Milwaukee: Youth Organizers Lead the Way on Reforming Public School Safety

We are grateful for the collaboration and support of Tarsi Dunlop from Local Progress, Cendi Tena from Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT), and Kate Terenzi from the Center for Popular Democracy. The original text on which this case study is based is part of Local Progress’s Dare to Reimagine series and can be accessed here.

Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) is the largest and most diverse public school district in Wisconsin. In the 2018-19 school year, MPS had 74,633 students, 89.9 percent (approximately 67,095) of whom were students of color.¹

At the same time, Milwaukee is also one of the most unequal municipalities in the United States. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights entered into a resolution agreement with Milwaukee Public Schools after a multi-year investigation into the question of whether the district discriminated against Black students. Federal investigators found that Black students were overrepresented in the proportion of students who were referred to law enforcement (in addition to several other data points that indicated discrimination).² The most recent local report fails to provide data on referrals to law enforcement, but federal data from the 2015–2016 school year shows another 30-point disparity between Black student enrollment and the percentage of students referred to law enforcement.³ Research shows that police interact with Black students at disproportionately high rates.

Years of increasingly harsh law enforcement and punitive school policies have resulted in growing concerns within affected communities, particularly among Black and Brown students who have been disproportionately impacted by the presence of police officers and safety assistants in and around their schools. There is no substantial evidentiary support for the proposition that suspensions or police presence in schools create safer learning environments.⁴ On the contrary, studies have shown that schools are no safer, even after years of punitive policing and disciplinary measures, than before such policies were implemented.⁵ Policing is not only ineffective, it also hurts individual students’ academic performance. One study found that experiencing an arrest for the first time in high school nearly doubles the odds of a student dropping out, and a court appearance nearly quadruples these odds.⁶ In addition to academic harms, recent research shows that over time, the mere presence of police may have a compounding psychological effect on students’ “nervous and immune systems that may result in anxiety, restlessness, lack of motivation, inability to focus, [and] social withdrawal.”⁷

These concerns have made MPS the site of powerful, multi-year community organizing, fueled by youth- and student activist-led movements. In 2016, MPS began responding to these concerns, ending the practice of permanently assigning School Resource Officers (SROs) to schools. Following the organizing and advocacy of Black and Brown young people, in 2019, the school’s board of directors reduced the number of contracts the district had established with the Milwaukee Police Department and voted down a proposed contract for upgraded X-ray metal detectors.

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police Department officers, youth organizers in Milwaukee built on their years of advocacy with a newfound level of community support, demanding that the school board fully end the practice of policing in schools. In 2020, the board unanimously voted to end all police contracts and limited surveillance equipment purchases to the extent permitted under state law.

The key provisions of the 2020 ordinance include:

• Immediate termination of all contracts and any further negotiations with the Milwaukee Police Department for the services of SROs and other personnel;
• Termination of any contracts to buy or maintain criminalizing equipment including metal detectors, facial recognition software, and social media monitoring software;
• A direction that the school administration creates a plan for how to use the funds previously allocated for police contracts. This plan should be done in cooperation with the advisory council established by the Black Lives Matter Resolution, the MPS Restorative Practices team, Milwaukee's Office of Violence Prevention, community partners such as the Running Rebels Violence Free Zone teams, and any other community-based organizations who may provide valuable input into the process; and
• A direction for the school board’s governmental relations services to lobby the Wisconsin legislature and the governor to repeal a law that forces Milwaukee schools to employ truancy officers, which the board strongly opposed.

Impacted communities played the central role in fighting to defund police in schools and in shaping an alternative vision for school safety. Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT), supported by the Black Educators Caucus and Milwaukee Inner-city Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), led the fight for changes in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) for years. LIT was founded in 2017 by young Black and Brown people directly impacted by policies that harm their communities. Through robust civic engagement and resiliency-building efforts, LIT builds homegrown leadership and empowers young Black and Brown people to drive the fight for social, racial, and economic justice.

Critically, LIT’s members are students in grades nine through twelve who have real, lived experiences. To build a strong foundation for future organizing, LIT staff helped students harness their experiences with message framing techniques and training that developed their lobbying, storytelling, and public speaking skills. They also offered education on punitive policies and detailed these policies’ impact on vulnerable student populations using specific and compelling terminology. Finally, throughout the fall of 2018, they hosted chapter and citywide meetings where LIT members engaged in power-mapping exercises, participated in political education sessions, and voted on the organization’s campaign priorities.

LIT staff and members firmly believe that success is predicated on a strong strategy first, and tactical supportive actions second. From the beginning, youth leaders at LIT took the lead as primary advocates with a clear vision for a safe and supportive learning environment as outlined in their youth agenda.⁸ The very first demand of this agenda, published in 2018, is the removal of police from schools. These youth leaders then took a multi-faceted approach in implementation, including broad community education and a political strategy.

In the lead-up to the 2019 school board election, LIT initiated a range of tactical supportive actions. As part of a new organization, LIT leaders knew some school board candidates, but did not have deep relationships with them. In response, LIT hosted town halls, conducted private interviews with candidates, and published questionnaire responses. Before this outreach, LIT had received support from one board member who knew some of the youth leaders but was in the minority on most policy issues. After this outreach, all of the five newly elected school board members had pledged to support LIT’s youth power agenda during their candidacy. LIT further strove to engage all of the school board members through regular meetings and consistent attendance at public meetings and forums. In doing so, they were able to help move the work forward and take a proactive but uncompromising approach towards building board relationships.

One of LIT’s primary organizing principles is to show up for those who show up for them, which later became advantageous for the 2020 campaign to defund police. LIT members showed up to support issues beyond those directly related to the youth power agenda, including a referendum effort. Individual board members, including those with significant community gravitas, in turn, started to respect LIT’s power and depend on the organization to organize other board colleagues around ideas.

Using those relationships and increased formal legitimacy as a resource, LIT was able to move more board members to align with their vision for school safety, even as board members assessed a range of funding priorities with limited resources. These school board members ultimately voted against metal detectors and to increase resources for mental health, setting the stage for further reform.

During the 2020 defund-the-police campaign, the young leaders’ vision was met with significant pushback. Some community members and parents were concerned that the proposed changes were simply a gut reaction, while some felt the alternatives for funding were not fully developed. Others expressed fear that schools would get out-of-control and the board would receive the blame.

In response, youth leaders effectively communicated their experiences and helped educate community members about the realities of how police in schools harm students, particularly youth of color. Youth leaders consistently showed up to testify at school board hearings, offering compelling stories about the learning support they needed and the vision they had for their learning community. These students—many of whom were members of LIT—experienced a discriminatory environment that felt more like a prison than a thriving learning environment. Students grounded the narrative and painted a vivid picture of day-to-day experiences, including going through metal detectors, being disrespected and looked down on by authority figures, and feeling the broad impacts of resource allocation that prioritized punitive infrastructure over supportive investments in services and counselors. Students also shared their proactive vision for thriving schools that invest in restorative practices, culturally relevant curricula, mental health resources, smaller classroom sizes, and more.

Though the school board’s direction and 2020 ordinance established a commitment to continued collaboration with community partners, some board members took longer than others to come around to alternative visions for school safety. But over time and with ongoing student advocacy and education, the school board became more responsive, taking gradual steps to reduce punitive infrastructure in the school district. In 2020, the vote to end SRO contracts was unanimous. One of LIT’s now-strongest supporters also pushed to terminate the contract for Truancy Abatement and Burglary Suppression (TABS) officers, although an added barrier has been that the state requires them in schools. In September 2020, the board voted to pass a resolution authored by another LIT champion to end suspensions in fifth grade and below.

The collaborative governance process in Milwaukee demonstrates the importance of showing up on a range of issues and moving forward through tension and disagreements about community-sensitive solutions given limited resources. Through persistence, education, and relationship-building, people with lived experience were at the heart of advocating for change, and were able to secure a series of significant victories and reforms to public school safety. Importantly, the process undertaken thus far in Milwaukee provides a strong framework for ongoing collaboration, power-sharing, and accountability, in which students can continue to successfully advocate for their community-informed vision of school safety.