A new report from the Moran Center for Youth Advocacy calls for Evanston Township High School to end the practice of stationing police officers at the school.
The ETHS school board is reportedly scheduled to discuss the school resource officer program at a meeting Monday.
The 31-page report from the Moran Center claims black students are three times more likely than white students to be arrested at the school.
The report notes that arrests at the school declined from a high of 14 in school year 2017-2018 to eight the next year and to two in 2019-2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut-down in-person classes starting in mid-March.
The Moran Center has been lobbying the district to dump the SRO program at least since July of last year.
The report also claims that SROs contribute to placing students with disabilities on the school-to-prison pipeline.
And it disputes assertions that SROs help prevent school violence.
The study also calls for reform of discipline policies at ETHS, claiming that ETHS has the highest rate of disciplinary transfers of students to alternative programs in the state.
It also says the school is violating its own policy regarding “no trespass” letters by not limiting the the term of the letters to a maximum of one year and not providing an opportunity for a hearing before the board to contest such letters.
And it condemns the use of social probation as an option for student discipline code violations and instead urges using “restorative practices rather than punitive methods to repair harm and foster rehabilitation.”