that the total percentage of Black students enrolled, the surrounding neighborhood crime rate, Diversity Index, and the total arrest rate of students on campus were significantly related with the LSC’s vote to retain their SRO. In a regression analysis, the arrest rate and percentage of Black students of school was associated with a higher likelihood that an LSC would vote to retain their SRO. When the diversity Index was substituted for the percentage of Black students, all three predicted the SRA retention rate.
Across CPS LSC meetings, arguments to remove were made at a rate over 3 times than those to retain, and the types of arguments made were largely similar across schools despite the ultimate decision outcome. The most common LSC meeting arguments in aggregate were also somewhat similar to arguments made in other cities, suggesting the specifics of CPS policy shaped the local discourse.

Scholarly Scientific Significance
Our findings raise difficult questions about how to exercise democratic governance over school safety policies within broader racist and segregated social systems.

Authors

• Charles Tocci, Loyola University Chicago

• David Igliozzi, Loyola University Chicago

• Candace Kyles, Loyola University Chicago

• Maryse Richards, Loyola University Chicago