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Learning From Chicago's Decentralized, School-Based Decision Making Regarding the Role of Police in Schools

Sat, April 15, 2:50 to 4:20pm CDT (2:50 to 4:20pm CDT), Hyatt Regency Chicago, Floor: East Tower- Ballroom Level, Grand Hall J

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session will explore the ongoing efforts to reform school safety in Chicago Public Schools.

Nationwide protests in the Summer of 2020 prompted school districts across the country to reassess their relationship with police. Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) decentralized process of School Resource Officer (SRO) removal stands in contrast to the centralized process of other large districts. CPS implemented a Whole School Safety planning process (WSS) that asked each high school to consider the holistic safety impacts of SROs and create a plan for whether and how SROs would be used at the school. WSS plans were then discussed and voted on by Local School Councils, letting each community determine its own approach to safety. During the session a range of stakeholders will aid in unpacking how a “community engaged” decision making process created the unintended outcome of increasing the racial and ethnic disparities in school-based contact with police and access to social and emotional support.

This session will address questions of local control, safety possibilities in the wake of policing, and the role of political historical context in school reform efforts. From multiple perspectives the panel will explore the following questions:

● What are the benefits and challenges of a decentralized decision-making process?
● What types of relationships and infrastructures need to exist in order to support a genuine process of local deliberation?
● When individual schools are given the freedom to articulate their own challenges and identify local solutions, what type of creative solutions emerge?
● How do school actors’ interpretations of “safety” and “support” entail divergent solutions?
● How does the historical context of the bureaucratic and political relationship between the Chicago Police Department and Chicago Public Schools shape a process like Whole School Safety?
● How does historical experience craft what possibilities schools imagine for the safety of their students?

This session enters the conversation on school policing from a political-historical perspective. By tracing how grassroots political action were translated into district policies we explore factors that can facilitate or hinder the extent to which equitable intentions lead to equitable outcomes. By seeking to understand the multiple realities of stakeholders involved we push the analysis of an educational policy beyond a normative approach focused narrowly on outcomes. This session’s discussion between activists and an interdisciplinary group of researchers allows us to explore multiple levels of Chicago’s efforts to remove police from schools. This analysis includes Chicago’s rich history of activism around schools, political relationships between intertwined bureaucracies and the experiences of those implementing change.

Whole School Safety asked school communities to define safety for themselves and to build towards their own vision and version of safety. At the same time CPS maintains a newly articulated institutional position that SROs should eventually be phased out in the interest of safety. Evidence from school planning meetings will be leveraged to interrogate the ways that truth is contested, particularly when discussing subjective feelings of safety. Panelists will cover the variety of positions and truths that stakeholders articulate in regards to questions of safety, highlighting the tensions that various school actors must hold in order to successfully carry out a collaborative and democratic decision-making process.

Attendees will hear from grassroots changemakers like student groups and parent advocacy organizations as well as the various institutional actors shaping the Whole School Safety process. These stakeholders will highlight effective strategies as well as the tensions of going through a community-controlled change process. In addition to these stakeholder perspectives, evidence from over 50 hours of ethnographic data from Local School Councils meetings discussing the decision to remove SROs, school demographic data, and neighborhood crime data will be shared. Attendees will walk away with an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges associated with Chicago’s local school governance, as well as a wealth of perspectives on the role of police in schools.

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