Organizing by Black Parents Removed Cops From Oakland Schools

https://truthout.org/articles/tireless-community-organizing-by-black-parents-removed-cops-from-oakland-schools/

Tireless Community Organizing by Black Parents Removed Cops From Oakland Schools

Children thrive when we center violence prevention and co-create learning environments that welcome the whole person.

By Malaika Parker , YES!MAGAZINE
Published June 9, 2024

Four years ago, as a result of more than a decade of organizing led by the Black Organizing Project (BOP), a group of students, parents, teachers, and allies united to achieve a historic win in Oakland, California, resulting in the removal of police officers from the Oakland Unified School District. The campaign succeeded after years of Black students being treated unjustly. It was a community-driven solution to redefine school safety — and today we’re starting to see signs of real progress.

The school district’s passage of the George Floyd Resolution for Police-Free Schools (GFR) didn’t come easy. Parents and teachers demanded a plan to eliminate officer positions in the schools at a board of education meeting in March 2020, but the fundamentals of the resolution date back to BOP’s People’s Plan for Police-Free Schools from 2019. At that March meeting, a divided board voted down the resolution. George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis two months later prompted BOP to mobilize community partners during a week of action, lifting up the voices of Black and Brown youth across Oakland. As a result, the OUSD school board unanimously voted to eliminate police from all Oakland schools, becoming the first in the nation to do so.

Under the GFR, the school district eliminated police officers in Oakland schools, while committing a one-time fund of $1.9 million from the previous school police budget in critical resources. This was in addition to the more than $5 million over three years in funding for services from the Department of Violence Prevention — including expanded counseling, violence-prevention services, and academic and mental health support — to help more Black and Brown students feel safe and thrive.
The resolution was a critical win against systemic racism, over-policing, and the criminalization of Black and Brown youth at a time when people across the country were rising up for justice. In the years leading up to the resolution’s passage, Black students in Oakland public schools were 76% of those arrested by school police but only 26% of all local students.

Today, the new policy is starting to reverse this racist trend with a 10% reduction in suspensions for physical violence across Oakland’s public high schools and a substantial decline in police calls since in-person teaching resumed post pandemic. The 2021 OUSD board report compared police calls before and after the new policy and found that “police calls to campus have dropped dramatically since the George Floyd Resolution, with 134 calls to campus between August 2021 and April 2022, compared with 1,814 during the same timeframe from

…more…de-escalation techniques, and the use of trauma-informed restorative practices.”…