The Chicago Board of Education approved a $10.3 million contract with the Police Department Wednesday to post school resource officers in about a quarter of district high schools in the coming school year. The vote came amid renewed scrutiny over the presence of law enforcement in schools and over who should decide if the cops are welcome.
But the 57 school resource officers funded by the new contract don’t encompass the full scope of the Police Department’s footprint in Chicago Public Schools.
Active law enforcement officers have been hired as part-time CPS school security officers since at least 2018, according to the district’s contract with Service Employees International Union Local 73. The contract, which expires Friday, stipulates that new part-time security hires must “have the legal authority to effectuate an arrest.”
“Both parties will be working to address this” in ongoing contract negotiations, SEIU spokesperson Eric Bailey told the Tribune.
But, as of Wednesday, being an “active, sworn Chicago Police Officer” remained a requirement of a job listing for a “part-time security officer (off-duty police)” that’s been posted on CPS’ website since January. The position is described as “the first line of defense to defuse and de-escalate student misconduct and/or serious incidents.”
CPS currently employs 62 part-time security officers and maintains an additional pool of people who have been vetted and trained to fill in as part-time security officers, the district told the Tribune in emailed statements Tuesday and Wednesday morning.
Ahead of Wednesday’s vote renewing the CPD agreement, Board of Education member Elizabeth Todd-Breland asked CPS Security Chief Jadine Chou about the district’s use of sworn CPD officers as part-time security personnel. “That eligibility requirement will be removed,” Chou said, though a new SEIU contract has not been finalized.
Cassie Creswell is a CPS parent and former chair of the Jones College Prep Local School Council, which voted to remove its school resource officers.
“That’s really worrisome, to potentially have someone who’s essentially CPD working in the building and the school community doesn’t necessarily even know,” Creswell told the Tribune. “We have definitely seen off-duty officers do some dangerous and harmful things.”
In April 2022, federal court records show, CPS paid a $50,000 settlement to the mother of a McCutcheon Elementary School student who alleged her son was dragged down a hallway in 2020, when he was 4, by an off-duty CPD officer working as a CPS security guard. In December 2022, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability sustained a complaint that a CPD officer working as a security guard at Ashe Elementary School in 2018 used “egregious” force without justification against a student who was 8, resulting in a yearlong suspension of the officer by the Police Board.
Aside from school resource officers, CPS said its full-time security officers “are civilian staff members (non-law enforcement).” And though the Tribune found six full-time security officers in CPS’ employee roster whose first names, middle initials and last names match those of CPD officers listed in the city worker database, CPS said “none” of the six security officers are employed by the Police Department.
The district also said in a statement that CPS “prioritizes the safety of its students and staff” and “remains committed to continuing to authentically engage with students, parents, staff and community members to design school safety plans that promote physical and emotional safety for all students and staff.”
Following racial justice protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, vocal groups of CPS students demanded the district nullify its then-$33 million CPD contract. CPS instead reduced the contract by half and granted Local School Councils the ability to vote to keep or remove resource officers. The district has since partnered with five community-based organizations in its “Whole School Safety” planning process to guide Local School Councils through the annual voting process.
Among the 72 schools that voted in 2020, 17 opted to remove their school resource officers and 55 voted to keep them. The number of schools with school resource officers has slowly dwindled with annual voting in the years since.
The local councils of 40 schools, with either one or two school resource officers, voted this year. The LSC at Marshall High School voted to remove both officers and the Austin College and Career Academy LSC voted to remove one.
“We are continuing to reduce or remove police presence in our schools, continuing our relationship with the Chicago Police Department, which we’re very thankful for, but also most importantly, we’re continuing to partner with the five community-based organizations,” Chou said at board committee meeting last week.
Among schools that have voted to keep SROs, Chou said she’s received feedback that they have “played a role in helping to stabilize the safety of the community that they’re serving,” without perpetuating racial disparities. Data of school-based arrests CPS released in 2020 showed the overwhelming majority, 73%, involved Black students, who accounted for only 36% of students.
Chou and Mayor Brandon Johnson have both recently cited the need for SRO decisions to stem from engagement of local school communities. Other advocates, including Creswell, who’s the director of Illinois Families for Public Schools, have pressed CPS to make a centralized decision, as some other large school systems have done.
“It’s not really something that should be left up to the schools to decide, because it’s clear what the good and supported policy is: It’s not to have armed officers in schools,” said Creswell, citing the lack of evidence that police improve school safety. “I would like to see this new administration give up on that bad strategy, especially because financially, schools are not being given one-to-one resources.” The average funding for a single school resource officer, in the newly approved $10.3 million contract, surpasses the amount of trade-in funds to hire alternative safety personnel, such as restorative justice coordinators, she said.
As a mayoral candidate, Johnson responded to a Sun-Times/WBEZ questionnaire that “armed officers have no place in schools in communities already struggling with over-incarceration, criminalization, profiling and mistrust.” But last week he said the placement of an SRO is “a budgetary decision that ultimately will come down to whether or not a Local School Council believes that’s the best pathway forward” for students’ development.
The board’s new honorary student member Katelynn Shaw, a rising junior at Kenwood Academy High School, spoke up on the issue at her first board meeting Wednesday. “We do see a lot of abuse when it comes to SROs,” Shaw said. “Going to an 86% Black school, I see the relationship between SROs and students and where we can have those changes.”
A couple other CPS students, affiliated with the district’s community-based organization partners, also spoke alongside Chou at the board meeting Wednesday, encouraging the district to continue involving students in the decision-making process.
