The Denver Board of Education voted to reduce the number of police officers assigned to schools by 25% by the end of the calendar year and to end its partnership with the Denver Police Department.

 

Moving forward, Denver Public Schools (DPS) will rely on 100 private security officers, both armed and unarmed.

"DPS is deeply committed to affirming the lives of our students and has been changing our institutional culture to align with that commitment and undo the normalization of inferiority and bias," the district wrote in its decision. 

In the decision, DPS noted that students were ticketed or arrested by police officers while at school at least 4,540 times from the 2014-15 school year through the 2018-19 school year. The vast majority of those students, DPS said, were black or Latinx, ages 10 to 15, "thereby introducing them to the criminal justice system and often inflicting institutional trauma." 

The district said the majority of those cases could have been handled by school personnel without police interference.

DPS said it plans to redirect the funds from the contract to increase the number of school-based social workers, psychologists, restorative justice practitioners and other mental or behavioral health professionals. It introduced a number of measures along with the decision to ensure student safety.