School districts would be prohibited from hiring police officers to patrol their hallways if a bill introduced this week becomes law.
S.63 would ban the use of so-called “school resource officers,” who are currently posted in about half of all Vermont public school districts. Schools would still be allowed to call police to deal with security concerns on a case-by-case basis, but would not be allowed to contract with law enforcement agencies to station one in a school on a regular basis.
Many civil liberties, racial justice and disability rights activists have been advocating for years that police be removed from schools or, at the very least, that more restrictions be put on their use.
But the conversation took added urgency after last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and several school districts across Vermont are now debating whether to cut ties with police.
Those discussions are ongoing in Burlington, Winooski and St. Albans. After some discussion, school leaders in the Montpelier-Roxbury and Champlain Valley Union school districts announced this month that they will end their contracts with local law enforcement.
These debates have been highly contentious, and parents whose children have formed positive relationships with their school resource officers are usually some of the program’s strongest defenders.
Vermont schools collectively spent more than $2 million last year on policing services, according to a VTDigger analysis during the summer. Advocates say that money could better be spent on mental health support, restorative justice training, and other alternatives that address misbehavior in developmentally appropriate ways.
“The conversation is not just ‘get rid of cops’; it’s about like, what are the alternative systems that really provide safety for our (Black, Indigenous and people of color) students that are trauma-informed?” said Amanda Garces, director of policy, education and outreach for the Vermont Human Rights Commission.
Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, the bill’s sponsor, said she’s “under no illusion” the bill will remain as-is if it picks up steam in the Legislature. But she said it felt important to start the conversation from the point of view that stationing police in schools had been a failed policy.
“Based on the research that I have seen, there’s not really so much of a gray area when it comes to the impact of SROs on some of our most vulnerable students,” she said.
Study after study has shown that discipline in schools is meted out more frequently, and more harshly, to students of color, students with disabilities, and low-income students. Critics charge that police in schools supercharge this dynamic, and that students acting out in minor ways — or because of a disability — subsequently wind up in the criminal justice system.
The bill cites data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, and says that schools with law enforcement presence reported 3.5 times as many arrests as schools without police. That same data set showed that in Vermont, Black students were arrested at 5.4 times the rate of white students during the 2015-16 school year.
In Montpelier, high school junior Edie Donofrio worked on a school board subcommittee that looked into research about police in schools and surveyed the school community on the subject. And she said she was ultimately struck by what some wrote in.
“We got some responses from parents and students of color, saying things like, it’s super, super scary and triggering to be around a person with a gun in school,” she said.
Over a dozen advocacy organizations — including the ACLU, Vermont Public Interest Research Group, Migrant Justice and Vermont Legal Aid — have backed a 10-point criminal justice reform agenda this legislative session that includes removing police from schools.
Falko Schilling, advocacy director for the Vermont chapter of the ACLU, said the group was glad the conversation is advancing from the local level to the Statehouse.
“The evidence shows that students of color and students with disabilities are disproportionately arrested in schools,” he said. “It’s important to take a statewide approach to this issue and implement a statewide solution.”
