This Wednesday, Portland Public Schools (PPS) Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero and Chief of Staff Jonathan Garcia held a listening session with students to discuss school safety. The meeting broached a topic contentious in today’s sociopolitical climate: school resource officers (SROs), on-campus police officers that carry firearms and have the power to arrest students.
Only three students were allowed to attend the meeting. They were hand-picked by their respective administrations at Grant, Lincoln and Ida B. Wells-Barnett high schools to represent their student bodies. Those not approved by Guerrero, including student journalists, were barred from attending or observing.
This student listening session did not include Jefferson, Cleveland or Franklin high schools — the three PPS schools that experienced gun violence this school year. According to Naima Smith, Grant’s student representative at Wednesday’s meeting, Guerrero intends to hold listening sessions with other schools, as well as a Town Hall with the superintendent and PPS Board of Education on Feb. 24.
Smith says that Wednesday’s conversation had two major takeaways, the first being that the district should implement more lockdown drills.
Second, Guerrero and the students discussed the potential for the reimplementation of SROs in schools. They were removed from PPS in 2020 following student activism in 2017 and 2018 as well as protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Listening sessions like the one on Wednesday come as PPS begins talks with the Portland Police Bureau about the reintroduction of SROs to schools, as reported by Oregon Live in early December.
On-campus officers are intended to increase safety and crime prevention in schools, but have proven to “intensify the use of suspensions, expulsions, police referrals, and arrests of students. These effects are consistently over two times larger for Black students than White students,” according to a 2021 study by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University.
This same study notes that while SROs “do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools,” they “do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.”
“We are thankful for the ongoing collaboration with the Portland Police Bureau,” Guerrero wrote in a column in the Oregonian. “We will continue to dialogue with students, educators, the school board and families to help shape and determine any evolution in our relationship with the bureau.”
According to Smith, the students’ consensus was to implement SROs on a school-by-school basis. Guerrero has yet to announce his ultimate decision.
PPS has not sought teacher input in their discussions, according to Grant’s Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) representative Sunshine McFaul-Amadoro.
Furthermore, the timing of this listening session is strategic, says Grant English teacher Scott Blevins. Because the PAT bargaining discussions with PPS began on Tuesday, Jan. 31, the PAT did not have the bandwidth to respond to the meetings.
This introduces questions about the future of PPS’s student safety discussions. Will the superintendent listen to a diverse range of voices?
Danny Cage, a student at Grant and former District Student Representative, questions why PPS would consult these schools together about an issue that statistically impacts them the least. “Look at the facts,” he says.
Numerous studies, such as a 2020 report from the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education, cite the vicarious trauma of police presence for students of color and demonstrate that lower-income and Black and Brown students are more susceptible to the school-to-prison pipeline.
Grant, Lincoln and Ida B. Wells-Barnett are not geographically near each other, but are the top four whitest high schools in PPS along with Cleveland, according to a 2022 PPS enrollment report.
Data from the City Budget Office shows that 50% of students arrested by SROs in PPS during the 2017–18 school year were Black, while the number of Black students in the district was only 9%.
Smith, who is biracial, was the only student of color at the listening session. She says, “Within this discussion, I don’t know if we really touched on race too much.”
Guerrero did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
The future of police presence on PPS campuses remains undetermined. According to Grant Principal James McGee, the district is in the “listening phase” of SRO implementation and is looking for student input.