In a roiled Minneapolis, schools are testing new model for safety

Students in Minneapolis are at the epicenter of the police-free schools movement. Amid high tensions, the model of moving toward a new culture of safety within schools is being tested and, some say, strengthened.

When Nathaniel Genene walked into his Minneapolis high school last week for the first time in over a year he quickly noticed that there was no uniformed police officer standing watch.

“Usually when you walk in SROs are the first thing you see and the last when you walk out,” he says, using the abbreviation for school resource officers.

Mr. Genene, a senior at Washburn High School, served as the citywide student representative on the Minneapolis school board last year. He helped push the board to cut ties with the city’s police department last June in the wake of the death of George Floyd in police custody. Other school systems, including in Portland, Oregon, and Denver followed suit, sparking a wave of districts reconsidering whether officers belong in schools.

In Minneapolis, where police department contracts with Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) date back to the 1960s, a new cadre of civilian safety support specialists is now in place. And despite challenges here from events outside school doors – the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin, the death of Daunte Wright during a traffic stop in nearby Brooklyn Center – some students and staff say that the security culture is slowly becoming strengthened by being more inclusive of students who have asked to remove officers for years.

It’s a window on one model for keeping students safe and reflects the steps being taken by a shaken city as it seeks to embrace justice and fairness in its institutions. It also comes with its own share of controversy, with several principals writing in an open letter that students had been placed in “grave danger” and that the school board had “burned a fragile bridge” by viewing the entire police department in a negative light.