Education Week - February 8, 2017 - 13

Laura Olson, the security
director for the St. Paul
school district, observes
activity in one of the city's
schools at the district's
administration building.

A New Start
For Atlanta's
School Police

n POLICE REFERRALS
AND RACE

One High School's Experience
At Como Park High School, swaddled in a hilly,
middle-class neighborhood lined with Craftsmanstyle homes, administrators have taken some of the
most aggressive steps to improve relations between
teachers and students and between students and
police officers. Disputes between teen gangs in St.
Paul's downtown skyways and on social media sites
sometimes spill into classrooms at Como and other
schools, say teachers, who complain about a lack of
backup from the administration.
And tensions have been fueled by racially inflammatory remarks, including some from a former Como
Park High teacher who was suspended without pay
for 10 days last year for blog posts that mocked black
students and alluded to the Ku Klux Klan.
According to the new agreement a "student advocate," such as a teacher, counselor, or parent, must
be present before a student is arrested, and officers
must go through de-escalation training in how to
deal with conflicts, among other measures.
Leading the effort at Como Park High is Principal Theresa Neal, who before coming to the school
in 2014, ran the school that serves youth in a local
juvenile-detention center. In 2007, her husband,
Howard Porter, a former player for the Chicago Bulls
basketball team, was beaten to death with a pipe by
a young black man during a botched robbery. His
murder sealed her passion for helping young black
men get their lives on track.
Neal, a St. Paul native, says she knows well how
drugs and violence weave in and out of students'
home lives and how St. Paul's government has long

struggled to provide minority communities with
basic social services. She also understands that Como's teachers are being asked to serve a population
mix different from the student body of a few years
ago, and to do it as demands to improve test scores
and to close achievement gaps increase.
"You can't exclude safety and security from education," Neal said. "We have to be a conducive place for
teaching and learning."
Under her watch, arrests at Como Park High declined from 52 in 2014 to just one last year, and there
were no calls to the city police department to intervene in fights last year.

Steps Forward, Back
And while St. Paul school officials focus intently on
improving school safety and climate, they're called
upon to cope with community tensions and the
unpredictable.
The week of Education Week's visit, the Ramsey
County attorney announced manslaughter charges
against the police officer who killed Castile, known
here as Mr. Phil. Activists that night marched to J.J.
Hill Montessori School, where he worked for 14 years
as a cafeteria manager.
That same week, Principal Neal placed on administrative leave a Como Park High teacher after he
declared to his class that he had voted for Donald
Trump for president, didn't support the Black Lives
Matter movement and was afraid of black people.
Then, just a mile from Como, a .38-caliber revolver
that a child had brought to Crossroads Elementary
School went off in a 3rd grade classroom full of students. Nobody was hurt, but the incident once again
thrust the school system's security hurdles back into
the news.
At a school board meeting last month, administrators presented a promising progress report. They
told board members that student arrests in the first
quarter of the current school year fell to just one,
down from 21 during the same period last school
year. Students caught carrying small amounts of
alcohol or marijuana were sent home, sometimes
escorted personally by a school police officer.
"Arrest is now an absolutely last resort," said
Laura Olson, the district's security director.
Board member John Brodrick warned that the
district's policies could prevent officers from being
"assertive enough to protect our students."
With another budget deficit looming, some board
members are likely to question spending so much
money on the district's policing program.
Board member Chue Vue is one who thinks spending on police is not worth it and, he points out, is in
conflict with the mission of public schools.
"Having police in a school," Vue said, "is just odd."

950
students
were referred to
police by the district
in 2013-14.

62%

were black,
even though
only 29%
of students
in the district
were AfricanAmerican.

SOURCE: Education Week Research
Center original analysis of Civil
Rights Data Collection, 2017

School resource officer Derrick
Hammond works during a lunch
break at Grady High School in
Atlanta late last year.

By Evie Blad
Atlanta

A fight had been brewing between two girls
at Grady High School and was on the verge
of erupting in the cafeteria. Willette Barr, one
of Grady's school resource officers, and her
partner Derrick Hammond, stepped in to intervene. In her rage, one of the girls started
swinging at Hammond, an action that in other
schools-and almost certainly on the street-
would have been met forcefully by the two
officers and may have led to the girl's arrest.
Instead, Barr and Hammond stayed calm.
Along with a Grady assistant principal,
Barr-who previously worked as a county
sheriff's deputy-sat with the two girls to talk
through what happened. And why.
It took some digging, but Barr and the school
administrator uncovered the root of their
squabble. Both girls' families were living in
the same homeless shelter, and one of them,
who had lived there longer, saw herself in the
role of big sister. The other girl, however, was
overwhelmed by the attention.
The students explained that if they got into
trouble, their families would be asked to leave
the shelter, raising the stakes of the fight even
higher for school officials, who spent several
hours helping them resolve their conflict.
Barr's approach-talking with the girls
to ease the friction, rather than disciplining
them-is an integral part of the Atlanta school
district's comprehensive plan to improve school
climate for its 51,000 students. That plan
includes forming its own police force, hiring 68
new school resource officers like Barr, and providing ongoing training about how to work in
a school environment. The officers have been
taught things Barr didn't learn in her more
traditional law enforcement training, like how
the teenage brain develops and how to interact
with students to resolve conflicts.
"My expectation is for them to be who they
are, and that's kids," Barr said.
The district's new police department is the
first step in Atlanta's efforts to confront a
challenge many urban school systems have
not easily tackled: concerns that putting police in schools undermines efforts to create a
safe and supportive learning environment,
PAGE 14 >

Melissa Golden/Redux for Education Week

have gone too far or not far enough. They're talking
about what role, if any, the district's school resource
officers should play in keeping schools safe.
Teachers' union officials agree in principle that
teachers shouldn't burden school police officers
with basic classroom management, such as dealing with an unruly student. But the union also says
the district isn't providing enough counselors, school
nurses, or social workers to handle the social ills
that plague the schools.
"We've got to start to fight for supports in the classroom," said Nick Faber, the vice president of the St.
Paul Federation of Teachers. "And not short-term
things, but long-term things where both the students'
and the teachers' voices are heard so we can start to
understand and gain perspective from each other."
While arrests went down last school year, suspensions for black students-but not for white
students-went up, according to the district's own
data. Between 2014-15 and 2015-16, the total
number of students suspended increased by 21
percent, amounting to more than 750 additional
suspensions. The number of black students suspended increased by 26 percent, meaning that
there were almost 700 more black student suspensions in 2015-16 than in the previous year.

The St. Paul school district
has grappled for years
with racial disparities
in discipline and police
interactions with students.
Here's a snapshot from
the most recent federal
data on school authorities
referring students to police
for an incident at school.

District hires own officers

Education Week Research Center Research Analyst
Alex Harwin and Correspondent Kavitha Cardoza
contributed to this report.

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Education Week - February 8, 2017

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