Portland superintendent says he’s ‘discontinuing’ presence of armed police officers in schools

Guerrero leadership summit

Portland Public Schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero said on Thursday the district is "discontinuing the regular presence of school resource officers."Photo courtesy of Portland Public Schools via Beth Conyers

Portland Public Schools will no longer have city police officers patrol the halls of its nine high schools, nor will the other two school districts inside Portland city limits.

Portland Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero on Thursday announced that the state’s largest school district is “discontinuing the regular presence of school resource officers.” He said the district, which didn’t pay for the police officers, intends to increase spending on social workers, counselors and culturally specific supports for students.

Guerrero’s decision is an about-face from spring 2019, when he and his counterparts in two adjoining districts — David Douglas and Parkrose — told city officials they wanted the officers to remain stationed in their schools, they just didn’t want to pay for them.

The announcement came one day after Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty reiterated a call she made three weeks ago to defund the program, a $1.6 million chunk of the police bureau budget.

Hardesty, the only black member of the Portland City Council, also said she’d like to defund the city’s Violence Reduction Team and transit police. The school resource officer program provides for 11 armed police officers to patrol the halls of the city’s high schools, nine of them in Portland Public Schools.

One of those officers patrols David Douglas High. That district’s school board chair, Andrea Valderrama, announced she plans to introduce a resolution to not only nix the school resource officer program but also bar Portland police from providing security during school sporting events and other occasions.

“I urge the City of Portland to consider reinvesting these resources allocated to SROs for retention efforts for staff of color in the David Douglas School District and other districts,” she said during a press conference at City Hall.

Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner, the union for rank and file officers, said Thursday that patrol officers will still respond to calls on district campuses. The Police Bureau’s 13 school resource officers will return to the patrol division.

Later in the day, Mayor Ted Wheeler said he also had decided to pull officers out of the city’s schools. The city also will transfer the $1 million the Police Bureau used to support the school resource program to an undetermined "community-driven'' program.

The developments in Portland come on the heels of nationwide protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd, the Minneapolis man who died when officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nine minutes.

Chauvin has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The three officers who witnessed the event were arrested and charged with aiding and abetting murder.

Floyd’s death led Minneapolis Public Schools cut its ties with city police earlier this week.

In Portland, students, particularly those of color, have long criticized the contract between the school district and the Portland Police Bureau. In December of 2018, demonstrators flooded a school board meeting demanding the district cut ties with the school resource officer program.

The school board at the time was considering a contract to pay the city police bureau $1.2 million to keep the program running at the behest of police agency leaders. The board approved the contract after some members said they felt pressed to do so — citing an ultimatum, as some said they understood it, that they must fund the program by Dec. 31 lest they lose school resource officers.

The board reversed its decision weeks later amid backlash from students and parents who said they weren’t properly consulted in the lead up to the decision.

Then in May, Wheeler agreed to set aside $1.6 million in city money to fund the program in the three participating districts after meeting with Guerrero and the David Douglas and Parkrose superintendents and school board chairs.

Hardesty spoke against the allocation during budget discussions at the time, echoing student and community criticisms that conversations over the program’s fate were largely held out of the public eye.

She was the only city councilor to vote against the city budget.

Her criticisms echo those Portland school board members included in Guerrero’s 2019 performance evaluation.

As The Oregonian/OregonLive reported last year, board members expressed a desire for a post-mortem on what they saw as a public relations fiasco: discussions between Portland Public Schools and the city police bureau over the school resource officer program lacked consultation with students and teachers.

But proponents of the program say school resource officers often get a bad rap because of cops who make national headlines for the wrong reasons.

Earlier this year, Portland Police Deputy Chief Chris Davis told city leaders such officers are typically dismissed or charged with misconduct. He said school-based police help keep teens out of the criminal justice system by addressing minor issues in school buildings rather than letting students develop a rap sheet.

“We have no interest in a school-to-prison pipeline,” Davis said, stressing that the youth services division is the bureau’s most diverse in terms of age, race, gender, language fluency and sexual orientation.

Some education leaders have defended the role of police in schools, saying they help young people build trusting relationships with an officer who chooses to work with youth and sees them day in and day out. With serious threats to school safety in schools around the country, having an officer on campus is a plus, they argued.

But the most recent incident of a school shooter in the Portland area was diffused by an unarmed coach who brandished not a gun but a hug to save the life of one or more students after a distraught Parkrose High student brought a loaded shotgun inside the school.

The police union president said he’s not surprised by the mayor’s move to move all the school resource officers back to patrol. It’s been the subject of debate in recent years, and the Police Bureau budget “was taking a hit for it,’’ as the Portland school district had stopped paying for the officers.

“We figured it was probably going to be the first on the chopping block,’’ Turner said.

“Kind of like the mounted patrol,’’ which had been the subject of debate for many years before it was discontinued, he added.

--Eder Campuzano | 503-221-4344 | @edercampuzano

Eder is The Oregonian’s education reporter. Do you have a tip about Portland Public Schools? Email ecampuzano@oregonian.com.

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