During their lesson on electric currents, I told the Black kids to stop resisting!
Ask three people about good pedagogy on teaching school kids and you’ll get five answers. Should teachers give out homework? Should high schoolers have nap nap? Does this math book care about Black people a little too much? Or… you know… should we have more cops?
House Bill 63, recently signed into law by Gov. Andy Beshear, requires local and state law enforcement, local boards of education, superintendents and school administrators to cooperate in finding the funds and personnel to assign at least one school resource officer (SRO) to every school. As a result, Calloway County Sheriff Nicky Knight announced Friday that his office will be expanding the School Resource Officer Program at the Calloway County School District.
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Now this strikes me immediately as weird. The elementary and middle schools I went to had bars on the windows, but we just had security guards. In elementary school, we had the D.A.R.E. program where they told us how dangerous marijuana is, but other than that I was pretty good with just… you know… several teachers and a principal instill the submission and fear confused for respect for authority and manners that young children are expected to display. There’s no reason that I can think of to have police (excuse me, school resource officers) regularly at schools besides either 1) we’ve just hit that point in normalizing our school shooting crisis that we’ve decided to shorten 911 response times by always having an officer on duty or 2) this is just blatant Copaganda aiming to skew public perceptions in favor of police in a generational way. But that’s too conspiratorial, even for me.
“I think it’s important for children to see law enforcement officers as positive figures. If kids know a police officer at school that they trust and that they see every day, that they’re high-fiving in the hallway, if their initial experience with a police officer is positive, that’s something that can stay with them for the rest of their lives. That would be a huge benefit to having them in the elementary schools – seeing that person as a positive role model and not as someone that’s out to get them or someone they should be scared of. That would be a huge positive in the elementary world.”
Oh. It’s literally what’s written on the tin.
I sure do hope that they talk to the students who lived through having Hawaii 50 in homeroom, cause not all of the interactions are as positive as they’d have you believe.
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Outside his old high school, on Chicago’s northwest side, 19-year-old Antonio Magic says if SROs are supposed to build relationships with students they often don’t do a good job of it. “The only time I seen police interacting with students,” says Magic, “was when students were being arrested.”
The quote comes from this article that looks at the results of SROs and as it turns out, the folks who’ve experienced the joys of knowing the boys in blue are just down the hall from you the entire day have made pushes for funding personnel like, I don’t know, school psychologists and social workers.
I just really think it’s premature to station officers in schools without addressing the school to prison pipeline. Might I suggest moving making sure teachers can afford to live near where they teach up on the list?
New Law Requires Resource Officers At All Schools [Murray Ledger]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.