After year of trauma, Minneapolis students to return to police-free schools

One of the earliest policy responses to the police killing of George Floyd was a decision by Minneapolis Public Schools to sever its ties with the Minneapolis Police Department. Many districts across the country followed suit, and now that movement is being put to the test as students return to in-person learning.

Experts say students are likely to bring anxiety and trauma from the past year with them into classrooms, potentially leading to behavioral problems that sworn school resource officers may have once handled. When older students return to Minneapolis schools next month, they’ll instead encounter newly minted public safety support specialists — many with the kind of law enforcement training the school board sought to abandon in the first place.

That’s according to Mark Keierleber, a reporter at The 74, a nonpartisan news site covering education. He obtained the specialists’ application materials through a public records request.

“Roughly half of them have backgrounds as former police officers, corrections officers or security guards,” Keierleber said. “One has experience responding to terrorist bombings. There’s another who has a background in theater and building positive relationships with students, so we really are talking about a very wide range of experiences.”

Keierleber shared more of his reporting with MPR News host Tom Crann. Click play on the audio player above to hear their full conversation.

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