This valuable report analyzes how money could be better spent to protect students at school. It’s findings are stunning. We as a nation are spending vast sums on police in schools but insignificant amounts on mental health services and counselors who interact directly with students.
KEY FINDINGS & OBSERVATIONS
*Since 2018, states have allocated an additional $965 million to law enforcement in schools.
*According to a 2019 ACLU study, 1.7 million students have cops in their schools, but no counselors; 3 million have cops, but no nurses; 6 million have cops, but no school psychologists; and 10 million have cops, but no social workers.
*As of 2020, nearly 60 percent of all schools and 90 percent of high schools now have a law enforcement officer at least part time.
*The $33.2 million “school security” budget allocated for 2021 in Washington, D.C., could instead fund up to 222 psychologists, 345 guidance counselors, or 332 social workers.
*The $15 million “school security” budget approved for 2021 in Chicago could instead fund up to 140 psychologists, 182 guidance counselors, or 192 social workers.
*The $32.5 million “school security” budget allocated for 2021 in Philadelphia could instead fund up to 278 psychologists, 355 guidance counselors, or 467 social workers.
The report describes “militarized schools”:
As of 2019, there were nearly 50,000 school resource officers patrolling the hallways of America’s schools.
In schools that serve predominantly Black student populations, it is often much more than hallways that are patrolled.
For example, D.C. police are deployed to nearly all high schools to monitor cafeterias, auditoriums, hallways, stairwells, restrooms, entrances, and exits, as well as provide security for school-sponsored events. Such schools promote a learning environment that is more akin to that of a correctional institution than an educational one
Heart-breaking list. Thank you.
Sent from my iPhone
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Robert Reich has been releasing videos and posts on inequity. He maintains that when society disinvests in social supports and social safety nets, it resorts to social controls. He supports his argument with all the cuts that have been made to education, housing and social welfare while funding for police, prisons and surveillance are increasing. https://robertreich.org/post/624281544006205440
I like Reich’s opposition of social investment vs social control. The telling thing about this link for me: the 1960’s seems to be our country’s only period of swinging toward social investment. Then we swang right back to what is a history of social control.
Equity vs inequity, which he alludes to, is intertwined. No doubt the last 40-yrs’ ballooning of expenditure on social control is tied directly to spiraling inequality—nice words for more poor people. Jim Tankersley has a new book out examining what made our middle class thrive in post-WWII years. His research shows that period of prosperity was all about unleashing the economic power of women and minorities.
Sickening!
I just received My copy of EdSpeak and Doubletalk by Ravitch & Bailey. Thanks, Diane and Nancy.
I will put this book in my Little Free Library when done reading it. I hope whoever takes it will read it and pass it on.
Thank you, Yvonne!
Since 2018.
“On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others. Witnesses identified the gunman as a 19-year-old former student at the school.”
Solution is not more guns whether owned by 17-year-olds,19-year-olds or younger, or in the hands of law enforcement officers patrolling schools.
I taught in a school with an armed “school safety” officer. There were incidents of drug dealing and knifing in the school, but the the real and sustained violence was in the community and especially dense low income housing where intimidation was felt to be the way to survive. Even the community counsel meetings had armed guards.
blaming the schools for what the community is forced to suffer
Right. As Ciedie implies, the school is only the reflection of the community. Part of the solution or part of the problem, but never the main actor.
The United States officially became a police state when President Nixon declared War on Drugs and the prison population climbed like a rocket from less than a half-million annually to more than two million annually.
The police state we live that was mostly created by Republican presidents starting with Nixon has more people locked in jails and prisons than any country on the planet. China with more than four times the population is in a distant 2nd place behind by several hundred thousand.
Some states have even criminalized pregnancy and abortions.
Click to access AMR5162032017ENGLISH.pdf
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/06/abortion-laws-in-the-us-10-things-you-need-to-know/
A fairly small percentage of incarceration is due to drug offenses. Most incarceration is due to violent crime (e.g. murder, rape, assault, robbery).
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/30/15591700/mass-incarceration-john-pfaff-locked-in
Incarceration in the US, I meant (obviously).
First off, I find it very hard to imagine how armed cops in schools help anything, and can only imagine harm. We have seen enough anecdotes from around the country supporting this view. The most outrageous instances seem to be a combination of the worst consequences of underfunding: misapplication of ‘least restrictive environment’ [mainstreaming of emotionally disturbed/ neurologically impaired students] + understaffing of regular and support staff + inexperience/ lack of leadership. To balance such a teetering tinderbox on the shoulders of law enforcement is just asking for trouble.
It’s ironic that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas mass murders are used as justification for an explosion in armed SRO’s. It was an illustration of how little armed security can do in such a situation.
Nevertheless. I would like input on whether you all think just having a quorum of nurses, therapists and social workers onsite is sufficient to address the problems of a school in a poor neighborhood beset by food insecurity, homelessness, addiction dysfunction, petty crime and even gang violence. I picture that school as a rickety raft in a typhoon, with kids getting washed overboard and clinging to floating boards as school staff tries to pull them in with hooks and lassoes.
My sis is an admin in a hisch w/a mere 30% free [22%] & reduced [8%]lunch enrollment. For an enrollment of 1400, there are 2 nurses, 2 social workers, 1 “family liaison”, and 5 counselors whose duties include academic/ college & social-emotional. I know this isn’t enough, because each of the 4 asst principals have 60 neediest kids assigned to them for a anything that comes up, which keeps them hopping. That work is partly counseling, partly connecting them to local social help agencies.
That’s a reasonably well-funded school. Yet nurses are 1: 700, ditto social wkrs, & the 1:280 counselors are doing double duty acad/ soc-emotional [is there even such an animal?], buttressed by the 4 asst principals. All these support staff are stretched to the limit & highly-stressed; burnout/ turnover is common; results are fair to good. Even here, something seems wrong w/the structure to me. Obviously poorer schools fare far worse.
I’d like to know if people think the ‘community school’ model is better, where as I understand it, the schdist is a hub around which municipal social & health services are located/ connected. It sounds more efficient. Can that even work if the municipality has scattered/ spotty soc services? Seems like it would take a dedicated mayor w/a vision—for starters.
When I worked at a school in a neighborhood beset by violence, the campus aide and the counselors were each better able to deal with minor crimes on campus than was the assigned police officer. The officer would shove you up against a wall and handcuff you. The counselors would insist on talking to your parents. The campus aide would tell your grandmama what you did when he saw her in church the following Sunday. Nobody ever messed with the campus aide.
In Los Angeles Unified, one single district, the annual $70 million dollar budget for the armed, private security force called L.A. School Police could have been better spent on 130 counselors, 130 attendance counselors, 130 psychologists, 130 social workers, 130 campus aides, and 10 more community schools with full wrap-around services. LASP is pepper spraying children, giving truancy tickets, arresting 1st graders… I heard they wanted to buy a tank! Research suggests having armed agents on campus makes a school less safe, and less academically effective. Black students in LAUSD are 8% of the population and 25% of arrests. Our students have too much experience with armed occupation forces in their communities and are uncomfortable at school with LASP because of it. Our students spent the summer protesting to try to make the world a better place. But does Superintendent Investment Banker Beutner listen to students? No. He listens to money.
The funny thing is that we wanted police in our schools back when the drug dealers almost ran the place, and the principal even had to discuss it during assemblies, responding to the constant smell of “love-boat” in the stairwells, and the chains on the front doors during classes.
During the late 80s almost no one felt safe in inner city DC, even at Dunbar, which was far better off than say, Anacostia HS.
But I think we knew that our guidance counselors were overwhelmed, and I don’t even recall whether we had a school nurse, despite Dunbar being such a high profile school in DC (formerly the M st. school, which produced the first Black Fire Chief, police chief, etc, and feeder to Howard University…).
I think that in hindsight, it is clear that the de-institutionalization of mental hospitals and the lack of almost any kind of health care, let alone mental or emotional therapy, beginning in the 1980s, set up a situation that almost had to lead to what we have now.
The question is how to get the massive amounts of funding we need for nurses, therapists, social workers, guidance counselors and librarians, not to mention libraries, into the schools at all levels.
I wonder how much of this immediate-term problem is affected by and can be solved via longer-term thinking, and empathy-building via programs like what PBS was doing in the 70s, and encouraging the ‘each one teach one’ model of cooperative learning as a supplement to additional funding for our institutions, including schools, libraries, the public health care system as well as nurses in schools, and public transportation, which is a tie-in that seems to be often overlooked?
In Hope,
-Shira
Shira,
Important and thoughtful questions.
Thank you, Diane: I only wish I had some more satisfying answers than the little bit that I’ve come up with (posting my interdisciplinary GED lesson plans) to make my blog useful. I hope that if we work from both ends, ground up via learners, and top-down via policy, needed change can come sooner?
Best regards,
-Shira
Shira,
If by some miracle, the billionaires stop playing with education as a hobby, teacher knowledge might prevail.
True, but there has to be something that we, the pebbles, can do?