The Chicago Principals & Administrators Association is unhappy with the Chicago Board of Education wanting to remove police from the schools.
The board brought up the idea on the same day a teenager killed one and injured five at an Iowa school.
Principals are mad. From CBS Chicago:
We sat down with Troy LaRaviere, president of The Chicago Principals & Administrators Association and a onetime mayoral candidate.”Principals were told there was going to be a meeting on December 15 to get their input,” LaRaviere said.LaRaviere represents those principals, and said the meeting with the Chicago Board of Education he was talking about did not involve any input.”They were told that the board had made a unilateral decision, without the input of the people who actually run the schools,” LaRaviere said.
Schools always had the freedom to decide on officers on their campuses. The question is in the Whole School Safety Plans.
16 out of the 40 public schools chose to keep two officers. 23 schools chose one officer.
Only one school chose not to have any officers.
The city gives $3.7 million to the schools that choose not to have two officers to install security.
LaRaviere said schools know the two officers are more valuable than the funding:
LaRaviere gave an example of why 16 schools chose both officers over any funding, from a principal on the Southwest Side who protected a student from another with a weapon.”She stood between him and his access to that school to protect that child, and he pulled out a gun, and put it in her face, and said, ‘Get out of my way,'” LaRaviere said, “and she said, ‘I’m not moving.'”He added that school shootings – like the one that just happened Thursday in Iowa – are a concern that is never far from school administrators’ minds.”Our principals are concerned about school shootings nationally,” LaRaviere said. “The reality they face – at least the 39 principals who voted to keep those SROs – the reality they face is more local, and that’s not what we see on the TV. It the violence we see and hear about every single day.”Furthermore, LaRaviere said, a school resource officer can get to known and build a relationship with students. But if there is no school resource officer, he said, police will still need to come to schools from time to time.”If you don’t have an SRO, what are you supposed to do? You don’t have the SRO with the relationships. You have to call 911. And then you have to get the luck of the draw,” LaRaviere said. “Cops with no relationships with the children show up, and you’re more likely to get the kind of interaction between cops and children. The same kind of interaction you’re trying to prevent, you just created a situation where you’re more likely it get it.”
But we all know far-left progressives control Chicago. Far-left progressives hate the police.
The principals want the board to listen to them before the members make any final decisions.
LaRaviere said: “We’d be happy to meet with the board so they can get a better understanding. We know they have good intentions, but they don’t have the best information right now – at least they don’t have all of the information and we would love an opportunity to help them get it.”
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