The board decided to cut 133 school police positions from the Los Angeles School Police Department, among them, 70 sworn officers, 62 non-sworn officers, and one support staff member. The staff decreases lessen the annual budget of the district’s police force from $77.5 million to $52.5 million.
Police officers assigned at all secondary schools will be succeeded by new “climate coaches,” who are qualified to, according to the plan, implement “positive school culture and climate,” use “de-escalation strategies” to solve a conflict, understand and treat “implicit bias,” and reduce “racial disparity” in school discipline practices.
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The new program doesn’t allow individual schools to apply to retain police officers on their campuses. Alternatively, officers will remain on call to react to emergencies, with a purpose of a three-to-five minute response time.
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The police force reduction is part of the LAUSD’s $36.5 million Black Student Achievement Plan, which intends to grant supplemental services and aid to 53 schools that have a large black student population and “high need indicators,” such as lower than average math and English language arts proficiency rates, higher than average referral and suspension rates, and higher than average chronic absenteeism.
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Adding to the police overhaul, the program would give $30.1 million for improving “school climate” and decreasing “over-identification of black students” in suspensions and discipline actions, $4.4 million to implement academic adjustments such as adding more black authors into school curricula, and $2 million for community partnership with organizations that serve black youth.
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“We’ve been systematically failing black children as a country. Schools must be part of the solution, because a great education is the most important part of the path out of poverty,” Superintendent Austin Beutner announced on Monday throughout his weekly update to the LAUSD community. “While we at L.A. Unified don’t have all the answers, we’re committed to making change.”
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The changes mark the latest step by the nation’s major public school districts in response to the “defund the police” movement. In the wake of the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police, activists and groups such as Black Lives Matter have urged local and officials to “defund” their law enforcement forces, claiming that redirecting funding from police toward other social service programs could make communities safer.
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Last summer, the Minneapolis Public Schools board of education voted unanimously to terminate its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department, saying it “cannot continue to be in partnership with an organization that has the culture of violence and racism.”
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