There’s a saying: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
That’s what Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Board of Education should keep in mind before canceling altogether the Chicago Public Schools contract with the Chicago Police Department to provide police officers in high schools that have opted to keep them, as the district works toward completely removing them from schools.
What happened to local decision-making? What about letting schools decide what works best for them in the here-and-now while continuing to prod them toward a desired alternative — in this case, every high school having a well-thought-out strategy for handling discipline without uniformed officers assigned full-time to schools?
That’s the best way to handle this controversial issue, a point this editorial board made several weeks ago. The administration of Mayor Lori Lightfoot made the right call in giving local school councils the final say, while offering schools a carrot: Those that gave up their assigned officers would still get money to implement alternative discipline strategies.
That made sense. Many high schools did indeed take advantage of the offer and hired counselors and other staff with the goal of preventing behavior problems rather than relying on punishment and harsh discipline.
But Johnson has given the OK for the board to end its contract with CPD altogether, as the Sun-Times’ Nader Issa and WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reported Tuesday.
When an approach is working, as Johnson himself admitted this one has, why mess with it and infringe on local control and neighborhood decision-making? This year, just 16 high schools have two assigned officers and 23 high schools have one; the rest, fewer than half of high schools, have any cops assigned to them at all.
Most schools with cops are majority-Black, and the concern about over-policing of Black youth is valid. But on the flip side, if schools — and likely most of these schools are led by LSCs and administrators of color — have a respected officer who’s a stable adult presence, there’s probably a good reason they might want to hang on to him or her. Not all cops are bad apples.
There was pushback from some City Council members at the January board meeting on this issue, Issa and Karp reported, including Southeast Side Ald. Peter Chico (10th), who said that parents at George Washington High objected when that school removed its officers. We suspect there will be similar grumbling moving forward.
The point here is not that cops do, or do not, belong in schools. Ideally, cops shouldn’t be needed in a place of learning.
The bigger issue is, who gets to decide?
It should be schools and parents themselves, period.
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