Rashad Talley, the principal at Wendell Phillips Academy High School, believes safety and discipline practices that are healthy are more about the staff’s relationship with students and not whether the South Side high school has police in the building every day. 

“It’s hard for me to pinpoint whether a [school resource officer] makes that much of a difference, because I could be an SRO and have a great relationship with a kid,” he said. “I don’t think it matters, the title of the person, or the position of the person. It matters, that relationship.”

As Chicago Public Schools prepares to eliminate resource officer positions districtwide, a new study found removing police from city schools has not led to increased disciplinary issues, nor did it make students and staff feel less safe. 

The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research on Wednesday published a new report examining the impacts of removing resource officers from Chicago public high schools...

Removing uniformed police officers from Chicago Public Schools had little effect on students’ and teachers’ perceptions of safety, according to a new report, published Wednesday. 

The study — conducted by a team of researchers at U. of C.’s Consortium on School Research, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital Center for Childhood Resilience — examines the outcome of CPS’ plan to phase out uniformed police officers in schools...

Chicago high schools that removed police in the last few years saw a slight dip in the most serious types of student disciplinary violations, according to a new study released Wednesday. 

The study, from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, comes as Chicago Public Schools plans to launch a new safety policy for the upcoming school year that will unilaterally remove school resource officers, or SROs, from all campuses...

How does your child’s school approach school discipline and school climate? The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research recently released a toolkit called Family Playbook: School Suspensions, Discipline & Restorative Justice. The playbook summarizes research and data on school discipline and includes actions you can take to learn more about how your child’s school approaches discipline and climate in school. 

With school districts across the country still grappling with learning loss due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago Public Schools announced Thursday that students in grades 3-8 appear to have performed better on English language proficiency tests, on average, than they did in 2018-19, the last full school year before the pandemic disrupted in-person learning. 

Overview

National context: Schools across the United States have long grappled with the role and impact of school-based police officers, often referred to as school resource officers (SROs). Proponents for school-based policing believe that SROs contribute to school safety by preventing or addressing crime and violence in schools. Opponents of SROs in schools argue that the presence of SROs criminalizes students and increases the likelihood of school-based arrest, particularly for students of color. Policies around SROs vary in districts across the country. 

Chicago Public Schools students who live in direct proximity to a homicide often suffer in the classroom afterwards, but a new report from the University of Chicago examined the ways schools can mitigate the impact that violence has on kids. 

The findings of that report, published this week by UChicago’s Consortium on School Research, show the ways some schools are already working to limit the negative effects that living near violence can have on students...

Some Chicago schools excel at curbing the academic and social-emotional fallout experienced by students who live near where homicides happen, a new University of Chicago study found.