Gwinnett SToPP went virtual for our 2020 Dignity In Schools Week of Action! Our ED, Marlyn Tillman joined three of our advocates (Amina, Rama, and Melody) to discuss Police Free Schools in Gwinnett County. We were also joined by civil rights attorney Adam Fernandez, Vice President of Policy and Strategic Engagement at Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG). Adam has been working on various education campaigns for ten years.
The event began with an introduction of our new report, The Misrepresentation of School Safety: A Review of Policing in Gwinnett County Schools by Amina Busuri. The report highlights the impact that police have on Gwinnett county students. After interviewing students, Amina found that “a lot of the policing is around identity” which included “race, gender, sexuality, and ability”. Her findings reflect the disproportionate impact that discipline has on marginalized students, especially Black students with disabilities.¹
Amina also focused on The Give Center, GCPS’ alternative school. “The Give Center is ran like a prison,” she said. “Students there are not on a track to learning from their mistakes [or] to make better decisions but rather to experience punitive measures that make them feel worse about themselves, and they emerge from high school feeling really disempowered and uninspired in life – that obviously is a direct effect of the school-to-prison pipeline which is a very very violent process.”
Attorney Fernandez urged communities to take action at the local level and to not wait for the federal government to do something. He announced his plan for L4GG to support local community organizations like Gwinnett SToPP and use that blueprint to also remove SROs in other counties as well. “For Black and Brown kids and kids with disabilities, police in schools make things much much worse,” he said. “Children as young as 12 are being body slammed with absolutely no provocation.” L4GG is conducting a 50 state survey of all of the laws on police in schools to determine their source of funding. The laws governing police in schools are vague and purposefully so, but Attorney Fernandez is confident in using a local strategy, “at the end of the day, the goal is safe schools for everyone that means we have to get police out of schools.”
Acknowledging the urgency of police free schools in Gwinnett, we unveiled the following 7 demands titled, A New Vision of School Safety for GCPS:
1. Eliminate SROs from GCPS
2. Reinvest $10.5m+ GCPS Police Budget into Hiring Additional School Mental & Behavioral Health and Restorative Justice Staff.
3. Revise the student discipline policies and practices to include Restorative Practices within the PBIS Framework
4.Implement a culturally relevant inclusive curriculum in elementary, middle, and high school.
5.Transparent review and reporting of student achievement and discipline including arrests and use of force.
6.Ongoing anti-bias and cultural competency professional development for all GCPS staff.
7.Establish a protocol for the rare occasions that local police are called to school.
Melody and Rama discussed each demand and the need to end policing at GCPS. The demands call for investing in restorative practices that address the root cause of misbehavior instead of punitive measures. The current discipline system is overly harsh and ineffective. The Coalition recognizes that true safety ensures that all students are supported.
A video of the event can be found here. You can also visit the #KickCopsOutOfSchools campaign page to view our full demands and other information.
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¹ U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. (2015). Civil Rights Data Collection. Retrieved from
https://ocrdata.ed.gov/Page?t=d&eid=28916&syk=8&pid=2403