Chicago Public Schools may soon remove police officers and implement “restorative justice” and “social-emotional learning” instead.
It is part of the “Whole School Safety” plan, now available for public comment. The plan would include banning school resource officers at the 39 remaining schools that still employ them.
Chicago Public Schools has tried to get schools to drop their officers by offering them “trade-in funds” to instead hire security guards, a “restorative justice coordinator,” or a “climate and cultural coordinator.” But some schools are still reluctant, leading the public school system to move closer to banning them entirely.
It is part of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s agenda — he has flip-flopped on whether he believes schools should have local control over hiring police officers. But it is no surprise he supports the plan to get rid of police officers — as a Cook County commissioner, he supported defunding the police.
The plan overrides the concerns of local schools, many of which are in some of the city’s worst neighborhoods. This includes Fenger High School in the South Side Roseland neighborhood and Collins High School near the Garfield Park and North Lawndale communities.
Removing police officers from high schools in dangerous neighborhoods defies common sense. So it fits well with the rest of the safety plan, which includes implementing “social-emotional learning,” a critical race theory-linked idea that infuses political ideology into the classroom.
The plan increases “access to social-emotional learning and mental health resources,” according to a summary on the Chicago Public Schools website. The aims of this approach sound good — Chicago Public Schools’s Office of Social and Emotional Learning says the program helps students learn how to manage their emotions, “relate to others,” and make “responsible decisions.”
But it does not work, at least in the way it is sold. It is a good way to push a leftist agenda, however.
“When you understand the program fully, and you understand the framework and the ideology behind it, you will understand that it is not good,” former Indiana teacher Jennifer McWilliams told the Daily Signal about her experience.
“The entire social-emotional learning framework is based on the critical race theory ideology,” McWilliams said. She also called it “psychological manipulation.”
For example, her school began to allow boys who claimed they were girls to use the female restroom. She said the emotional learning program was set up to condition students to accept “new social norms.”
Chicago also wants to implement restorative justice, which oftentimes prioritizes the perpetrator over the victim. By removing the penal element and shifting to discussions between involved parties, this strategy can leave victims feeling unheard.
Chicago Public Schools wants to continue to embrace political ideology over real academic standards and quality. It already uses movies such as Black Panther in its English classes, for example.
Yet, while emphasizing relationship-building through social-emotional learning, it disregards the importance of students having a school resource officer they know and can trust, a key to preventing crime.
A public school principal warned that there will still be violence, but the officers who will show up from a 911 call may not know the students, making the problem worse.
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“Cops with no relationships with the children show up, and you’re more likely to get the kind of interaction between cops and children,” Principal Troy LaRaviere, who leads the Chicago Principals & Administrators Association, previously said. “The same kind of interaction you’re trying to prevent, you just created a situation where you’re more likely [to] get it.”
Chicago should listen to its administrators, not activists, and allow schools to keep officers.
Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.