how south side high schools voted to keep or remove cops

How South Side High Schools Voted to Keep or Remove Cops SRO decisions were left to individual Local School Councils

BY JACQUELINE SERRATO

In contrast with school districts in other cities, Chicago’s Board of Education voted in June 4-3 against terminating Chicago Public Schools’ $33 million contract with the Chicago Police Department. Offi cials said that cops-in-schools decisions were better left to seventy-two individual Local School Councils (LSCs) and that they had until August 15 to do so.

Seventeen schools in the city did not have enough votes (aka quorum) and nine schools in the city had no LSCs or had “nonfunctioning” LSCs, which the CPS website defi ned as those unable to convene members besides the principal. Charter schools don’t participate in the School Resource Offi cer (SRO) program.

With Mayor Lori Lightfoot reluctantly allowing CPS to do full-time remote learning for the fall semester under pressure from parents and teachers due to consistent COVID-19 trends, the school board recently had to slash its CPD budget in half. Th e board expects to vote on renewing its contract August 26. Here’s how South Side high schools voted. ¬

Visit cps.edu/votesro for fi nal tally

Jacqueline Serrato is the editor-in-chief of the South Side Weekly. She last wrote about the intersection of Black Lives Matter and decolonization.

ILLUSTRATION BY ALEJANDRA FERNANDEZ