We’ve won removal of a School Resource Officer at Hyde Park!
Read about this in the Hyde Park Herald and Block Club Chicago.
Joint statement from STOP youth and Not Me We on removal of one police officer from Hyde Park Academy
On July 1, Hyde Park Academy’s Local School Council voted to remove one of the two police officers from the school, and to replace that officer with a culture-and-climate dean who will focus on restorative justice. We are one of very few majority Black high schools to have voted to remove police and invest in alternatives. This step is a significant victory for our youth-led campaign, which has been pushing to remove all police from the school and to re-invest in restorative-justice alternatives.
STOP youth and Not Me We partnered with the Chicago Teachers Union and the #CopsOutCPS coalition to build a campaign that organized youth, teachers, parents, and community to demand removal of police and re-investment in alternatives at Hyde Park Academy. We learned a lot from this experience: we built relationships with students, teachers, parents, and community; we got a better understanding of why some teachers, staff, and parents support the police in the school; and through this work, our youth developed their leadership.
But we still have more work to do. We are not sitting down and we are not taking a break. We will not stop until all police are removed from our schools. We will work to build alternatives to policing in our school. We will educate and we will have the difficult conversations with our school community to show them that alternatives to police work, and will result in a safer school with greater investment in our youth. Finally, we will continue organizing with our youth to build their power and voice in the school and city.
Last year, our school—and nearly all majority-Black schools—voted unanimously to keep police in schools. They said it was impossible for a majority-Black school on the South Side to remove police… Well, Black students made the impossible possible. Now let’s get back to work and finish the job.
