Thread by @Theresa_Chapple

Today is my first day of vacation since Dec 2019.
How am I spending it? Well, just trying to make schools safer for all.

Thread about #SROs in schools.

My concern about school safety has always been about way more than infectious disease spread.
School shootings, school violence, school to prison pipeline, school stress & anxiety, bullying, racially based macro and microaggressions, I've been trying to bring attention to this

Since my oldest daughter got arrested at school.
She was 15. I had been her parent for 3 months. We adopted her, and moved her to a new city. Her life literally changed overnight. But she didn't. Her trauma was still hers. The liberal affluent community we moved her to

wouldn't change that.
So one day, she used her basic survival skills to deal with a problem she had with a classmate (pushing/shoving/ name calling), subsequently both were arrested by a school resource officer.
Now, my former foster child, recently adopted child, had a criminal

record on top of everything else. I was 12 years her senior, and trying to negotiate the criminal justice system, while working on my doctorate degree.
I was prepared and trained to be her trauma informed parent. I was not prepared for her school that was aware of her situation

to throw us into the criminal justice system. My child was from my hometown. School shoving matches are par for the course until kids were taught better ways to manage conflict. School counselors would have been called to help the kids work out there problems and show them how to

respond to similar situations in the future. Parents would have been called, and we would be expected to reiterate the lessons at home. But an arrest? No one had any physical evidence of a fight, no clothes or property damaged. They both stopped when an adult intervened.

This was odd to me. But the presence of both a police officer on campus plus zero tolerance (when kids surely deserve tolerance), led to my child being arrested, having a criminal record, having to report that record when looking for a job, not getting a job in high school,

And for her 18th birthday, all she asked for was help getting her record expunged.
After years of support, love, family, and therapy, the biggest obstacle to my child being a productive member of society ended up being her school's approach to discipline, not the 12 yrs she was

in group homes.
The school district she went to got rid of SROs 11 years after that incident.
After the most recent school shooting, the community is discussing bringing SROs back. I will continue to tell my child's story and share data about the school to prison pipeline, and

the 20+ year experience this nation has had with SROs in schools and their inability to stop school shootings, with hopes of policy based solutions that actually make schools safer for all.