FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 18, 2020, Lawrenceville, Ga. – During this time in our nation’s history, the public has re-examined the role of police in our communities. We at Gwinnett SToPP have been calling for an end to overly harsh and ineffective discipline at Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) since our founding in 2008. It is NOT the school resource officer’s (SRO) job to enforce school discipline rules. We believe that SROs have no place in our schools. Instead, GCPS should hire counselors, restorative justice practitioners, and community intervention workersi full time to maintain a peaceful learning environment. Students should feel emotionally safe to learn and make mistakes.
We know that “armed personnel pose a safety threat to students and other school staff, and there is no evidence they make schools safer.”ii Student arrests, tasing and social media surveillance at GCPS does not protect our kids. It undermines the trust that students have with adults which jeopardizes school safety. According to the latest data available from the U.S. Department of Education, Black students and students with disabilities are disproportionately referred to law enforcement or arrested in Gwinnett Schools. Students with disabilities represent 12.3% of Gwinnett students but 27% of all students referred to law enforcement and receiving a school -based arrest.iii Black students without disabilities comprise 30.7% of the student population, yet represent 56.1% of referrals to law enforcement and 49.5% of school-based arrests.iv Black students represent 36% of students with disabilities and disproportionately represent 58.1% of referrals to law enforcementv and 56.6% of school-based arrests.vi Black students continue to be under-represented in academic opportunities and over-represented in discipline and criminalization.
We cannot expect students who have had negative and discriminatory encounters with SROs to learn in places where they feel targeted, especially in light of recent events across the country. It is incumbent upon GCPS to create a climate and culture of care and nurturing, a place where students are emotionally and physically safe to learn. We have to invest in evidence-based violence reduction strategies that engage all the community stakeholders. We demand that SROs be removed from GCPS because they make our schools unsafe.
In additional to being unfairly disciplined, Black students at GCPS must endure a racist school culture. In the past few weeks, multiple racist incidents including a yearbook photo at Collins Hill High School where a student photo-shopped a picture of Dr. Martin Luther King holding a document with the N-word on it twice.vii This is just one example of racist incidents in GCPS schools that continue to happen without a system-wide solution. The GCPS school board should start addressing systemic racism by removing school resource officers.
Several school districts across the country have removed school resource officers with even more school districts considering it. We call on Gwinnett County Board of Education to begin the process of removing SROs and implementing a fully-funded alternative discipline system lead by the community and counselors that will restore students, not criminalize them.
Gwinnett SToPP is a grassroots, parent-led, community-centered organization in Gwinnett County. The vision of Gwinnett SToPP is to lead a parent-driven, community-centered approach to identifying and dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline in Gwinnett County through parent/community education, district monitoring and accountability, and recommending national best practices. Our partners include parents, students, the Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC), the Education Civil Rights Alliance, the Praxis Project, and other local and national organizations.
CONTACT: Marlyn Tillman, Gwinnett SToPP, 404-590-7877, info@gwinnettstopp.org