[syndacks]

Hey so this is awesome, and I'd like to add a few points. (I used to teach HS Math in NYC Public Schools).

- End scanning[1]. Scanning is the practice of forcing students to put their possessions through x-ray machines and walk their bodies through metal detectors. Like, airport security.

- Wrap your head around that for a sec. Everyday, you trek to school, and are immediately put in a hostile environment where you must prove your innocence to be _able_ to learn. Not to mention it's a flagrant violation of the 4th amendment (search/seizure). Oh, and this happens disproportionately to poor/minority students.

- End police in schools, period. In NYC, we have "school safety agents" which are a subset of the NYPD[2]. School Safety, if taken as its own police department, is greater than the size of police departments in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and other police departments with <5,000 officers.

- Furthermore, because you now have cop-lites in the building, you also have cops in the building...because, why not? Minor infractions like fighting, pot, or even "disrespecting teachers" no longer get a call home or a trip to the principal's office, but handed over to a cop.

- Boom, the student is now in the system. This is called the school to prison pipeline[3]. It's real, very real. The pathetic feedback loop of going to school to break out of poverty only to be streamlined to jail...

  1. https://www.schools.nyc.gov/school-life/safe-schools/school-safety
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Department_School_Safety_Division
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline

[edit: formatting]

[bonchicbongenre]

This, sadly, conforms very well with my experience of lower-income/higher-minority schools. I was a volunteer teacher (for a program teaching young ones to code with Scratch, once weekly) at a number of West Philly grade 1-12 schools for a few years, and the environment in those schools was obviously to the detriment of the students. Wonderful kids, but it's no wonder that so many won't make it to a better life when they're taught nothing of value, but are taught that they're to be feared, derided, and not cared for from a young age. I kid you not, the average SAT math score from one school I taught at was in the 300s (and of course, less than 10% of those graduating took the SAT/ACT) — you can score a 300 on the SAT math without answering a single question correctly. The students were taught nothing at all. There was constant cacophony of teachers yelling all the time, I saw multiple police in the halls every day, had to be scanned myself going in. The whole thing was ridiculous, and it's only clear purpose was to imprison those wonderful children in the poverty and destitution they were born into