By Tamara Ward
Special to the AFRO
Erika Strauss Chavarria, a former high school Spanish teacher of 12 years in Howard County Public Schools, just recently transitioned from educator to student advocate.
Credit: Courtesy photo
“My first year teaching, I saw a student that I cared very much about get arrested. I never saw him again. He got hauled off the school grounds,” Strauss Chavarria said of an incident at Wilde Lake High School. “I want to do what I can as an educator to prevent harms that I see.”
She joins a long list of legislators, educators and advocates that have been working to quell over-policing in Maryland’s public schools. And since the passage of the Maryland Safe to Learn Act of 2018, which mandated the assignment of a school resource officer (SRO) or adequate law enforcement coverage at all schools, there has been much debate about the law as well as several efforts to reform the role of law enforcement in educational environments.
Attempts at legislative fixes
Several Maryland legislators have attempted to pass legislation to address over-policing of students, criminalizing adolescent behavior and the problems associated with having SROs inside schools.
Credit: Courtesy photo
State Del. Jheanelle Wilkins, a Democrat who represents the 20th District of Maryland, which includes Montgomery County, introduced in 2021 House Bill 496, Counselors Not Cops Act, which sought to redirect funds allocated to SROs to mental health services and restorative justice programs.
“It would redirect $10 million of state funding that expands law enforcement in our school,” Wilkins said, “redirecting those funds to instead support mental health services and school counselors and wraparound supports, restorative justice practices, trauma-informed practices, and those types of services that actually truly reinforce safety in our schools and help our students.”
Wilkins said the impetus for the legislation was actually the students.
“This is in the wake of George Floyd,” a Black man whose 2020 murder by a White police officer sparked national outrage,” Wilkins said. “This is in the wake of a lot of protests and calls for accountability around police officers, treatment of people of color and Black people specifically, where students came to us and said that they didn’t feel safe having school resource officers and these police officers in their schools.”
She acknowledges there are differing opinions about SROs among students, parents, teachers and other administrative leaders, but said, “I thought that the Counselors Not Cops Act was a first step in making sure that we were being responsive to the calls from some of these students and redirecting some of the funding.”
Counselors are in short supply in Maryland schools, Wilkins said. “We have schools where they don’t even have a counselor each day, but the counselor is being shared between different schools.”
The Counselors Not Cops bill did not make it out of committee. However, in Montgomery County, where Wilkins presides, SROs were largely removed from day-to-day operations inside school buildings in the school year 2021-2022, about 22 years after they were introduced in the aftermath of the infamous Columbine school shooting.
At its highest, there were 349 reported arrests in the 2016-2017 school year, with Black and Brown students accounting for 41 percent and 32 percent, respectively, of all arrests in schools. And while the disparity among students of color remains, school year 2022-’23 reveals arrest numbers have dropped to 56, an 84 percent decrease over the last six years as SROs inside school buildings were replaced with community engagement officers assigned to schools but not stationed physically within the building.
“Montgomery County did act to radically reduce or eliminate school resource officers in the schools,” Wilkins said, but noted there has been a re-emergence of some police presence within schools to address recent violence. She said the county and the school district underwent an expansive process to reach that decision.
“They really attempted to engage students and parents in the conversation around SROs and what that looks like and what public safety and safety in our schools looks like, with and without , and making changes to our SRO program,” Wilkins said, stressing it is important to listen to students, parents and educators about school safety needs. “We don’t always have to have a knee-jerk reaction around police in our schools– being integrated in our schools – as being the only solution.”
Maryland Sen. Alonzo Washington, who represents District 22 in neighboring Prince George’s County, also sought to correct issues surrounding SROs, specifically the overdependence on SROs by teachers, administrators and other school professionals in handling disciplinary measures.
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In the 2015-’16, Prince George’s County Public Schools led the state with 588 school-based arrests.
“So, I saw a need to address this issue of the school-to-prison pipeline or out-of-school suspensions for nonviolent offenses,” before he was a legislator, Washington said. “I was a chief of staff for a council member, and I realized that our students were being suspended out of school for just simply yelling at teachers or acting out in the classroom. They were suspended out of school for three to five days at a time.
“So, I already had that in the back of my mind, and it’s something that I really wanted to work on,” Washington said. “We didn’t really collect a lot of data or publish a lot of data on out-of-school suspensions for nonviolent offenses, or even violent offenses at that time.”
His observations, which date back to 2008, led him to conduct additional research, advocate for better data collection on school offenses and arrests and introduce school discipline legislation in the General Assembly as both a delegate and a senator, including HB1287 Commission on the School-to-Prison Pipeline and Restorative Practices in 2017.
The bill, passed and signed into law, established a commission to examine current disciplinary practices in Maryland public schools and nationally, as well as best approaches for training teachers and principals in restorative practices and ending the school-to-prison pipeline.
The Commission on the School-to-Prison Pipeline and Restorative Practices was also required to submit a final report to the governor and Maryland General Assembly by January 2019. The commission had representation from school personnel, state government, parents, legislators, SROs, students and youth advocates, and worked with researchers from across the state, including those from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, to lead the 18-month effort.
“They reviewed the entire state’s discipline practices from all of our jurisdictions in the state of Maryland,” said Washington, who was also appointed to the commission.
Maryland State Department of Education released school-based arrest data for the first time in 2018, which revealed there were 2,759 school-related arrests during 2015-2016. With 879,196 students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade, the commission’s analysis of the data revealed a school-based arrest rate of 3.1 per 1,000 students. The national school-based arrest rate for the same year was just 1.2 per 1,000 students.
Further analysis of arrest rates across districts and states revealed Black students were arrested at a higher rate than their proportion of school enrollment. While Black students made up 34.6 percent of the total public school population, they were responsible for 66 percent of school-related arrests that year.
Additionally, a disproportionate number of arrests occurred among students with disabilities, who represented only 11 percent of the student population but comprised 22 percent of school-based arrests. The report noted that students with disabilities were 2.45 times as likely to be arrested at school than students without disabilities.
“School discipline has been increasingly criminalized,” the commission stated in its final report in the chapter titled “School Resource Officers and The School-To-Prison Pipeline,” which examined school arrest data from 2011-2012. “This increase in the criminalization of common adolescent behaviors coincided with the influx of funding for school resources officers (SROs) in the wake of fears about school shootings.”
In the report, the commission recognized all the roles SROs can play in a school setting, including mentorship, coaching, emergency event response and the prevention of drug and alcohol use and gang violence.
“But in too many schools, SROs inappropriately have become heavy-handed enforcers of basic school discipline, causing arrests of children for minor incidents that should be handled by a teacher or principal,” the report states, citing researchers.
The commission’s report concluded that the use of SROs increases exclusionary discipline and criminalizes relatively “trivial” student behaviors. While not a formal recommendation, the report stated SROs must have extensive training in adolescent development, trauma-informed conflict, de-escalation, implicit bias, cultural competence and restorative practices.
The report also found that SRO school staffing is costly to implement and lacks robust evidence of effectiveness; students are more likely to be arrested for lower-level offenses in schools with SROs; and when over-policing occurs in schools, youth may feel demeaned, scared, or criminalized, and may act out in response.
While the report notes the role of SROs in exclusionary discipline, there were no recommendations specific to SROs. The commission sunsetted in 2019.
Also while in the House of Delegates, Washington introduced in 2020 HB 327 Public Schools – School Resources Officers – Prohibited Conduct, to prevent school administrators from using SROs to enforce discipline-related school policies. Among the provisions of the bill were the prohibition against school administrators, officials or school safety coordinators ordering an SRO to enforce discipline-related policies, rules, regulations, or procedures; the prohibition on an SRO unilaterally enforcing discipline-related policies, rules, regulations or procedures; and the requirement that a specialized curriculum be used to train SROs, to include training in prohibited conduct.
HB 327 died in committee, but as a first-year senator, Washington reintroduced the bill as SB 522 in 2021. The carryover bill also died in committee.
“I had a real passion about this from the very beginning because I felt like our students were being overly policed, and overly suspended for nonviolent offenses and the classroom, therefore impacting their ability to learn,” Washington said. “So, I just feel like we need to continue to study this, make changes to the school-to-prison pipeline and what we do in this work.”
Washington said there are many other Democrats in the General Assembly who are more conservative than he is, and they believe students are misbehaving and more punitive measures are required.
“I would hope that the data would show to our legislators that there’s a need for change and reform in our discipline practices, and restorative approaches is the right direction we need to go,” Washington said.
Among other legislation introduced in past years to quell over-policing of students in Maryland public schools is Sen. Arthur Ellis’s (D-Charles) SB 245 Public Schools – School Resource Officers – Requirements and Prohibitions (2021), which would have prohibited officers from entering schools unless invited, and required them to conceal their weapons and wear civilian clothes.
Del. Gabriel Acevero (D-Montgomery) introduced HB1089, Expansion of Mental Health Services and Prohibition of School Resource Officers (Police–Free Schools Act) (2021), which sought to replace police in schools with security employees who do not have arrest authority. The bill also sought to provide more mental health services for students.
Neither Ellis’s nor Acevero’s legislation was signed into law.
This session, Washington has teamed up with Baltimore County Democrat Del. Shelia Ruth, who represents District 44B, to sponsor companion bills SB 0512 Education – Prohibited Behavior on School Grounds and Property – Application and House Bill 615 to remove the statute from the education code that allows students to be charged with disrupting school activities for certain behaviors at their own school or while attending an event at another school. Both bills are still in play at the State House.
The push for restorative practices
“We should not be criminalizing student behaviors and giving students any type of a record unnecessarily,” said Maryland State Education Association (MSEA) President Cheryl Bost.
Instead, MSEA wants educators to rely on restorative practices to resolve conflicts. Bost said in instances where two students are fighting, either a peace circle or a conflict resolution time period to resolve the underlying issue is preferable to arresting the students involved.
An arrest never addresses “the root cause” of the fight, Bost said. “That is just going to continue. And we have to diffuse whatever that was.”
MSEA recently put forth a resolution that says anyone who is dealing with discipline of students should have training in restorative practices, de-escalation skills and anti-bias.
“So that’s anybody who would be disciplining students. And, specific to school resource officers and security in schools, they should have all of that training, but they should not be involved in individual student discipline,” Bost said.
She cites a lack of training, time and opportunity within a daily schedule, and too many kids in the class, for teachers to deal with the root causes of the disruption of some students.
“So, we don’t have time to de-escalate or do some of the restorative practices in the classroom when you have 35 to 40 students in a classroom. And unfortunately, we feel we’re not looking at root causes. We’re understaffed with school counselors, school psychologists, school social workers,” said Bost.
MSEA believes if they can address those issues and deal with the trauma and the issues that students are coming to school with, they can reduce the disciplinary consequences and overwhelmingly the disproportionality of consequences.
“We think that all teachers should go through an anti-bias training to hopefully alleviate that disproportionality so we can get these things in place,” Bost said. “We feel that more teachers, education support professionals administrators can deal with the discipline and not have to go to any SRO or police officer. And that’s our goal.”
MSEA worked on legislation to ensure SROs received anti-bias and de-escalation training. Also, members of the advocacy group’s staff had a hand in crafting the curriculum for SROs.
“The part that is missing is the state requires SROs to go through this training, but if a school system uses outside security, individuals or companies, or they use the sheriff’s office to do it, those people might not get that training, and so it would be really good to have it more inclusive of everybody who’s going to be in a school building,” Bost said.
Bost, who has long been interested in the discipline data since she was a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, has observed the disparity for students of color and those with special needs.
She said “the disproportionality is real. I’ve done trainings with our members to show the disproportionality, and the disproportionality in my mind is an adult problem. And we have to give the resources and the tools so that we can reduce that.”
One tool MSEA relies on is HB 725 Public Schools – Student Discipline – Restorative Approaches, which passed in the legislature in 2019 and required restorative practices for suspension and expulsion in Maryland public schools, but it did not receive any funding. Bost said MSEA continues the push to get those funds appropriated.
This legislative session, MSEA is focused on larger legislative efforts, to include full funding of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, which passed in 2021, and several other bills that relate to solving the educator shortage, including improving staffing levels and recruitment and retention efforts among school counselors, psychologists and support staff that play important roles in enabling earlier and restorative interventions to create a safe and supportive school environment for all students.
From education to advocacy
Based on her experiences teaching, Strauss Chavarria firmly believes armed law enforcement should not be in schools and SROs contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline. She makes clear this is not about the credibility of individual officers nor whether a particular police officer is good or bad or cares or does not care to build relationships with students.
“This is about the system and the intention of why police officers are in the schools to begin with,” Strauss Chavarria said.
Regarding efforts to retrain SROs in implicit bias and to educate them on adolescent behavior and brain development, Strauss Chavarria scoffs, “It is not working.”
She said there is a disconnect with the training because police policies and the Memorandums of Understandings (MOUs) that school systems have with the local police entity dictate what an SRO should do in school incidents, especially school fights.
She looks to other ways to ensure students are safe within schools in the absence of SROs.
“When you think about what school safety actually means, there are a million things that should be done that are not being done, where funding should be focused that is not where it is focused, that actually keep schools safe and create welcoming, warm and beautiful environments,” Strauss Chavarria said.
In Howard County, where school-based arrest numbers for the last two school years (SY 2021-’22 and 2022-’23) are among the the lowest in state at 22 and 27, respectively, Strauss Chavarria advocates for a complete cultural shift into a restorative justice culture, where the foundation is building relationships, and making sure that there are enough staff present to provide mental health support in the schools.
“Right now, we have mental health workers that are on a 1-to-700 student ratio,” said Strauss Chavarria. “You are not able to build relationships or create safe environments or catch when there’s a potential problem or make sure that students’ mental health and physical well-being
or emotional well-being is prioritized when you have that ratio of mental health worker to student.”
She asks how that can be expected of mental health providers when teachers currently have class sizes of 35 students and are unable to attend to the needs of all 35.
“I was very adamant about building relationships with every single student. But that really is impossible–it’s not impossible, it’s very difficult to do that,” Strauss Chavarria said. “I had five classes, 33 kids a class.”
As for the student she never saw again, he had just lost family members and was starting a new chapter at Wilde Lake High School.
“He was just really trying to get by and not get involved in any issue. He just wanted to graduate,” Strauss Chavarria said. Another student in the hallway made a comment, possibly about his family member, that triggered him. He started fighting and the SRO came behind him and grabbed him from behind.
“His first gut instinct was to turn around and punch whoever was behind him. So, he ended up hitting a police officer, and then was charged with assault on a police officer,” Strauss Chavarria said. “It was a gut reaction that he had just known his whole life, and his intent, his reaction was to turn around and get whoever was behind him off of him.”
“We are not providing the necessary tools for young people to learn how to handle conflict without getting physical. And so, if we really wanted to create change in terms of fighting, we really need to start focusing on implementing these strategies early,” Strauss Chavarria said. “And how do we handle conflict? And a lot of that is, again, going back to the relationship- building, but instead we’re arresting young people for fighting when everybody, I mean everybody–people fight, it’s a natural thing.”
Strauss Chavarria now spends her days advocating to make sure young people feel accepted, safe, welcomed and affirmed in the school environment, promoting a “culturally responsive pedagogy” and curriculum, and making sure educators are already going into classrooms with anti-racist, consistent professional learning opportunities, where they are reflecting on their own practices.
She said it is important to think about how school is structured, the demands that are put on students and the demands that are put on educators.
“School just does not work for a lot of people. It’s just the system itself is so flawed that it creates an environment that is stress inducing, that creates social and emotional problems,” she said.
She challenges educators and administrators to look at the data for each individual school and school system, conduct a racial equity audit and ask themselves, “Where are we failing? What are we doing and how are our policies and practices being implemented on students?”
The next step, she said, is to create real change by looking at power dynamics and involving the students, parents and community in the decisions that are being made in schools.
“That’s where funding should be going to instead of SROs,” Strauss Chavarria said.
Credit: Courtesy photo
Matthew Vaughn-Smith is the founder and president of the Anti-Racist Education Alliance Inc. (AREA), a nonprofit with a mission to “dismantle white supremacy in classrooms and schools.”
By day, Vaughn-Smith is an administrator with Montgomery County Public Schools, but he felt a need to start the advocacy group to address what he saw was missing in many classrooms.
While AREA began with a focus on removing SROs from Howard County Public Schools, it also advocates for a restorative culture over retributive justice.
Under Vaughn-Smith’s leadership, the nonprofit also seeks to decolonize the curriculum and increase diversity in the teacher ranks to ensure students can see teachers who look like them and understand their experiences in the Greater Baltimore area.
“There’s no secret that teacher diversity is an issue … especially in predominantly White spaces,” Vaughn-Smith said. “And you seldom see a Black male who’s in an elementary school.”
Vaughn-Smith pointed to a study that reports educators of color hold higher expectations of children of color and that having an educator of color in fourth grade increases the student of color’s trajectory for going on to college and for career and community readiness.
The study, conducted by researchers from multiple institutions, including Johns Hopkins University and American University, examined the “long-run” effects of exposure to Black teachers and concluded that Black students were 13 percent more likely to attend college if they had one Black teacher by third grade.
“All they have to have is one Black educator,” Vaughn-Smith stressed.
With that in mind, AREA focuses on building capacity in staff by providing professional development opportunities, as well as creating a space and advocating for Black, Brown and Indigenous students, educators and community members.
While the impacts of both planned and in-progress efforts aimed at curbing Maryland’s disproportionately high arrest rates of Black students and students with disabilities remain to be seen, the father of four admits his own advocacy stems from a desire to ensure his children are in a safe and nurturing school environment.
“Wouldn’t it be fantastic,” Vaughn-Smith said, “if Zariah would be able to go to a school, feel included, see teachers that look like her, see a curriculum that models her lived experiences, have her social-emotional needs met be taught ways to resolve conflict, without an armed officer being brought into the mix, or her behavior being criminalized?”
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