Education Week - February 8, 2017 - 15

Solving Conflicts In-House
Students' sense of safety and belonging can have
profound effects on how they do academically, said
David Osher, who is vice president and institute fellow at the American Institutes for Research and the
principal investigator of the National Center on Safe
and Supportive Learning Environments.
"If you're not being treated fairly, if your perception is that people like you are punished disproportionately, it affects your short-term motivation, and
it also affects your engagement in school," he said.
Researchers have found a host of negative outcomes associated with early interactions with the
criminal justice system, from higher dropout rates to
an increased chance of later incarceration.
Atlanta hopes to reduce students' contact with the
justice system even more through a voluntary court
diversion program modeled on Clayton County, Ga.,
juvenile court Judge Steven Teske's efforts, which
have won praise from national civil rights groups.
To reduce court referrals for students, Teske struck
an agreement with Clayton County schools that students won't be the subject of criminal complaints for
the first offense of "misdemeanor delinquent acts,"
like fighting or disrupting a school. Instead, they are
referred to school-based conflict-resolution programs.
The Atlanta district signed onto a voluntary agreement with the Fulton County Juvenile Court last
March, but it does not restrict the district from making criminal referrals for students. By signing on,
however, school officials agreed to strive to channel
misdemeanor offenses and delinquent acts through
a tiered system of interventions rather than immediately filing court complaints.

That response plan includes verbal warnings and
interventions like anger management classes. At the
top tier of interventions, Atlanta officials are working with community organizations to find unique
mentoring and learning experiences for students
that correlate with their behavior, said Marquenta
Sands Hall, the district's director of security.
Already this year, a school counselor took a student who was "acting tough" and getting into fights
to visit a man at a hospital who'd been wounded by
gunfire to show him what might happen if his behavior escalated, Sands Hall said.
"The majority of what we're dealing with are kids
getting into what we call low-hanging fruit types of
acts," she said. "But they are gateway types of acts,
and we need to respond to them."

What Role Should Police Play?
To be sure, changes in school safety and discipline
plans like Atlanta is embarking on aren't always
smooth.
In some districts that have sought to introduce discipline alternatives, such as Los Angeles Unified, teachers and teachers' unions have complained that school
leaders eliminated their ability to suspend students
without committing enough resources to training
them in new methods, such as restorative practices.
The results, they say, have been chaotic learning environments in some schools. Some teachers in other
areas have also expressed safety concerns after districts changed discipline approaches.
Verdaillia Turner, the president of the Atlanta Federation of Teachers, said the district's teachers are
wary of programs and initiatives that have come and
gone quickly in recent years.
"Children learn in spite of it," said Turner, who said
she favors focusing money on community schools and
student supports to address issues related to student
poverty. That's a departure from the positions of some
local teachers' unions in other areas, which have favored police presence in schools.
Like Turner, many national civil rights groups agree
that school police should be restricted even more than
they are in Atlanta. They argue for limitations even on
casual interactions with students and keeping police
out of common areas like cafeterias unless they are
called to respond. Some favor removing police from
schools entirely and spending the money instead on
personnel like school counselors and social workers.
David Payne, a civil rights advocate and director
of the Atlanta Community Engagement Team, said
he understands the desire to keep police in Atlanta's
schools, but he hopes that school climate work and
improved relationships between students and adults
will reduce the need for a law enforcement presence
in the future.
Neighborhood and parent groups plan to monitor
school discipline data as the district carries out its
plans, he said.
Officer Kimberly Chamblee works at Sylvan Hills
Middle School. She says it's important for her to "know
all of the kids, not just the ones who have issues."
Sylvan Hills has a social-emotional learning period
built into its schedule every day, and it uses peer mediation groups to address some student behavioral issues. Chamblee quickly adopted the approach by asking students about the cause of their behavior at the
moment she intervenes.
Once, the officer asked a girl to throw away a bag
of hot fries before she entered the building-a routine practice because junk food isn't allowed. When
the girl resisted, Chamblee pulled the student aside
to a private room, where she told the officer that her
family shares a house with others, and children were
stealing her food at night.
Chamblee took the girl to school staff, who ensured
that she had food to take home.
"Everything doesn't have to be 'you're going to
jail,' " Chamblee said.
Coverage of social and emotional learning is supported
in part by a grant from the NoVo Foundation,
at www.novofoundation.org. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.

Melissa Golden/Redux for Education Week

district's approach to discipline. Atlanta's SROs are
trained to take a preventative approach that has them
talking with students on campus throughout the day
to identify and solve problems in their early stages.
Autumn Koins, a senior at Grady, said she's noticed
a difference in how the officers interact with students.
"They're not just there to be intimidating," she said.
Barr, one of Grady's SROs, once intervened in a dispute between Koins and a classmate.
"She wasn't saying, 'you do this or I'm going to do
this,'" Koins said. "She said: 'You're better than this.'"
Officers focus much of their time on getting to know
students and becoming friendly with them. When it
comes to discipline, though, they are only supposed to
be called to intervene in violent or potentially violent
situations, a policy more clearly outlined in the new
policing model, several city principals said.
"It's not only a shift for us; it's also a shift for our
children," said Artesza Portee, the principal at Sylvan
Hills Middle School. "So often they see law enforcement as people who will do harm to them."
Officers placed in schools should demonstrate that
they want to work with students and receive special
training to do so, said Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, which helped Atlanta with some training.
"It's such a unique environment," Canady said.
"There's not another law enforcement assignment
like that."
That's because students are still developing physically, emotionally, and psychologically, he said. Their
impulse control isn't as strong as adults' and they
often respond to confrontation differently. In Canady's
training, officers learn that frontal lobes in the brains
of teens and adolescents-which are responsible for
behavior and control-don't finish developing until
adulthood. He sometimes has to extend that session
because of officers' interest in the subject, he said.
School-based officers must also be sensitive to the
unique needs of students with disabilities, who may
respond in ways that look defiant when they are really
just overwhelmed with trying to process a situation,
Canady said.
An Education Week Research Center analysis of federal civil rights data show that the nationwide arrest
and referral rates for students with disabilities are
more than double that of the entire student population. Those disparities are magnified when they are
students of color.

ABOUT THIS SERIES
What should be the role of police
officers in schools? How much do they
protect? Do they contribute to the
so-called school-to-prison pipeline?
Education Week dug into the latest
federal civil rights data to see who is
most likely to be arrested at school
and which students are most likely to
go to schools with cops. We also
profiled two districts-St. Paul,
Minn., and Atlanta-trying to balance
safety and a positive school climate.

More coverage, data, and
multimedia > edweek.org/
go/SchoolPolicing

FIRST INSTALLMENT
Black Students Most Likely
To Be Arrested at School
In 43 states and the District
of Columbia, black students
are arrested at school at
disproportionately high levels.

Which Students Are Arrested
Most in School?
Use our data tool to explore student
arrest rates and referrals to law
enforcement at national, state,
and local levels.
> edweek.org/go/SchoolPolicing

A Student's Controversial
Arrest, Analyzed
A St. Paul student's arrest by a school
police officer was captured on video.
The executive director of the National
Association of School Resource Officers
analyzes how the situation was handled.
> edweek.org/go/SchoolPolicing

THIS WEEK
In St. Paul, a Fight to Build Trust
Violence in the city's schools-and
contentious interactions with police-
have divided some students and
teachers, making efforts to revamp
school security difficult. > Page 1

Atlanta Starts Over With Police
The district is building its own police
department from scratch and officers
are getting specialized training to work
in school settings. > Page 1

EDUCATION WEEK | February 8, 2017 | www.edweek.org | 15

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Education Week - February 8, 2017

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