Amid the growing outcry against police brutality and increased calls to defund or abolish the police, a collective of youth organizations is focusing on one of the harshest aspects of policing—cops in schools. 

A coalition of youth advocates, service groups and progressive allies organized by the Center for Popular Democracy has created a list of demands about policing and criminalization in schools that they call the Youth Mandate for Education and Liberation—a powerful set of policy proposals that dovetails with the increased outcry against this often-overlooked aspect of American policing. 

An early obstacle to racial equity

As noted by CPD’s Education Justice Campaigns Director Dmitri Holtzman, the Youth Mandate’s demands — to “fund education, not incarceration,” to “restore and strengthen the civil rights of young people,” and “to end the private takeover of schools”—are necessary first steps in achieving racial equity in schools.

“We can't really even begin to address issues of racial equity in schools if police are still there,” Holtzman said in an interview with Blue Tent. The urgency for the Youth Mandate’s agenda, he added, stems from the demonstrated harm that Black and brown youth experience at the hands of police and other criminalizing tools in schools, such as metal detectors, security cameras and even facial recognition software. 

“We know that police are distributed primarily and predominantly in majority Black and brown schools and that the youth that suffer the most from the existence of police in schools and everything else that makes up the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline are Black youth and youth of color—who, at the same time, are not provided with other most basic resources,” Holtzman said. “There are more than 14 million students across the country that have a police officer but don't have a counselor or nurse in their school. The mandate speaks to those issues.”

Addressed primarily to the Biden administration and the new Congress, the Youth Mandate demands an immediate end to federal funding for police in schools and broader funding for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. It also calls for financial resources geared toward the implementation of the sustainable community schools model pioneered by Chicago Public Schools, in which schools engage in restorative justice rather than policing to handle misconduct. 

A multi-pronged strategy

Along with its large list of endorsers, which numbers 160 and counting, CPD and the youth organizations in its network recognize that a multi-pronged approach is required to begin the hard work of dismantling what they call the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline. As a national coalition, much of its focus has been on the federal level, while providing support for groups on the state and local level who wish to adopt the mandate’s policy proposals, as well.

“What's important about the mandate is that it is actually a reflection of decades of organizing and demands that young people have been making for a long time,” Holtzman said. “A lot of what it contains is not actually new, but there is a renewed push to make sure that what young people are fighting for at the school district level or at their city council level, and will continue to fight, they're also just expanding and building off that to take our fight to Congress.” 

Holtzman pointed out that the mandate’s former iteration, the Youth Mandate for Presidential Candidates to Permanently Dismantle the School-to-Prison-and-Deportation Pipeline, was reflected in federal legislation that was introduced in 2020 after the anti-police brutality uprisings in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. 

Introduced in the House by Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and in the Senate by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT), the Counseling not Criminalization in Schools Act “is, as far as we've seen, the best and most progressive piece of federal legislation to date that actually seeks to address directly the question of police in schools,” Holtzman said. 

Part of a larger agenda

Much of the mandate’s agenda, which involves divesting in school policing and diverting money to the chronically underfunded public schools where cops are seen as a solution, dovetails well with broader calls to defund and abolish police in the United States — especially as experiments in defunding police have begun in local municipalities since last summer’s uprisings. 

“We saw in the midst of the uprisings last year a number of school districts cut ties and end their contracts with police departments,” Holtzman said. “There's a number of examples where young people are winning in these big fights. We are seeing momentum, we are seeing that it's possible, and I think the more that it happens, the more momentum that is behind this movement.”

He added that the Youth Mandate and its demands are situated well within the broader defund movement, because, as Holtzman put it, “schools are microcosms of society.”

“Schools provide for us an opportunity to see what's possible when we divest from things that actually bring less safety and more violence and more discrimination,” Holtzman said. “I think we can see the possibilities of divesting from those practices and those resources and investing into things that do make schools safe, healthy, and equitable.”