Parents in Des Moines, Iowa, made a huge decision: to remove school resource officers from schools and use that $750,000 budget for restorative practices and support staff instead. But what exactly does this mean?
At Roosevelt High School, facilitators and students work together to solve problems, from attendance issues to school fights. Students have safe spaces to process their emotions.
Contexts like their financial status and mental health often become clear, resulting in solutions that broad punishments effectively ignore.
In this district, Black students were 53% of all arrests despite being only 20% of the student body. Compared to white girls, Black girls in Iowa were 9x more likely to be arrested.
Still, since these changes, arrests dropped from 538 to 98, resulting in hundreds of young students avoiding the school-to-prison pipeline.
The school hasn’t yet used restorative justice to address more serious violence - but who’s to say it can’t be developed and formalized to tackle that, too?
Despite their deadly history and poor outcomes, this country continues to invest in police. So, like Roosevelt, why can’t we take a chance and invest in the community?