SAN JOSE — Teachers, students and police-reform activists staged a car caravan and circled the San Jose Unified School District offices Thursday afternoon to re-energize their efforts to get district leaders to move toward removing the contracted presence of police officers on district campuses.
Some of San Jose Unified’s peer districts in the city, including the Alum Rock Union and East Side Union High school districts, have moved not to renew contracts with police.
The action Thursday was timed to a board of trustees meeting and continued a campaign launched in the summer following national and local protests of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. Ultimately, the board of trustees approved renewing a school-police cooperation agreement but put off further discussions about keeping on-campus police officers.
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“Any role that a police officer is doing at a school can be done better by someone else,” said Jennifer Alva Lewis, 34, a parent of two young students in the district. “We need to prioritize actual school safety over the feeling of safety for a small number of students.”
Tension between the group demanding the change, aligning themselves as the San Jose Unified Equity Coalition, and the board reached a new level when Board President Teresa Castellanos reported that protesters had staged outside her home, which she said represented “lines being crossed.”
“We are not in school. There are no police officers on campus. I understand the urgency of the moment, I understand the historical context and in many arenas I agree with what you’re asking us to do,” Castellanos said. “I do not appreciate the aggression that is starting to cross boundaries.”
Castellanos suggested the demonstration was taking place at her home rather than the district offices, though there was ample evidence of a protest at the headquarters. It was not immediately clear whether the people Castellanos mentioned were from the same group.
Organizer Derrick Sanderlin, who was at the district offices, said later that he could not speak to what Castellanos described, and saw its mention as a deflection.
“If a protest outside of her house was in fact just a protest, to me that sounds like a community that is begging to be heard and is actively not being heard,” he said.
During a special session on the campus officer issue in August, administrators in San Jose Unified asserted that having on-campus officers is a vital protective measure helped to “maintain a sense of community” that allows for more effective responses to potential safety issues.
Those who support ending the police presence — which has cost the district upwards of $1 million annually over the past few years — point to the city’s Guardian Program that has officers on-call for potential active-shooter scenarios as a reason the district can change. Steering that money toward avenues like trauma-informed counseling, ethnic-studies requirements, and behavioral-health support, they say, would yield far greater benefits for troubled students than police officers could.
Outside the district building, coalition member Latoya Fernandez said enforcement-oriented measures like suspensions and police at schools inflict more trauma on students already beset by trauma. As a recent dean of students at Downtown College Prep El Camino, a middle school, she said she successfully phased out suspensions altogether.
“Students don’t need police, they need guidance that gets to the root of the issue,” Fernandez said. “Students need to know they’re welcome and safe to make mistakes, and feel supported through that.”
The equity coalition, made up of students, parents, teachers and residents, has gathered more than 1,800 signatures on an online petition in support of steering funds away from a police contract toward support services. They want the school board to agendize a resolution — named after Sanderlin, who was injured on the first day of George Floyd protests in late May when a San Jose police officer shot him in the groin with a rubber bullet — that would turn the petition into formal policy.
Several board members voiced sympathy toward the aims of the coalition, which called in dozens of comments at the teleconference meeting Thursday evening and submitted numerous letters, all supporting their proposed resolution.
What took up most of that portion of the meeting was a discussion between the board and administrators about renewing a Memorandum of Understanding between the district and San Jose Police Department governing conduct and guidelines for officers when they are on San Jose Unified campuses. The board and administration stressed in the meeting that the MOU discussion was divorced from the issue of school-resource and on-campus officers, who are not currently contracted to provide services due to the pandemic shutting down in-person learning.
They voted 5-0 to keep guidelines for police conduct on campuses in place. Additionally, Castellanos and trustee Carla Collins were among those who supported the idea of holding off on approving a new police contract for the current school year until more research could be done about the work and impact of on-campus officers.
“In making that decision, what we are all committing to is taking care of each other,” Castellanos said.
That did not appease the coalition members, who argued that focusing on the memorandum as a literal document distracted from its role in upholding a framework that puts police officers in schools.
“They either aren’t aware that we know the difference between the contract and the MOU, or it means they know it and continue to delay or ignore what we’re asking for,” Sanderlin said. “It’s really frustrating.”
