A photo from inside a Philadelphia school. Image credit: Philadelphia Inquirer

Over the summer, a national reckoning with ongoing police brutality in the United States led several schools in major cities across the country to take decisive steps toward ending police presence in their buildings (Golstein, 2020). The research is clear on why this is a necessary step in racial justice work: police exacerbate racial inequities in public education. In 2014, more than two-thirds of American public high school students attended a school with a police officer, and schools with “a sizable share of black and Hispanic students” were more likely to have police officers (Lindsay, Lee, and Lloyd, 2018). These officers had a disproportionate impact on Black and Hispanic students in the same year; while Black and Hispanic students made up 15.5% and 24.7% of public school enrollment, respectively, they accounted for 33.4% and 24.9% of public school arrests (Education Week Research Center, 2017). 

Not only has data shown that police tend to criminalize Black and Hispanic students, but research also indicates that police, as a whole, are ineffective at addressing issues of school discipline. Teske (2011) writes that introducing police to school campuses correlated with more student referrals to juvenile courts, and Hines-Datiri (2015) demonstrates that this increases the school-to-prison pipeline and results in Black males receiving “severe punishment for their behavior, because they are seen as adultified and hyper-masculine rather than as teenage male youth” (p. 18). For my case study, I will examine a grassroots organization in Philadelphia that is committed to creating just and anti-racist public schools, with a key sub-goal of ending police presence in classrooms, hallways, and all other school facilities. Given that COVID-19 has also been a serious threat to Philadelphia children and families in 2020, especially children and families of color, the organization has also organized for a just and safe reopening.