April 24, 2024
Dear City Counsel of Victoria:
I am writing to you today to sing the praises of School District 61 for their bravery. They did an incredibly rare thing in our society, and a thing that I would have thought would resonate with the values of the present council: they listened to the minority voices who attended their schools, the voices of those who are more often ignored in the name of our status quo.
As the council is probably already aware, the school board made the decision to end their SLO program based on the results of the survey they conducted in 2021. In that survey 559 respondents were “uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with SLOs in schools. Dozens of respondents also reported “negative” or “very negative” past interactions with SLOs. Those were racialized students, 2SLGBTQIA+ students, and indigenous students. The board at that time decided that, while these students did not represent the majority, they felt that it was the smaller voices that needed protection, that needed their schools to feel safer for them.
It was then disheartening to hear that this council decided to reinstate the program against the wishes of the school board. Presently, a quarter of the city’s budget goes into policing, and one does begin to ponder where the value-added benefit is to increasing such a budget - especially when the actual activities of SLO’s are such a generic list: attending school functions, training sessions, and giving presentations. Such is the breakdown of their time as was presented to SD61 in June of 2021 by local data analyst Stephen Harrison. That presentation can be viewed here.
In the protests around the school budget in 2021, much fanfare was directed around the school music program, but what was often missed in that fanfare was the number of social work positions that were threatened, and that were later cut when the music program survived. Those positions were in marginalized schools, those were social workers who would have worked with students represented in the naysayers surveyed. If the present council is concerned with the social dynamics found in SD61, then I would implore council to figure out ways to fund more social workers to develop programs to address the social dislocation that is experienced by parents and students on the margins. Adding more funding to a police budget may feel like doing that, but that is not what we have been told by those who are directly experiencing the presence of police on school grounds. Police are not social workers, they are not mental health workers, and we do a huge disservice to all concerned where we conflate the services of the police force as unilaterally necessary in all public spaces.
Matthew Cook, RSW
