Action Alert
It’s our last chance to act!
The Police Accountability Bills from the House and Senate have been sent to a six-member Conference Committee for reconciliation. We need your help to make sure the final Police Accountability Bill protects young people.
Our School Resource Officer (SRO) Priorities:
- Adopt Sections 50 & 51 of S.2820 which require a public vote by school committees – rather than the decision of superintendents and police chiefs – to annually assign SROs to schools. These sections also require public reporting of arrests and mental health student support spending for a district to qualify for an SRO.
- Fix the error in Section 50 which can be read to require school committee votes, not in traditional school districts, but in charter schools, which don’t have school committees. This was a technical error from Senate Ways and Means, and we need to fix it by adding “by public vote of the relevant school committee” to the first sentence of Section 50.
- Avoid the new model MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) process in House 66, and instead use the current Model MOU from 2018 as the baseline for all school districts, while keeping the transparency requirements from Section 66 of the House bill.
- Ensure that whatever qualified immunity provision the bill adopts expressly applies to SROs and amend c. 71 s. 37P(f) accordingly.
Our Juvenile Justice Privacy Priorities:
- Adopt Section 49 of S.2820 to keep school administrators from sharing student information with federal law enforcement databases, while removing the “germane to an incident or activity” standard and removing the requirement that the aforementioned databases be “designed” to track gang affiliation.
- Adopt Sections 59, 60, 61, & 71 of S.2820 to expand eligibility of juvenile expungement by allowing expungement of non-convictions, replacing the one-case restriction to a 3 to 7 year waiting period, and maintaining a list of ineligible offenses only to those with a felony conviction.
The legislative session may be ending this month, which means we need your voice TODAY.
What You Can Do
- Email your senators and representatives using this template, and tell them you support the priorities of the Coalition for Smart Responses to Student Behavior in addition to the expansion of expungement.
- Be sure to attach these four attachments to your email: Amendment #88’s list of co-sponsors, Amendment #1’s list of co-sponsors, the Coalition’s testimony in support of the above provisions, and additional testimony from the AFT-MA, MTA, and BTU in support of the school committee provision vote.
- Because elected officials get a lot of emails, follow-up with a phone call.
- Click here to find your legislators’ emails and phone numbers.
Our Response to COVID-19
From developing and sharing accessible legal resources in areas of urgent need to advocating for equitable policies to support those hit hardest by COVID-19 – there’s work to be done. Learn more about steps we’re taking to aid our most vulnerable communities during the pandemic and how you can help.
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