Young People Deserve Police-Free Schools.

• Date: 01 August 2021
• Author: Fernandez, Maria C.,Stith, Jonathan,Fernandez, Maria C.^Stith, Jonathan
• Published date: 01 August 2021
• Author: Fernandez, Maria C.

In 2015, a student-recorded video of the #AssaultatSpringValley went viral; it shows Shakara, a sixteen-year-old Black girl from Columbia, South Carolina, being placed in a headlock, flipped over in her desk chair, then dragged and thrown across her classroom by a school police officer. The student who recorded the video, Niya, was arrested; the cop who assaulted Shakara, Ben Fields, was not charged.

After this assault, young people came together to seek to end the criminalization and abuse of students of color, and support those young people who have experienced police violence firsthand. They wrote letters to the students, Niya and Shakara. They modeled the world they would like to see, a world without police. When young people and organizers talk about police-free schools, they are fighting for a world that does not yet exist. They're fighting to dismande school policing infrastructure, culture, and practice, to end school militarization and surveillance, and to build a new, liberatory education system.

We can't build the future our students deserve through modest reforms. Instead, we must heed their calls to transform safety in our schools through resources that meet students' needs. And that includes getting rid of the police.

The police murder of George Floyd forced communities to grapple with the fact that the police who target, terrorize, and kill Black and brown people on the streets are the same police in schools with our children. Over the past year, at least thirty-five school districts have taken steps to end policing in their hallways.

And federal legislation has been introduced...