The productive tensions of designing, implementing and negotiating an abolitionist vision of police-free schools

• In Event: Building Abolitionist Futures in Education Now: Critical Engagements with Freedom, Belonging, and Police-Free Schools

Abstract

In June 2020, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in California passed the
“George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate School Police” (Resolution No. 1920-0260) (GFR),
which abolished OUSD’s school police department and school police services. In the wake of
the police killing of George Floyd, and many other victims of police, violence, scholars and
practitioners are at the helm of a critical moment to illuminate what happens when district policy
makers act to diminish police presence in schools. This paper centers ethnographic data around the sense-making of members of the George Floyd Resolution (GFR) Design Team–a district, community, and student-led policy and stakeholder group involved in the design, rollout, and evaluation of the GFR police abolition school policy.

The paper explores the productive tensions of practicing an abolitionist vision of police-free schools within a historical, structural, and cultural context of racism, capitalist class inequality, and structurally entrenched complacency. Findings suggest that against the power imbalances of this structural context and its effects, school district leaders who partner with community members through an organic community-driven process of accountability have the capacity to engender ideological and agentic shifts in the structural consciousness of district workers in ways that can enact abolitionist visions of police-free schools. Such shifts and a unique partnership between district leaders and community members highlight the need to creatively build inclusive people power inside and outside of schools to galvanize the energies needed for sustained, liberatory change.

Author

• Rekia G. Jibrin, University of California - Santa Cruz