Since the May 25 killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police, there has been a wave of advocacy that has successfully removed police officers from public schools.

But Floyd’s murder did not start the movement. It added fuel to a fire that has burned for decades in communities of color. 

The story of school policing is one that is rooted in the fights for civil rights and education equality. 

In 1948, the Los Angeles School Police Department, which would go on to become the largest school police department in the nation, was created to combat violence in newly integrating schools, according to a 2017 ACLU report. Around the nation, as schools began to integrate, the notion prevailed that bringing Black students into white schools would also bring violence. 

Police presence grew in schools and so did its opposition. In 1971, Boston’s Black Student Federation staged a boycott of its public school system. Nearly half of the Black students in the city stayed home from school during the week of Feb. 8, according to a report in the Journal of Urban History. Among their demands was “the removal of police from schools and surrounding areas.”

Decades later, amid the uprising following Floyd’s murder, a handful of school districts have answered renewed calls to remove police from schools. Advocates say police escalate school discipline situations and their strict surveillance of communities of color disproportionately funnels those students into prisons, according to the ACLU and the Advancement Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. 

Despite their proliferation after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, there is no evidence that school resource officers actually make schools safer.  The Advancement Project identified 62 assaults by school police officers between 2009 and 2019.

In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, the decision to end the school district’s decades-long contract with the local police department came just over a week after his death. In Oakland, the city voted to disband its school police department a month after his death, after falling one vote short in March.

But for both cities, there was a George Floyd before 2020. 

Four years earlier in a suburb of Minneapolis, 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop just outside of Minneapolis in front of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter. 

It was just the latest highly-publicized offense in the fraught relationship between police and the Black community. A day earlier, Alton Sterling was shot and killed while selling CDs  outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

“We don’t need to tie that history to learning environments in our schools and to also be developing fake narratives around what police actually mean when we are seeing differently every day what police mean to our communities and how that history continues to live on,” said Kenneth Eban, director of policy and advocacy for the Advancing Equity Coalition in Minneapolis.

Talks of eliminating school resource officers began in the Twin Cities following Castile’s murder, Eban said. 

Nearby, a Minneapolis suburb ended its contract with local police departments in 2017. After several incidents of excessive force, Intermediate District 287 in Plymouth, Minnesota got rid of its police officers and replaced them with student safety coaches, trained to de-escalate conflict and address students’ mental health needs.

The battle was ongoing. 

“We wouldn’t have gotten here, even with everything that happened with the murder of George Floyd, if we didn’t challenge the school district and the school board’s values a year earlier, when the Minneapolis police department had done other racist things,”  Eban said. 

In Oakland, the Black Organizing Project’s work zeroed in on removing police from schools in 2011 after the murder of Raheim Brown, a 20-year-old Black man who was shot and killed by an Oakland school police officer. It launched its Bettering Our School Systems (BOSS) Campaign.

After realizing how deeply embedded police were in their schools, the campaign launched efforts to reform the police in schools. Not only was there a school police department, but the schools also contracted a number of city police officers and school resource officers, said Manning.

“Police in schools were normalized,” said Ni’Keah Manning, the advocacy group’s program coordinator. “It was so normalized that it wasn’t even questioned.” 

The campaign started with small reforms, such as formalizing a complaint policy against officers to empower students and parents, and establishing a memorandum of understanding to limit the power the city’s police department had in schools. 

Despite their victories in reform, Manning said the goal was always complete abolition. 

“We knew in organizing that a system will only revert back to doing what it was designed to do. And there is no one to make sure they’re being held accountable,”  Manning said. 

The international uprising caused by Floyd’s murder was a catalyst that created a moment of opportunity,  Manning said.  

“It was divine timing,” she said. 

On June 24, the Oakland School Board voted unanimously to eliminate the Oakland Unified School District Police Department.

Now, in both cities, the next step is providing alternatives to police in schools. 

In Minneapolis, there had been research for at least 10 alternatives prior to the decision to end the contract with their police department, though none had been approved, according to Eban. 

Manning said the work of the next two to three years will be creating a safety plan that gives the community a seat at the table and focuses on restorative practices that emphasize repairing harm caused by wrongdoing, rather than punishment. 

Source art courtesy of Black Organizing Project

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Nick Shubert stood in front of a Harvard lecture hall this spring. The room was dead silent as he shared his story. They were listening to him. 

“They understood where I was coming from and my pain and my passion for making things right,” Shubert, 22, said. 

He had traveled to Massachusetts from Florida with a few peers and a teacher, as part of a group called the EVAC Movement, which started in Jacksonville’s Robert E. Lee High School five years earlier. They were invited to come to Harvard to talk about the power and danger of youth storytelling, and the start, success, and eventual demise of their student-led social justice initiative. 

“It changed how I look at people,” Shubert said. “It changed how I look at life. It just changed everything. That was the best experience I have ever had, probably, in my life.” 

The EVAC movement, coordinated by teacher Amy Donofrio, morphed from a lesson Donofrio would teach in her co-ed leadership class about using personal storytelling to escape the “cave” of their life, or whatever is holding them back.

In 2015, Donofrio was asked to teach a male-only leadership class for predominately black students. They reversed the word cave, and dubbed it EVAC. 

Of the 13 high schoolers in the group, 12 had an immediate family member in jail, seven had been arrested, nine had been shot at, 11 had seen someone get shot, and 12 had a close family member murdered. 

“EVAC is about getting an understanding of each individual,” said Bernard Thomas III, an EVAC member and current junior at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. “Without understanding, you cannot go as a community. You cannot go as one. You can never be united without understanding.” 

Thomas and Shubert said the class was atrocious at first. Some of the boys didn’t know each other. Others outright hated each other. Donofrio cried a lot, and day in and day out her lesson plans failed to strike a chord. 

A few months in, they decided to go back to where they started, sharing their stories. Donofrio, a white woman, learned from hearing the stories of the young black men. 

Shubert, Thomas, and the others started to share their negative experiences with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and how they felt labeled as a criminal and gang member because of their skin color and hair style. EVAC started to sell hoodies that said, “I am not a gang member.” 

What started as a leadership class quickly became a movement, the former high school students said. 

They hosted roundtables with local leaders including the Jacksonville mayor, Jacksonville sheriff, and Florida state attorney to discuss issues important to them. 

Local and national news outlets started picking up their stories. Within a year they had met with President Barack Obama, New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker and civil-rights legend and Georgia Rep. John Lewis. 

“It all happened so fast,” said Thomas. 

The New York Times featured one of its members on the front page in a story about juvenile fines and fees. The White House invited them to participate in a roundtable on juvenile justice. They won Harvard’s national KIND Schools challenge. They traveled to Ferguson, Missouri, to present to teachers on how to implement the program in their schools in the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting. 

But in May 2017, as most of the boys were about to enter their senior year, Donofrio found out that the EVAC class would no longer be on her schedule. 

Robert E. Lee’s principal told Donofrio she would have to use her planning period to teach the class, but she was already staying at school until late at night every day. She declined. The class was canceled. 

She fought for a month to keep the class. She looked for a funder. She met with the mayor. Donofrio was encouraged by the principal to continue doing EVAC lessons in her speech classes, but the program that gained national attention for telling their story would no longer meet during the regular school day. 

After teaching EVAC lessons in her speech classes for a couple years, Donofrio found out she would be reassigned to teach British literature in spring 2019. That summer, Vinceté Waugh, an EVAC member, said he arrived at Donofrio’s classroom to see all of EVAC’s posters and photos dismantled.

“The journey of our journey was there,” said Waugh, a rising senior at the time. “And then to see it all crumpled up, thrown into trash bags and thrown on top of eachother, it just made me feel like, wow, no one understood.” 

The Duval County Public Schools was not available for comment.

Waugh, emancipated from his family, says without EVAC he lacked the support he needed in his final year of high school. He started the year with a promising outlook to get into Florida State University, but he ended the year without meeting the minimum admissions requirements. 

“It didn’t turn out to be the year that it was supposed to be,” said Waugh.

But, this May he became the first in his family to ever graduate high school and has begun attending community college as a first generation student. 

The other EVAC members have all since graduated and now find other ways to speak out. One founding member, Reginald Boston Jr., was shot and killed by a police officer in January. The boys and Donofrio have leaned on each other for support and demanded answers. 

They recently have taken to the streets in protests after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. They will publish an essay about the story of EVAC and the power and dangers of youth storytelling in the Harvard Educational Review this summer. Donofrio says they still talk weekly, and she talks to many of them every day. She said Shubert, Thomas, Waugh and the other EVAC members are like family.

“We’re going to fight until our very last breath for the ones that are struggling,” said Shubert. 

Lead photo courtesy of Amy Donofrio

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