We create truly safe schools when we provide physical, psychological, and emotional safety for all students. That’s why the Local Progress Minnesota Organizing Committee sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy and Governor Tim Walz today urging them to oppose HF 3489 / SF 3534, which would repeal the ban prohibiting school-based law enforcement from using prone restraints on students.
“As local leaders, we are the ones closest to the communities; we intimately know and understand our constituents’ fears, concerns, and hopes,” wrote the LPMN Organizing Committee. “Our communities do not support a policy that makes children unsafe at school.”
Almost four years ago, Minnesota faced a reckoning after the police murder of George Floyd that reverberated across the nation. The restraint that this bill would allow school-based law enforcement to use on children is dangerously similar to the restraint that killed George Floyd. It is the restraint that was banned in schools less than a year ago because it was deemed lethal and unnecessary.
“The bottom line is that prone restraints kill,” said the eight local leaders representing the Local Progress Minnesota state chapter.
“Rejecting HF 3489 / SF 3534 is a critical opportunity to lead with an affirmative vision of school safety – to do more of what we know works: trauma-informed care and counseling, mental health services, restorative practices, wraparound services, and afterschool programming. Our children are counting on us. Let’s show them that we are listening.”
You can read the full letter here.
Photo Credit: Mario Tama / Getty Images – retrieved from The 74
