Vote could return cops to campuses
New board members could reverse panel’s decision to pull them
oRlMONT >> After making the controversial decision in November to eliminate police officers from its campuses, the Fremont Unified School District board will reconsider the idea at its meeting tonight.
Since the board voted 3-2 on Nov. 12 to eliminate the longstanding School Resource Officer program, two new board members who were elected and strongly support the program — Vivek Prasad and Yajing Zhang — have been seated, replacing two of the three board members who voted to end it.
The program places one Fremont Police Department officer at each of the district’s high school campuses, and is overseen by a sergeant. In all, the program costs about $2.5 million annually, according to the police department, and the school district picks up about $838,000 of that amount.
It’s unclear what the outcome of the meeting may be, though the chair of a 25-member district task force charged with evaluating the program and which recommended its disbandment said it’s very possible that the program will be reinstated.
“I think the push will be to bring back police,” Antonio Birbeck-Herrera said in an interview Tuesday.
“Within the context of the board that we have, my focus isn’t on the removal or reinstatement, because to some degree I think that’s already a foregone conclusion.”
But he’s hopeful the other task force recommendations for reform adopted by the board in November will remain, and that the board will take concrete action to move those forward.
“Regardless of whether (School Resource officers) are permanently on campus or not, there needs to be a restructuring of how this district interacts with law enforcement, and I’ve seen no progress being made there,” Birbeck-Herrera said.
The task force was created by the board in the summer and recommended to the board that it end the more than two-decade old SRO program, expand mental health support across the district as well as restorative practices and restructure the way student interactions with police are handled.
The board also adopted a recommendation from the task force that an “inclusive, community-driven process” be outlined by the end of 2020 to work on completing a new safety plan for the district, but the board hasn’t done that yet, Birbeck-Herrera said.
Board member Desrie Campbell, who voted against ending the SRO program in November, asked in a Dec. 16 meeting to have the issue brought back to the board in January, to both reconsider the vote and to hear an update on what, if any progress has been made on planning for reforms.
“I want to know and understand, when we eliminate the program how are we going to replace the services they were actually doing, how are we going to pay for the recommendations being made here,” she said in an interview Tuesday.
“What are we doing?” she asked, regarding the November vote. “We’re just going to accept a recommendation but we don’t even have an implementation strategy?”
Birbeck-Herrera, however, said Campbell, who was a nonvoting member of the task force, and up until recently was president of the board of trustees with influence over its agenda, could have urged district staff to bring more information forward on the possible changes if it was needed.
“You can choose to not find more information on a subject. But that’s a choice. That is a choice unfortunately the board made in not spurring this pro
cess along, but then you have to own that,” he said.
The re-examining of the police relationship with the school district was touched off by the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked national and local protests, as well as calls to defund police departments and remove officers from school campuses.
In November, board members Michele Berke, Ann Crosbie, and Dianne Jones voted in favor of removing police from campuses, citing data in a report from the task force showing Black and Latinx students were arrested at disproportionately high rates in recent years of the program.
They also expressed concern about a lack of comprehensive data from both the police department and the school district about how police interact with students on campus.
Both Campbell and board member Larry Sweeney voted against ending the program.
Many parents pushed back against ending the program, claiming they felt police on campus increased the safety of their kids, and thousands showed support in online surveys.
A recent online petition created to push the board to “revive” the SRO program has garnered over 2,000 signatures.
The Fremont board also recently received a recommendation from the Alameda County Office of Education that it should figure out how to cut about $17 million from its budget by Feb 21, which will also be discussed at the meeting on Jan. 20.