Fayette County schools still ignore students’ pleas for more counselors than cops
On June 4, the Fayette County Public Schools board held an unannounced meeting to confirm a “safety” plan that added five new police officers to the already bloated police force throughout our public school system. The live meeting was broadcast on YouTube without a way for the public to meaningfully engage. As soon as other students and I began using the comment section to lodge civil, articulate criticisms of the decision to intensify the policing of school children, our comments were swiftly removed by the school board.
For nearly a year, the student-led Counselors over Cops FCPS campaign has pressured the board to reduce the SRO (School Resource Officer) count to one officer per school and change their role to emergency responders only, where there is a real and immediate threat of serious physical harm to individuals inside. SROs should otherwise stay out of school disciplinary matters and never serve as the responders to typical childhood misbehavior. We don’t need officers walking the halls like they’re patrolling the beat.
Board members promised that they were working with us to fix the over-policing problems that have been apparent to students but neglected by adults with the authority to fix them. These problems include racial disparities in school discipline and inadequate mental health support and resources. Just last school year, 86% of FCPS student arrests and 92% of FCPS student charges were of Black students, while they only made up 23% of the student body. FCPS should free up the funds that are being used on SROs to police school-children and redistribute them to much needed mental health support and other gravely underfunded resources that promote student well-being.
The school board told us that they planned to create a safety plan that addressed behavioral issues with empathy and better student services, but that students should be more patient because “policy doesn’t get written overnight.” Yet experts at one of our partner organizations, Grassroots Law Project, have already written extensive policy outlines for the needed changes, which the school board could use to model this new policy.
The police force in FCPS is willfully ignorant at best and antagonistic at worst. Cops in our schools regularly profile Black kids as troublemakers. As a recent graduate from Bryan Station High School (the poorest, most racially diverse, and most policed school in FCPS), I’ve seen this kind of disparate treatment firsthand. I am white, and I can recall several occasions where I walked past SROs in the hallway without a hall pass and was never stopped or questioned by an officer. The same was not true for my schoolmates of color. When the same SROs saw students of color just steps behind me without a pass, they would stop and question them about it.
The bottom line is that police are trained to police. Seven million of our tax dollars each year are going to arm people who police children within our schools. SROs aren’t here for our safety; they’re a threat to our safety. Behavioral corrections in schools should be approached with understanding and empathy, which is not happening when we spend millions more on school policing than we do on student support. In my times of mental health crisis, counselors, social workers, mental health professionals, and school psychologists were nowhere to be found. We need to prevent behavioral issues by providing much needed resources to students because punitive and sometimes violent police responses only exacerbate existing problems.
Kids go to school to learn in a nurturing and supportive environment, yet we are unsafe in the very place we should feel safest. On behalf of students still in FCPS, we demand that the district limit the number of SROs to one per school, stop their involvement in everyday classroom infractions, and provide children with the support they need and deserve.
Richard O’Neill is an 18-year-old organizer with the student-led Counselors Over Cops FCPS Campaign.