Letter to Mayor to get Police Out of Schools

Send to: https://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/city_organization/mayor/contact-the-mayor and your city councillor

My name is ___________ and I am a ___________ in (ward). I am writing to you to ask that you remove the School Respurce Officers from Edmonton’s schools. SROs are discriminatory, they feed the school-to-prison pipeline, and they make students feel less safe. Programs that actually help students should be instituted instead.

SROs discriminatorily and disproportionately target Black, Indigenous, and poor students. They harass students and sometimes even resort to violence over small, petty matters. This is unfair and creates a hostile and unequal environment for marginalized children, where they cannot learn as well as their white or middle class peers.

The SROs also arrest children, sometimes over petty crimes. This leads the child to be traumatized and often for their life to be ruined. Being in jail at an early age has proven to cause many psychological and behavioural problems in people for the rest of their lives.

Children should never be arrested. Children make mistakes, including some very stupid mistakes. It’s what children do. They will not learn if they get arrested or treated punitively. They will learn if they are taught why their actions are bad and how they can do better.

Programs that help students learn and actually educate them should be funded instead of SROs.

The SRO program is also a huge drain on the school board’s budget, and that money could be better spent on other programs, such as supports for neurodivergent and disabled students, mental health therapists, or programs for students at risk.

The SRO program terrorizes marginalized students and the money can be better used to actually help children learn and grow. Please work to cut the SRO program in all schools.