The takedown of a Black student near Durango High School by a school cop, caught on video, has renewed discussions about safety in Southern Nevada schools. But this time, some outraged parents are talking about the safety of their children from police.
After that incident, Clark County School District parents have called for reforms for the officer to be fired and for a review of school police policies.
Meanwhile, no one can forget what happened to a high school teacher about a year ago, who was attacked by a student who reportedly said he was trying to kill her.
We all want our kids to feel safe in the classrooms. Teachers want to be able to do their jobs without worrying about fights or disruptions. And no one wants to worry that their son or daughter is being targeted or profiled by school police.
CCSD School Police Chief Henry Blackeye has led the department since last spring, but he’s been with the school district for two decades.
Blackeye started as chief around the time the teacher was attacked and assaulted by a student. The department responded to several incidents last year, including parents attacking students, and now they’re handling the Durango High School incident.
He told State of Nevada host Joe Schoenmann he’s “enjoying the struggle,” because he can “look back and see how we came out. … I know there’s going to be improvements if there needs to be, later on down the line. Just getting through what we need to get through the best we can.”
Since the Durango incident, CCSD Superintendent Jesus Jara has called for a review of the department’s use of force policies.
“I know the interest in the community of wanting to know .. seeing that video clip and then making a quick judgment on you know, ‘this is right, and this is wrong in my eyes.’ Well, they're looking at it with untrained eyes,” he said. “Ultimately, the decision to use force is based on that officer's perception of what's occurring at the time based on the tenseness of the situation.“
He also said everyone films these interactions now, and said the difficult part for them is the public not seeing what he called the full picture.
“We understand what the bad could be, is a video coming out not showing the whole story and then the public, like, just making a determination based on that, and then setting their feet in the sand and not wanting to move it and then causing others to accept that perception, and you know, take action on it without knowing all of the facts.”
He said viral videos on social media have “taken us back to gladiator times, where the crowd sees something and then Caesar gets up there and ‘thumbs up, thumbs down,’ and the person dies.”
Asked if he would consider releasing body camera footage, he said “it’s not open to the public to make their judgment.”
Malicia from Las Vegas called into State of Nevada and asked, “If there are a bunch of Caucasian police policing [Black students], how can we relate to one another?”
Blackeye said his officers are involved in their communities and schools.
“We do have that interaction and that communication. It's ongoing. What's unique about school police is a specialized police department. Our officers are there with the people that we serve each and every day. We're not hidden. We're out there so they can interact with our officers,” he said. “The communication when things are going on is … when everything's going fine, nobody cares. Nobody really cares about it. They care when something happens.”
Marie Neisess is president of the Clark County Education Association, a teachers union representing 18,000 educators in Southern Nevada. She said issues won’t be solved by having more or fewer police officers.
“We need to create a culture of deterrence in our schools and overhaul our policies for dealing with violence and violent student behavior. Our educators are frustrated with CCSD. [A] lack of progressive discipline policies, not only school wide, but also in our classrooms,” she said. “Educators feel like their hands are tied.”
In the current legislative session, she said they’re focused on school safety. It’s a top priority on both sides of the political aisle, and for Governor Joe Lombardo.
“We understand something needs to be done,” Neisess said. “We want accountability … whether it's a classroom, teachers, to principals, central administration, governance, and then of course, our school police should also be held to the highest standards of accountability.”
“I really feel like the rhetoric around school safety is incredibly problematic,” said West Juhl, the director of communications for the ACLU of Nevada. “We're a huge driver of the school to prison pipeline down here in Clark County. Specifically Nevada is sixth in the nation for the amount of students arrested in school. And we have so many students going to schools with really robust police presences, but hardly any counselors, social workers, anything like that.“
He asked the chief what can be done to help students outside of the criminal-legal system.
Blackeye said they have a program called “alternatives to arrest,” that’s separate from the school justice partnership with the CCSD Board of Trustees. In the past five years, he said they’ve had an 81% decrease in submittals for juveniles for arrest and citations.
“In the Clark County School District, we're still dealing with a system where Black students are twice as likely to be arrested as white students, Native American students more than three times, and students with disabilities four times as likely,” Juhl said. “It's really problematic when we're talking about a state education system where we have a social worker to student ratio of 8,730 students for every one social worker.”
Bob Weires is the director of psychological services for the school district. He agreed the district needs more social workers and specialists. With the staff they have, they’re organized, well-trained and can intervene efficiently.
“We're not pulling school police officers into that because they have more time and attention to deal with their standard safety issues. I think, not only from an intervention side, I would also emphasize the fact that to the extent that we bring in additional specialists, we can move away from crisis scenarios, and bringing down interventions to more at-risk kids, bringing back increased awareness for all students relative to suicidal ideation, safety, social interaction patterns, etc.. So as long as we're stuck, so to speak, in crisis intervention mode, one student at a time, we're missing opportunities to address kids earlier on when they're exhibiting at risk nature,” Weires said.
He continued, “There are limits to what we can provide, you cannot address 100% of our kids one student at a time, it's just not feasible. We actually follow a model framework within Clark County School District we're trying to refer to as multi-tiered systems of support. And what that is is continual focus, renewed focus on meeting the needs of as many kids as possible as we can, at the classroom level, that takes pressure off of our resources for at-risk kids, and for our response in crisis situations. So yes, there's a pressure on the system. How do we go about providing additional support to teachers within the classroom environment, so that we're meeting more of their needs across academic behavior and mental health needs?”
Guests: Henry Blackeye, chief, Clark County School District Police Department; Marie Neisess, president, Clark County Education Association; Robert Weires, psychological services, Clark County School District
