Reclaiming the Hallways: A Practical Guide to Removing Police from Schools and Investing in Student Futures

A school hallway should be a place of transition—between classes, between ideas, between the person a young person is and the one they are becoming. For millions of Black and Brown students across the United States, however, those hallways are patrolled by armed officers, surveilled by cameras, and governed by zero-tolerance policies that treat adolescence itself as a threat to be contained. The school-to-prison pipeline is not a metaphor. It is a physical infrastructure, and it runs directly through the front doors of American public schools.

Disrupting that infrastructure requires more than good intentions. It requires organized political pressure, alternative investment frameworks, and the courage to insist that children deserve care rather than criminalization. This guide is designed to help organizers, parents, and school board advocates do exactly that.

Understanding the Pipeline's Architecture

The school-to-prison pipeline did not emerge from a single policy decision. It was built incrementally, through the convergence of several forces: the expansion of zero-tolerance disciplinary codes in the 1990s, the post-Columbine proliferation of school resource officer (SRO) programs, and the broader logic of the carceral state that treats punishment as the appropriate response to social problems.

School resource officers are sworn law enforcement personnel, typically employed by local police or sheriff's departments, stationed permanently or regularly within school buildings. Proponents argue they deter violence and build trust between youth and police. The evidence tells a more complicated and troubling story.

Research from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Vera Institute of Justice, and dozens of peer-reviewed academic studies consistently finds that SRO presence does not meaningfully reduce school violence. What it does do is dramatically increase the rate at which students are arrested, referred to the juvenile justice system, and subjected to use-of-force incidents for behaviors that would previously have been handled by teachers, counselors, or administrators. A fight in the cafeteria that once resulted in a call to a parent can now result in handcuffs and a criminal record.

The racial disparities in these outcomes are not subtle. Black students are suspended at more than three times the rate of their white peers. They are disproportionately subject to school-based arrests and referrals to law enforcement. For Black girls, who face compounding stereotypes that render their behavior as threatening or disruptive, the disparities are even more acute. Disability status further compounds this exposure: students with disabilities, particularly those with emotional and behavioral diagnoses, are dramatically overrepresented in school discipline statistics.

This is the pipeline's mechanism. Not a dramatic single event, but the accumulation of small punitive decisions—a suspension here, an arrest there—that progressively disconnect young people from educational opportunity and draw them deeper into contact with the criminal legal system.

What the Evidence Actually Shows About School Safety

If armed officers do not make schools safer, what does? The research here is substantially clearer than the political discourse would suggest.

School counselors, social workers, and psychologists consistently demonstrate measurable positive effects on student outcomes—academic, social-emotional, and behavioral. The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of one counselor per 250 students. The national average is closer to one per 450. In under-resourced districts, the ratio stretches far beyond that. Meanwhile, many of those same districts maintain full-time SRO contracts.

Restorative practices—approaches that address conflict and harm through dialogue, accountability, and repair rather than punishment and exclusion—have demonstrated substantial reductions in suspension rates, improvements in school climate, and better long-term outcomes for students involved in disciplinary processes. Districts in Denver, Oakland, and Baltimore have documented significant results from restorative program investments.

Trauma-informed care, which trains educators and staff to understand and respond to the ways that poverty, housing instability, family separation, and community violence affect student behavior and learning, similarly reduces punitive disciplinary responses by reframing disruptive behavior as a communication of need rather than an act of defiance.

These are not utopian proposals. They are evidence-based interventions with documented track records. The obstacle to their broader adoption is rarely empirical. It is political and budgetary.

Districts That Have Shown It Can Be Done

The argument that schools cannot function safely without police is contradicted by the growing number of districts that have removed SROs and documented the results.

In Minneapolis, following the uprising after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the school board voted to terminate its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department—the oldest such contract in the country. The district subsequently invested a portion of those redirected funds in additional counselors and restorative practice coordinators. The transition was not without challenges, but it demonstrated that the political will to act could be organized and sustained.

In Portland, Oregon, the school board ended its SRO program in 2020 following sustained pressure from student activists and community organizations. Portland Public Schools redirected resources toward mental health support and explicitly committed to not replacing police with alternative security personnel.

Denver Public Schools, which pioneered restorative justice programming at scale over a decade ago, saw suspension rates fall significantly as restorative practices expanded—demonstrating that investment in healing-centered approaches produces measurable improvements in school climate without reliance on law enforcement.

These examples share a common thread: organized community pressure, clear demands, and a willingness by school boards to break with the institutional inertia of the carceral status quo.

A Tactical Roadmap for School Board Advocates

For organizers ready to launch or accelerate a campaign to remove police from local schools, the following sequence provides a practical framework.

Build your base before you enter the boardroom. School board campaigns succeed when they are grounded in organized constituencies—parent groups, student organizations, teacher unions, faith communities, and civil rights organizations. Identify allies early and build a coalition that reflects the communities most harmed by SRO programs.

Obtain and analyze your district's data. File public records requests for school discipline data disaggregated by race, gender, disability status, and type of infraction. Map SRO costs against counselor-to-student ratios. This data tells the story of the pipeline in your specific community and provides the evidentiary foundation for your demands.

Develop a concrete reinvestment proposal. Campaigns that simply demand removal of SROs are more vulnerable to the 'what replaces them?' counterattack. Arrive with a detailed alternative budget—specifying how redirected funds would be allocated to counselors, restorative practice coordinators, mental health clinicians, or other evidence-based supports. Make the alternative visible and specific.

Engage directly with school board members. Identify sympathetic board members and cultivate relationships. Understand the political landscape, including which members face reelection and who their donors are. Board votes are won through sustained relationship-building, not single public comment sessions.

Prepare for backlash and sustain the campaign. Opposition from police unions, some parent groups, and conservative political actors is predictable. Prepare messaging that centers student safety and wellbeing, lifts up the voices of directly impacted students and families, and responds to fear-based arguments with evidence and stories rather than abstract ideology.

Connect to the national ecosystem. Organizations including the Advancement Project, the Alliance for Educational Justice, and the Dignity in Schools Campaign provide organizing support, model policy language, and connection to peer campaigns across the country.

The Students Are Already Asking

Across the country, young people—many of them not yet old enough to vote—are leading the demand to reclaim their schools from the logic of policing. Student walkouts, school board testimony, social media campaigns, and direct organizing have already shifted the political terrain in dozens of cities. They understand, from lived experience, what the research confirms: they learn better, feel safer, and thrive more fully in environments built on care rather than surveillance.

The adults in the room—parents, organizers, school board members, and elected officials—have a responsibility to match that clarity with action. The hallways belong to the students. It is long past time to give them back.