The study ‘Unarresting School Safety’ points out that students of color and those with disabilities are more likely to experience contact with school police than their peers.
University of New Mexico Law Professor and study author Maryam Ahranjani said this issue was part of the landmark Yazzie/Martinez lawsuit.
In her decision on the suit, Judge Sarah Singleton found low-income, Native American students, English language learners, and those with disabilities were denied their constitutional right of a high quality education.
Ahranjani said Singleton expressed concern over the low ratio of school psychologists to the student population and how it contributed to inequity.
"And that’s one thing we have been dealing with. We’re trying to improve," said Ahranjani.
She added that there has been some progress by providing remote services, but she urged policymakers to see the value of investing in on-campus psychologists by providing pathways to accelerate certification or expanding funding for universities.
IAhranjani also explored the lack of collaboration occurring in schools between school resource officers and school psychologists.
MARYAM AHRANJANI: I talk about a practice called prisonization of public schools. The increasing emphasis on practices that are serious restraints on students’ freedom, and those include onsite police officers, cameras on campuses, metal detectors, and then practices like restraint and seclusion, like threat assessment instruments that are used to assess a large range of student behavior in a way that was intended to assess assassination risks for the President of the United States. We're imposing those on children as young as 5,6,7 years old.
But in this piece, I really focus on on-site police officers, which is also become a more common practice. And there's an organization called the National Association of School Resource Officers, and they have best practices for who should be hired, what kind of training should exist. The problem is that many districts are not following those best practices, and there are other disproportionate points in the education process that lead to what we call the school-to-prison pipeline.
KUNM: With your research now, what does school safety look like, considering we're using the school policing model more? How does this impact mental health efforts used by psychologists?
AHRANJANI: I define school safety broadly, and the reason for that is that although there has been an increase in the last several years of school violence episodes, still it's statistically incredibly rare that an instance of mass violence, or really any kind of armed violence, will happen in public schools. If you think about the fact that 50 million children go to public school every day in America, and they attend almost 95,000 schools. In that context, over a 25-year period, there have been about 700 instances of injury or death associated with school campuses. So that's too large a number. We don't want any child or adult, anyone associated with school to be injured or but if you define school safety more broadly in a way that actually encompasses the whole child, their mental wellness, their educational attainment, their constitutional rights, if you define school safety more broadly, that's where you can see very clearly the role for school psychologists.
KUNM: In your research, you also point to the prevalence of school resource officers in all schools across the nation. But if we do utilize school psychologists more in these systems, what would that actually look like?
AHRANJANI: They actually have two mechanisms that support a more careful and perhaps expanded role. One is that their own ethical obligations – there are two particular standards in their own ethics guidelines that are relevant to school policing. One of them requires that when they see that a child is being harmed somehow by efforts to curtail their freedom or privacy that may be related to prisonization, including school resource officers, they have an obligation to try to intervene to stop that harm that's being caused to the child.
So a very concrete example of this is where, for example, this happens, across the country every year that there's a rumor that a particular student or a group of students are engaged in drug use, and then all of a sudden, those students are required to submit to strip searches to find the drugs on their persons, and there's very little safeguard in place for their privacy or for their Fourth Amendment rights. And so, that's an example of a school psychologist were to become familiar with that, they'd have an ethical obligation to to speak up on behalf of that child
Now, the second big bucket of support for the enhanced role of school psychologist is state laws. We have many state laws across the country that are already in place and that are proposed every year that deal with school safety and the role of school resource officers and just safety measures in general, and many of them provide natural entry points for school psychologists to be consulted with or involved in conducting trainings, evaluating trainings, facilitating collaboration with other folks who are involved in student safety.
There's some things that we've started doing that we know are not really evidence-based to work. So things like, you know, making sure that front offices in schools are redesigned with bulletproof windows and very severe security measures in order to get into them, when, in fact, that doesn't stop people from committing school shootings in the instances that we've had them.
This coverage is made possible by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and KUNM listeners.
