Syracuse, NY (NCC NEWS) – Wednesday evening Board of Education meeting about Student Resource Officers has caused concern amongst protesters and students after a survey showed that 85 percent of people want Student Resource Officers to stay in high schools.
The survey was emailed and mailed to parents, students, staff, and community members on July 8th. 636 people responded to the survey. 358 of those responses came from staff members, 229 came from parents, 20 came from community members and 26 of them came from students.
“I think that it’s extremely skewed because who we primarily heard from were teachers and administrators,” said Cjala Surratt, Co-Founder of Black Leadership Coalition an activism group that has been following this narrative.
“It was very clear that students voices were not in attendance at those meetings when the surveys were put together…You can tell that some of those questions had very targeted answers that they wanted to get out of them” said Black Lives Matter Organizer Shukri Mohamed.
The Board Meeting discussed efforts to changing the job description, staff and SRO’s undergo training. They also discussed high schools picking the desired SRO.
Director of Black Leadership Coalition, Yusuf Abdul Qadir quoted the Memorandum of Understanding and added “They are absolutely in violation of the law because they have not done any of those actions or steps. It further precludes the idea that law enforcement should not be involved in discipline. That is the sole responsibility of educators”.
The Board of Education and the city pays $1.2 million for SRO’s to stay in schools. Protesters and students say they want to see the funds allocated towards specialist with training that deals with children and behavioral issues.
The People’s Agenda for Policing, a group that has also demanded SRO to be removed, released a statement stating “We are therefore demanding that today’s SCSD Board meeting focus exclusively on the timeline to moving SRO’s out of schools, and replacing them with proven supportive services such as culturally responsive and trauma-informed mental health and counseling services.”
Surratt says “A lot of what we’re seeing here is absolutely part of white supremacy, we have to look at the population. that are teaching our children, and we have to look at the propensity for white people to see our youth, as adults, and react in a way that is egregious”.
The Board of Education and Mayor Ben Walsh are set to make a decision on if SRO’s will be removed from schools on August 3rd.
