Harrell Quietly Pushing Police in Schools, with Possible Levy Funding Infusion

Critical education levy could be at risk by controversial proposal to put police officers back in Seattle schools.

In the midst of Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, the Seattle Public Schools (SPS) school board decided to remove the five police officers who worked in its schools. Now, five years later, after many feints and false starts, the district and the Seattle Police Department (SPD) are in talks to return an officer to Garfield High School for the 2025-2026 school year — in hopes of stemming a wave of gun violence even if empirical evidence supporting this approach is scant. 

A greater expansion of police in schools could be on the way, as voters will consider a new Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy in November. Harrell’s $1.3 billion proposal for the levy, to be collected over six years, marks a huge increase in investment. The last FEPP levy was passed by voters in November 2018 with a 69% approval rate and invested $619 million over seven years in early learning, academic and health care support for K-12 students, along with access to a two-year college degree or trade school for all SPS graduates. 

As the structure and areas of investment covered by the levy are hammered out by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the City Council, it’s possible the levy might include funding for a return of school emphasis officers (SEOs), which could prove controversial. 

How we got here

Before 2020, SPS only had five SEOs in its schools: South Shore PK-8, Aki Kurose Middle School, Denny International Middle School, Washington Middle School, and Garfield High School — all South Side or Central District locations. The program to put police into schools began in 2008, a year during which five Seattle high school students died from gun violence.

In 2009, then-Mayor Greg Nickels began the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (SYVPI), which focused on 800 kids most at risk in Central, Southeast, and Southwest Seattle with an emphasis on prevention, including mentorship, education, extended community center hours, and job programs for teens. 

At the time, participating schools were selected for the SEO program based on truancy, suspension, and discipline issues, in addition to being located within the initiative’s geographic focus area.

In 2016, Mayor Ed Murray moved the SYVPI from the Department of Education and Early Learning (DEEL) to the Human Services Department (HSD). The 2017 budget stated the HSD was “reprioritizing funds for programs that were part of SYVP.” HSD’s safety request for proposal (RFP) in 2019 appears to have completed the transition away from the SYVPI, which effectively ceased to exist.

When the school board decided to remove police from schools in 2020, the impetus was getting guns out of schools, school board director Liza Rankin told The Urbanist. She is one of only two directors still serving on the board who were part of the decision in 2020.

Rankin said the decision was not about hating police officers or not caring about safety, but rather a chance to consider what would be most successful at bringing safety to schools. While the board considered the possibility of allowing unarmed police officers to remain in schools, they were told the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) contract required all on-duty officers to be armed at all times, taking that compromise off the table.

At the time of the decision, the memorandum of understanding (MOU) between SPS and SPD hadn’t been updated since June of 2011. The outdated agreement contained several references to the SYVPI that no longer existed. 

On June 24, 2020, the school board adopted a moratorium “on the utilization of the Seattle Police Department’s School Emphasis Officers and School Resources Officers programs and providing replacements supported by community.”  The resolution stated that the district and board would “work in consultation with school communities, particularly Black and Indigenous families and students most directly impacted by policing in schools, to identify alternative, community-based, restorative mentorship for schools impacted by the programs’ cessation.”

Since 2020, there has sometimes been confusion between SPD and SPS around what is a police matter versus a school district matter. In a notable incident at Sand Point Elementary School in 2022, an intruder entered the campus, and instead of coming to the aid of teachers and students, an SPD police officer who was in a vehicle parked on the street appeared to delay by asking the school’s principal many questions. 

Rankin said there was also confusion after the Ingraham High School shooting because reunification of students with their families was a police matter, but the police didn’t have a direct line of communication with the families. 

“Ultimately, cops continuously say that the law is preventing them from keeping our schools safe when there’s nothing in existing law that keeps them from doing regular patrols outside of our schools and from responding to violent intruders,” said Oliver Miska, SPS educator and community organizer.

Miska worried SPD’s interest in getting back into schools had more to do with brand management than protecting kids.

“They’re acting absolutely in bad faith, and they are ultimately putting children at risk, limiting what kind of services they’re providing in order to change this law to get increased funding for their SEO program because they know that this is the best form of propaganda that they’ve got,” Miska continued.

A possible return of police to schools

While conversations about SEOs returning to Seattle schools have been documented as early as August of 2022, the November 2022 shooting of a student at Ingraham High School and the June 2024 shooting of a student outside Garfield High School intensified the discussion. 

Harrell’s office prepared a draft school safety plan in response to the Ingraham High School shooting that proposed reinstating an SEO pilot program at four SPS schools. However, the plan was never implemented. 

In fact, Rankin said a safety proposal involving SEOs was never brought to the school board. A series of emails from Rankin from the summer of 2024 shared with The Urbanist show Rankin’s repeated requests for updates and clarification as to any changes in SPS school safety procedures for the 2024-2025 school year.

“As I have stated on behalf of the board in multiple emails and in meetings with the Superintendent and staff, any safety plans/proposals must either comply with the policy as written, or come before the full board in a public meeting for consideration with proposed amendments to the policy, as well as presentation of evidence of adherence to guardrails – that safe and welcoming environments are maintained for all students and staff, and that disproportionate discipline will not increase,” Rankin wrote. “MOUs for both the individual officer at Garfield and for the organizational partnership should include that officers should not act in disciplinary roles, they must be answerable to school leaders, and training in minimum-use-of-force techniques should be required.”

Rankin also repeatedly shared an article discussing best safety practices for preventing gun violence in schools.

In an email sent to Rankin in August of 2024, SPS Superintendent Brent Jones wrote that none of the items involved in the safety and security improvements for the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year required board action.

 “During these first two months of school, we plan to negotiate an MOU with the police department that addresses “who does what, when,” as well as the role of police in schools,” Jones wrote. “Should an amendment to the moratorium be necessary to implement this MOU, we will bring that forward to the Board. You can expect policy recommendations related to a MOU by early November.”

However, no MOU was finalized, nor was an amendment to the moratorium brought before the board at that time. Last fall, Rankin was also told the city and district would be doing more community outreach around the idea of school safety and SEOs in schools but hasn’t seen any evidence of this.

Concerns about reintroducing police into schools

“It’s troubling to me that more of community isn’t being included in the conversation [regarding the] relationship to the police,” Rankin said. “It’s as concerning if not more concerning that safety is a high priority and there has been no clarity from district leadership regarding expectations and implementation of safety measures already identified.”

Rankin said that some security best practices that were supposed to be implemented last year, such as having all adults in schools wear identification badges and having schools maintain a single entry point during school hours, aren’t being followed in every school.

Rankin is also concerned that should SROs be reinstated, schools will only rely on a police officer to ensure school safety instead of working to build a safe school culture involving other staff members. 

“Conflict mediation, relationship building, restorative practices: police don’t have the resources to do that in any way different from staff already in the buildings. If we’re talking about increasing student safety and restorative practices and building a healthy culture, there’s a lot of other ways to address that,” Rankin said. “If the only difference is a badge and a gun, I’m hard pressed to understand how that is what our kids need right now.”

A 2024 report from the Chicago Justice Project about police in schools said the following: “One key finding of this report is how despite the empirical research showing cops in schools do not deter gun violence in schools, school shootings still serve as a catalyst for increased school policing across the country.”

A recent study found that schools that experienced shootings had a higher prevalence of police officers and a lower prevalence of nurses, psychologists, and counselors. And restorative justice training in schools has been shown to decrease misconduct and suspensions significantly.

Bringing police back into Seattle’s schools brings with it the risk of more disciplinary actions being brought against students, especially students of color, bolstering the school to prison pipeline and “increasing the criminalization of school discipline.” 

School board members reportedly only learned that the city, district, and SPD were making a new push towards having an SEO at Garfield for the 2025-2026 school year when they were asked for interviews by KIRO 7 earlier in May. 

The Seattle Times then reported last week that a new MOU between SPS and SPD is being negotiated for an SEO at Garfield. The article quotes José Curiel Morelos, the SPS executive director of safety and security, saying that “the officer will be armed and stationed primarily outside the school, because parents and students said they felt safe inside but not necessarily outside the building, which students can leave during lunch time.”

However, there has already been an increased police presence outside Garfield, and having an officer stationed outside the school would not actually require an end to the moratorium on SEOs unless the officer was also expected to sometimes work inside the school. 

SPS is scheduled to make a presentation to the school board about the new plan regarding SEOs in schools on Wednesday, June 4 at 4:15pm at the John Stanford Center. The Keep Your Promise Coalition, made up of SPS students, educators, staff, and community members, will be hosting a rally before the meeting at 3:45. 

“The call to action is to have community show up and speak to their issues with the lack of transparency and the lack of community engagement on this policy,” Miska said. “[The SEO plan] was socialized with the media before it was socialized with community.”

SPS sent a survey to Garfield parents over Memorial Day weekend in a rushed attempt to gauge community sentiment towards bringing an SEO back to the school. Meanwhile, the Keep Your Promise Coalition has initiated their own survey on the subject for students across the district. 

“The board feels student safety is an important part of access to education and understands that safety looks differently to different people,” Rankin told The Urbanist. “We want to know what the actual concerns are, what they have and haven’t addressed, and what seems to be working.”

 The FEPP levy potentially at risk

Were the board to approve a proposal to end their moratorium on SEOs, the City would pay the expense for the first year. But they are hoping to have taxpayers foot the bill through the new FEPP levy, should an SEO program continue and expand. The new levy will also seek to transfer some existing youth mental health investments currently funded by the JumpStart tax to the levy. 

The FEPP levy as it currently stands contains $46.6 million over six years “to expand school safety investments in and around schools.” 

When asked about police returning to schools during a press conference, Harrell said, “We are being very intentional on not saying police officers, school safety officers, care officers, because we’re going to work with the school district.”

Harrell went on to say, “I personally do have a strong preference to develop relationships with my police department.”

Callie Craighead, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office, told The Urbanist that a portion of the money will be used to sustain and expand the community-based partnerships for violence interruption and prevention staff in and around schools. “We won’t [have] exact amounts until the implementation plan is created,” Craighhead said.

However, the implementation plan, which would determine if funding would be provided for police in Seattle’s schools, won’t be decided until next year, after the public votes on the levy.

“Including a politically controversial bucket of funds into what should be dollars for our underfunded education system puts the levy at risk,” Miska said.

During a council meeting of the Select Committee on the FEPP Levy, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said that some community partners are wondering what could be funded by the school safety bucket. 

“I think there’s some questions related to some of the funding areas being a little bit too broad at this point, where we’re hearing some of our core school and advocates that are for young people feeling like maybe there needs to be some additional specificity outlined before sending to voters, so voters know what they’re signing up for,” Rinck said.

Councilmember Martiza Rivera pushed back, saying that levy language is usually designed to be broad to give flexibility to the subsequent implementation plan. 

Rankin agreed that this was generally true but said that the funding to support an SEO program, which would include ongoing salaries, would be a very different amount compared to funding other kinds of safety improvements. She suggested the City must have had some idea of what they wanted to fund to come up with the initial $46.6 million figure. 

The Select Committee on the FEPP levy will meet again on Thursday morning to discuss possible amendments to the levy. 

Meanwhile, voters might have a better idea of what their levy tax dollars will fund based on how the school board reacts to the district’s proposal to reinstate Garfield’s SEO. 

Miska called on the City to instead invest in scaling up violence prevention and restorative justice pilots that mainly operate in the South End in communities of color, allowing them to grow into citywide programs. 

“We made promises to students that we were going to end the school to prison pipeline, and that we were going to decriminalize our schools, and that we were going to implement and invest in restorative justice practices and violence prevention and intervention,” Miska said. “There were few material and significant changes that were taken away from the racial justice uprising of 2020. This is one where it’s not: ‘defund SPD;’ it’s ‘reinvest in community,’ and by pulling back away from this change and trying to put cops back in our schools, they’re erasing any of the progress we’ve made in the movement to end the school to prison pipeline.”

Gun Violence in Schools Has Seattle Officials Scrambling