Off-duty police can provide security

Activists decry decision as board, district staff assert safety needs at big events

SAN JOSE » A few weeks after a milestone vote by San Jose Unified School District board members to end the routine presence of police officers at campuses in the South Bay’s largest school district, the same board unanimously voted to allow those same officers to moonlight as security for large after-school events.

The decision was met with immediate outcry from advocates who lobbied the board to eliminate school resource officers from the district amid a wave of activism that coalesced last summer in the wake of George Floyd protests and broad reform calls.

“This is a way where they can still hold hands with police,” said Crystal Calhoun, a lead organizer for the San Jose Unified Equity Coalition and grandmother of

four district students. “(Police) need to handle criminals. They don’t need to handle children.”

But district administrators and the five-member board signaled that there is a remaining need for security at large schoolrelated public gatherings, football games being chief among them. That need, they say, makes it necessary to maintain an agreement that would allow San Jose police officers to work at school events under secondary employment — or moonlighting — conditions.

After the June 24 vote, a 3-2 decision that severed a longstanding agreement that provided campus with the school-based officers, the district was left “in a vacuum” about the big cam

pus events that are scheduled for the coming school year, school board President Brian Wheatley said.

“The worry was what do we do about night events,” said Wheatley, a former teacher and the brother-inlaw of a former SJPD assistant chief. “At a football game, it’s not just kids and parents, it’s the public. And keeping the public safe is important for everybody.”

The unanimous vote Thursday approved a memorandum of understanding with the city of San Jose that served two main objectives: Allowing police officers to moonlight at events outside school hours and preserving a campus code of conduct for police officers when they are called to respond to 911 calls to district schools.

A similar memorandum was renewed in December and will be in effect through Dec. 31. It is distinct from a previously proposed agreement that included provisions for school resource officers. That proposal was rejected by the board in June, effectively ending the decadeslong school resource officer program, which most recently cost about $1.4 million to maintain annually.

The officer-conduct provisions in the new memorandum extend an agreement reached in 2017. That deal established that police officers

would no longer enforce discipline and school conduct rules, which they agreed are better suited for school administrators.

Part of the conflict appears to stem from how those provisions on campus conduct for police and secondary employment jobs were “handcuffed”: Voting for one meant voting for the other, even if there were split feelings on the issues.

Wheatley stressed that the landmark change of removing the sustained and durable presence of police officers on campuses during school hours will remain. The Thursday vote was consistent with that idea, he said.

Calhoun and other critics contend that having police on campus for after-hours events is a distinction without a difference, given that she and the coalition fought to diminish not only the tangible police presence at schools, but the symbolic entanglement of schools and law enforcement.

The coalition and their allies argue that private security can stand in for police, which they say is the practice at many similar night events for private and charter schools.

But the district, and board members like Wheatley, say that private security firms typically lack the training and familiarity of being around students that officials desire. The schoolresource officers, Wheatley said, already have skills and know-how on working in the school environment, which would be very useful in the moonlighting jobs.

Wheatley said he’s open to the idea of a broader changeover, and supports the stance that officers’ presence at schools can be triggering to students whose families and communities have had contentious and strained relationships with police. But he also said something has to be in place in the short-term.

“From my perspective, it’s wonderful in theory to me. But to really do that, it’s a three-to-five-year project,” Wheatley said. “We have football games in two weeks.”

Calhoun, who argued passionately at Thursday night’s board meeting, said the vote needlessly injects life into a conflict that she believes was decided in June. She also lamented how it diminishes momentum for the kinds of programs and initiatives she and other advocates wanted to come out of that landmark shift, led by renewed emphasis on ethnic studies and increasing counseling and other non-criminal ways of responding to turbulent student behavior.

“We aren’t talking about the positive stuff we wanted to do with children,” she said. “All we talk about is police.”