Police in Schools: Striking a Balance Between Physical and Psychological Safety
By: Etienne R. LeGrand, CEO, Vivify Performance
Who remembers the black student who was dragged from her desk by a resource officer in Spring Valley High School in South Carolina in front of all her classmates? I can hardly imagine the embarrassment and psychological stress this incident put her through, and as I read more about the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) recently overhauling its police operation for the first time in 25 years, I was reminded of this story and the “safety” our school districts offer our kids daily.
While some may glean hope from the new agreement, I believe this is a long overdue update to a policy that has worked against the district’s purpose of enabling and promoting learning, which has caused the NYCDOE reputational and brand damage. You may be wondering about the connection between the two. Any reduction to the number of days kids attend schools is one less day available to learn. The National Center for Education Statistics has found that students who attend school regularly have achieved at higher levels than students who do not have regular attendance.
The new agreement is expected to limit situations under which police can send kids into the criminal justice system and discourage employees from summoning the police for minor behavior infractions. While these are changes in the right direction, the unintended consequences of a school security policy that undermines learning (even a little bit) cannot be tolerated.
Physical safety cannot be achieved at the expense of psychological safety. Kids need to feel safe from physical and emotional harm, unlike the student referenced in South Carolina. The kind of emotional harm that accrues to kids when they are dragged from their desk by a safety officer for refusing to leave a classroom can be permanently rooted in their memory and impact a district’s culture by demonstrating to students they are not deserving of respect and dignity when they misbehave. Unwittingly, districts communicate that following rules is more important than their well-being and that when you break a rule or exhibit poor judgement you will be punished in some instances worse than the “crime committed.”
Shifting the NYCDOE Culture and School Safety Practices
To ensure both physical and psychological safety, NYCDOE must establish a culture that prizes learning behaviors, habits and mindsets that reflect how the district’s values are expected to be lived everyday by employees, students and vendors. Every leader must walk the talk by modeling these behaviors, mindsets and habits, demonstrating through his or her conduct and without ambiguity, what is desired from employees, students and vendors.
While police practices and the culture that undergirds these police departments might work out on the street, they absolutely will not in schools. If police are to be in school at all, they should hew more closely to a community policing model that prizes emotional engagement with members of the community being protected and agree to operate under the school district’s culture rather their own. These requirements reinforced with an onboarding experience for police personnel on the district’s culture and training on the significance of psychological safety to learning.
District Leaders Must Stand Up for Psychological Safety
It may be a news flash, but police and sheriff departments are essentially vendors to school districts in these arrangements. Chancellors don’t have to engage them to the extent they do or at all, if there is unwillingness to meet the needs of the school districts for which they work and properly serve students. I realize this may be easier said than done in the context of mass shooting events that pressure leaders to reduce their perceived liability of what many recognize as a low probability event.
Under this pressure though, many leaders scrape together funds to invest in school security strategies absent evidence that policing for example, make schools safer. In fact, the Associated Press reported that hardening measures like metal detectors and armed officers make schools feel less safe.
While it’s true that kids can’t learn when they misbehave, they cannot learn if any misbehavior results in punishment that sends them out of class, out of school and into prison. They cannot learn from poor decisions and miscalculations, if control and punishment supersedes learning from teachable moments. After all, learning isn’t limited to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but must also include managing one’s ego defenses, acquiring emotional intelligence and active listening skills.
NYDOE Chancellor Richard Carranza and his team are in the early stages of reshaping its culture to be more people-centric where employees trust and care about each other as foundational to performing their roles well. I applaud their efforts, but there is more work to be done. Core district values on which Carranza is relying to the guide police under the new agreement need to be codified into well-defined, shared learning and performance behaviors, habits and mindsets they can be held accountable to as they work to keep kids and employees safe.
