After Student Opposition, Portland School District Rethinks Paying for Campus Cops

After nearly two months of student activism, the Portland Public Schools (PPS) board of directors voted Tuesday evening to suspend and reassess its agreement to pay the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) for additional officers on PPS campuses.

With this vote, the board effectively hit pause on an inter-governmental agreement it passed in December, in which the district agreed to pay PPB $1.2 million a year to have nine school resource officers (SROs) on duty five days a week. SROs are sworn, armed officers who have long-term assignments at public school districts.

The agreement sparked pushback among PPS students who felt they had not been properly informed or consulted about it. Students responded by demonstrating outside of Portland City Hall earlier this month, hoping to keep city commissioners from approving the agreement, and starting an online campaign with the social media handle NoSROsPPS. Their chief concerns are that having armed officers on campus would make students, especially students of color, feel threatened, and that the money could be better spent elsewhere.

Isabel Mace-McLatchie was among those students who organized after the original agreement passed. Talking to the Mercury after Tuesday’s board vote, she said that she and her fellow students were pleased with the board’s decision.

“We hung out a little bit after the meeting, and we’re all excited with them saying, ‘We made a mistake, we we need more time to figure this out,'” Mace-McLatchie said.

“There shouldn’t be a time when expediency trumps student voice in our decision making.”

SROs have had a presence in PPS schools for at least two decades, but there has never been a formal agreement between the two agencies, and the district never paid for the officers before. Officers were on campus three days a week; under the new agreement, SROs would have a full-time, five-day-a-week presence in Portland high schools.

PPS board member Julia Brim-Edwards authored the resolution passed at Tuesday’s meeting. Brim-Edwards told the Mercury last week that the board originally felt pressure from the city of Portland to pass an SRO funding agreement before the end of 2018, but that Portland’s city council has been dragging its feet in voting on it.

“The end of the year came and went, and it was clear that that wasn’t the real deadline,” she said.

Brim-Edwards said that with the new resolution, she intended to permanently suspend PPS’ agreement to pay for SROs, because “it’s their [the city’s] fiduciary responsibility, not the district’s.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, several other school board members expressed regret that the original agreement was rushed to a vote.

“There shouldn’t be a time when expediency trumps student voice in our decision making,” said board member Amy Kohnstamm.

Brim-Edwards told the Mercury she still wants SROs to have a presence in district schools, but that it was clear that a new agreement would need to include “students’ and staffs’ perspectives.” District leaders laid out a plan at Tuesday’s meeting to engage students, especially students of color, in more dialogues before drafting a new agreement. They said they’ll have a new agreement ready to consider by the end of February.

“This goes beyond this specific issue. It really gets to how students are involved in PPS decision making.”

Mace-McLatchie said she hopes that the SRO debate will lead to broader communication between the PPS board and the student population—and that “moving forward, it’s really going to depend on them doing what they said they were going to do.”

“This goes beyond this specific issue,” she added. “It really gets to how students are involved in PPS decision making.”

Last week, members of the PPS administration met with students at Jefferson High, where Mace-McLatchie is a senior, to hear about concerns brought up by the SRO issue.

“That was a great conversation,” she said. “It definitely felt like the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.”