STATEMENT FOR SAINT PAUL SCHOOL BOARD TO END CONTRACT WITH POLICE DEPARTMENT

Dear Saint Paul School Board Members and Superintendent Joe Gothard,

The Coalition of Asian American Leaders (CAAL), led by our youth organizing group BOBA, stands firmly with the community demands to remove school resource officers (SROs) from Saint Paul Public Schools. We urge you to listen to students, alumni, and community members who have trusted their education to Saint Paul. We urge you to vote NO to renewing the contract with the Saint Paul Police Department.

CAAL envisions a state where all Minnesotans, regardless of background, are actively engaged and can achieve prosperity. In pursuit of this vision, we  support calls to divest from the Saint Paul Police Department and all other systems that  disproportionately hurt Black, Brown, Indigenous and immigrant children. 

Every child deserves to learn and thrive in a safe environment; however, policing in schools makes this impossible. Police presence creates unsafe environments for students, many who have witnessed their community members being targeted and murdered by the police. The systems that are responsible for the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castille, and many more are the very same systems that are being put into school districts to target, punish, and surveil Black and Brown students. Furthermore, many students have spoken up about the racism and violence they have experienced from SROs. This has always been an urgent issue. We urge the district to center the voices of Black and Brown students and listen to their demands.

There are many other solutions to make our schools safe for students, yet we have seen very little investment in these areas. In 2019-2020, the district spent $775,000 on SROs. At the same time, SPPS does not provide adequate mental health resources or racial trauma-informed resources for students. In 2018, CAAL worked with Asian students and parents who identified that the district should hire and retain staff who are culturally responsive and reflect the students, invest in heritage language development, embed ethnic studies into core curriculum for all students, incorporate culturally sensitive social and emotional support and learning, and invest in college and career readiness. Though there was some progress on opening Hmong language programs to more students in the district, many of these asks were met with silence as SPPS indicated it did not have adequate resources to move things forward. These student and family-centered demands seem to only be pushed aside. Today, we stand firmly behind BIPOC students who are asking for you to divest from the police so that you can invest in these and other resources to better address the needs and support of BIPOC students.

SPPS is composed of 78% Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color. Asian students specifically make up your largest student of color population at 32.9% and over 70% are classified as English Language Learners (ELL).. While Black students are over policed, Asian students have continued to be ignored. In one case, a mother informed us that her middle schooler went through the whole school year with little interactions with any of the adults in the school. He became depressed and his grades dropped. When she asked him if there were any adults in the school he could turn to for help, he said there were none. The over-policing and neglect only demonstrates that there is a lot that needs to be done to better understand and support the academic and social emotional needs of students in a district where diversity is not the exception, but the norm. We know that BIPOC, ELL and special needs students’ outcomes in SPPS still lag far behind their white peers. Divesting from the police will enable you to truly prioritize the success of Saint Paul’s BIPOC students. Instead of using almost $800,000 to police students, the School Board can do much more to support students and their families so that they are not left behind, criminalized, and neglected.

We are at a critical moment in time, when there has been deeper awakenings to the generational cost for Black communities because of systemic oppression; we urge you to stand on the right side of history. The divestment away from the police department is an important first step towards investing in students and community-led solutions. We ask that  you vote to remove SROs from schools, and use those resources in the solutions that BIPOC communities have brought forward, to ensure that all Saint Paul students can succeed and thrive.

Sincerely,

Bo Thao-Urabe
Executive & Network Director, CAAL

Kay Moua
Leadership Programs Manager, BOBA