Los Altos votes to end school SRO program

Resource officers program long has been criticized for causing undue stress on Black and brown students

Months after downtown Los Altos exploded in protest over the police killing of George Floyd, City Council members voted this week to pull school resource officers from the Los Altos High School campus in response to the clamor from school officials, faculty and students.

Council members accepted the recommendations of a task force put together at the beginning of the summer to reevaluate the city’s school resource officer program and citizen complaint process.

The move comes as other cities and school districts across the Bay Area reevaluate the role of police and examine their impact on young people in school environments.

Los Altos High School follows in the footsteps of Oakland, San Francisco, San Rafael and San Mateo schools, which also have taken steps to increase mental health support for students of color and introduced new restorative justice programs and practices.

Mayor Jan Pepper said Tuesday she was convinced Los Altos had to join the other communities.

“I don’t think it should be wishy-washy; we are not going to do (the program) anymore,” she said. “To me, the testimony we heard is very compelling, and we need to take that step.”

The nine-member task force — which over several months heard testimony from concerned residents, two police captains and other members of the community — voted 7-2 to recommend elimination of the program based on its ineffectiveness, said task force member Renee Rashid.

Ostensibly, the program is meant to keep an armed police officer at schools in the event of a shooting or criminal activity. One Los Altos police officer is shared among 16 schools in the city, and the move by the council would only eliminate the position at Los Altos High. There’s no deadline for when the officer must be removed, though it is largely irrelevant now as students remain at home over fears of the spreading coronavirus.

Rashid said that although the department’s stated goals for the program are clear, there’s no evidence it is meeting them.

Based on the task force’s findings, the district relies on regular uniformed patrol officers more than its designated resource officers, Rashid said. Of the 475 calls police got from local schools from 2015 to 2020, she said, the school resource officers responded 13% of the time and regular officers the rest of the time.

Rashid also said the chances

of having a resource officer “at the right place and right time is very small” and the task force found that their presence at Los Altos High has “no positive impact … on school safety.” Sometimes, she added, “They have detrimental effects on students feeling safe.”

Another program goal is to divert juveniles from the criminal justice system, but Rashid said the Police Department doesn’t have any data to indicate that’s happening. The resource officers also have taught drug abuse and prevention courses in the past, but those have been discontinued by the district.

“Rather than making students feel safe, they do the opposite,” Rashid said. “They criminalize student behavior and increa se fear, especially among Black students. It can cause lower test scores and lead to racial inequalities. Adults already on campus — teachers, counselors, coaches, tutors and mentors — are the best people suited for building positive relationships with students. We don’t need an SRO to do this.”

But whether “it was right or wrong,” Mountain View Los Altos Union High School District Board President Sanjay Dave did not agree with the process and said the council took the decision out of the board’s hands.

Dave said he’s not happy with the strange situation the council’s decision has created within his school distr ict. T he distr ict ’ s other high school, Mountain View High, still has a resource officer.

“The overall process in which this was done was not collaborative,” Dave said. “The council did not take the school board into consideration, they did not ask us to be involved outside one meeting and they did not look at the overall issues we’re looking to deal with.”

Dave said the district and the council could have d iscussed a lt er nat ive s to modify the program. Like other school districts across the Bay Area, the Mountain View-Los Altos district board is faced with growing demands from students, staffers and community members to implement reforms that would help bridge racial divides.

Activists like Los Altos High School graduate Kiyoshi Taylor have organized around more than just getting police off high school campuses. He and others also have demanded that the district implement mandatory ethnic studies courses for all incoming high school freshmen and increase the number of counselors and mental health professionals with a special emphasis for hiring professionals who are people of color.

“I really believe that Los Altos could be the blueprint for schools across California on these issues,” Taylor said. “I’m ecstatic, but at the same time unfortunately the fight is not quite over because there’s no deadline to do it by. It’s a victory and a step forward, but the job still needs to be finished. The town has spoken.”