With communities across the United States coming together to demand police and criminal justice reform, it is time for the Beaverton School District to live up to its promise to "Embrace Equity" by ending the demonstrably harmful and discriminatory practice of staffing our schools with School Resource Officers (SROs), also known as cops.

By now, the "school-to-prison pipeline" is a concept most educators should be familiar with, and SROs play an integral role in ushering our most vulnerable students into the criminal "justice" system. The reasons for this aren't mysterious. As the ACLU's white paper "Bullies In Blue" argues, "police are police, and in schools they will act as police." This means that the communities of color, who disproportionately suffer from discrimination, oppression, and violence at the hands of police, will suffer the same in their local schools: the place where they should be safest.

Make no mistake; we are at a historic crossroads, and the time to act is now. If we intend to be on the right side of history, we must follow the lead of other school districts nationwide, including PPS, by removing police from our schools.

Please sign this petition and pass it on.

If you want to learn more about SROs and their role in the school-to-prison pipeline, follow this link to the ACLU's 2017 white paper "Bullies in Blue":

https://www.aclu.org/report/bullies-blue-origins-and-consequences-school-policing