scrap school police and add counselors and academic help for black students, coalition says

February 1, 2023. Originally published in LA Times.

Community and student activists on Tuesday relaunched a campaign to eliminate the Los Angeles School Police Department, calling instead for expansion of mental health and academic programs, college and career counseling and job and life-skills training — focusing especially on the needs of Black students.

The call from a coalition of organizations puts renewed pressure on Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Alberto Carvalho as he also confronts tense labor negotiations and pushes forward with his own expensive agenda for academic progress.

Meanwhile, a group of Latino parents on Tuesday spoke out in support of school police — a counterpoint of the message delivered with passion by about 150 protesters on the steps of Mann UCLA Community School in South Los Angeles.

“We’ve been fighting the school-to-prison pipeline for decades,” said Amir Whitaker, senior policy counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “And this fight to remove school police is a part of it.”

School districts speak of helping students with trauma, he told those assembled, “yet we know school police are a part of that trauma for so many students, for so many communities. ... I’ve represented students who are arrested for food fights or just other minor things that now set them on a path for criminalization, that changed the rest of their life, that changed their whole life trajectory.”