Student discipline used to be handled by guidance counselors and principals. Today, police are increasingly called upon to respond to children’s behavioral issues, giving rise to the school-to-prison pipeline. Today, over 1.5 million students attend schools with police but no counselors. The consequences can be dire: students are five times more likely to be arrested and charged when they attend schools where there are police, also known as school resource officers, or SROs.

Professor Mark Warren and Jonathan Stith argue that during pandemic-schooling, schools are responding to a student mental health crisis with harsh discipline that has fallen hardest on students of color. This “white lash” has resulted in what they call the “pandemic-to-prison pipeline.”

“The pandemic has really caused a lot of trauma and a lot of stress, economic hardship, family loss for young people and disruption of schooling,” says Mark Warren, Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline. “Instead of getting support, and investment of support, what we've been starting to see is the intensification of discipline and policing practices in schools.”

Warren argues that there is no research-based evidence that the presence of police improves safety in schools.

There is now a national campaign to limit the police presence in schools. Since June 2020, more than 138 school districts announced they would remove police from schools. In Vermont, several school boards, including Burlington, have voted to end or reduce their police contracts. A report last year by a task force of the Burlington School District concluded: “The majority of SRO activity is not associated with law enforcement but with mentoring students and connecting them with needed resources…These additional roles fell to the SROs due to social workers being overwhelmed with cases.”

There is “a direct link between that the Black Lives Matter movement and police-free schools,” says Jonathan Stith, National Director of the Alliance for Educational Justice and co-director of the National Campaign for Police-Free Schools. The effort to increase school policing, as well as fights over the teaching of critical race theory in schools is “what we've been calling this ‘white lash’ post the Trump presidency.”