Reconceptualizing School Safety

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 7) Health, Well-Being, and Social Conditions

Abstract

Public education has a responsibility to keep students safe. Yet school safety has long been less about preventing harm than about managing perceived violence and disorder. For more than seventy years, education law and policy have built systems of surveillance, policing, and preemptive intervention designed to manage risk in the name of safety. These systems now function as routine features of school governance, distributing presumptions of innocence to some students while subjecting others to heightened suspicion.

This Article asks how these systems operate in practice. Drawing on novel district-level threat data from Los Angeles and 208 interviews with Black, Latine, and White students, it identifies a striking paradox. Although threats are most frequently recorded in schools attended by Black students, White students account for the majority of documented threats, including every weapon-related incident in the dataset. Black students, by contrast, are far more likely to be arrested, removed from school, and formally labeled dangerous. The harshest interventions are thus imposed not in response to the most serious threats, but on the students least responsible for them.

To explain this divergence, the Article theorizes school safety as threat-based governance: an administrative regime that organizes institutional responses around perceived risk rather than demonstrated harm. Under this regime, judgments about danger determine who is punished and who is protected. When students are viewed as threatening, safety authorizes surveillance, exclusion, and police intervention. When they are viewed as non-threatening, serious misconduct is often reframed as care rather than control.

One mechanism sustaining this asymmetry is the unequal mobilization of disability and mental-health frameworks. Informal claims of anxiety, trauma, or emotional disturbance—often advanced on behalf of White students—redirect responses away from discipline and toward accommodation or record minimization. Because whiteness is associated with innocence and reduced threat perception, disability framing amplifies leniency for White students while students of color are more likely to be disciplined.

The Article makes three contributions: it documents racialized enforcement mismatches; theorizes threat-based governance; and shows how school-safety law authorizes action based on perception rather than proof. Policing, it concludes, reorganizes safety around control rather than prevention.

Author

• Terry Allen