Spokane Public Schools board passes equity guidelines

Employees of Spokane Public Schools will no longer be able to arrest students after the district’s board of directors on Wednesday night approved a broad set of priority objectives for the new school year that also include provisions to promote racial equity.

On top of the groundbreaking set of guidelines to address long-standing equity issues, the board pledged to offer intervention support for students not engaging in distance learning and strengthen the district’s social-emotional learning curriculum.

But the elimination of campus resource officers’ ability to arrest students – a move the board has discussed for several months – promises to be the most controversial.

The issue of campus security has simmered for years, but boiled over last year after a school resource officer at Ferris High School pressed his shin against a Black teenager’s neck during an arrest.

While the district has worked to reduce arrests and discipline rates that disproportionately affect students of color, an imbalance persists.

According to district data, students of color made up a majority of the 88 arrests in Spokane schools during the 2018-19 school year.

Later that year, Nikki Lockwood, who is Latinx, and Jenny Slagle, a Native American, were elected to the board. Both campaigned on the issue of equity and opposition to arming campus resource officers.

A few months later, both issues were highlighted with the Black Lives Matter protests in Spokane and the rest of the nation.

On June 10, the board had approved a resolution that was supported by hundreds of emails and dozens of public comments. It included a passage adapted from author Ijeomo Oluo: “We realize that structural racism is built into the bones of our schools, as well as every structure in society; we have to build anti-racism into the bones in order to increase student empowerment, belonging, value, and hope for the future.”

For board president Jerrall Haynes, that meant, “We are going to offer more than promises and empty statements.”

The final document – its wording unchanged since revisions in June – promises that the district will “Work with their Spokane Education Association (SEA) and Campus Resource Officer (CRO) partners to come to an agreement that will eliminate employees’ ability to arrest students.”

The district also vows to “develop and implement a new safety model by January 2021.”

No other details were provided in the document.

The Priority Objective document also covers a range of other issues. Listed under the overarching theme of “Strengthening excellence for everyone through equity,” they include the following:

• Implement researched-based social-emotional learning curriculum and emphasize wellness and anti-racism as key factors of student and staff success.

• Develop a training menu for staff focused on anti-racism and cultural responsiveness by January 2021.

• Establish an equity policy that requires all new employees to participate in anti-racism and cultural responsiveness training before working with students.

• Establish an equity policy that requires all new employees to participate in anti-racism and cultural responsiveness training before working with students.

• Improve rates of inclusion, in which students are placed in age-appropriate general education classes in their own neighborhood schools. The district’s goal is to “provide programming that results in 80% of students participating in inclusion 80% of the school week.”