[TIME] Student activists across the country are calling for their schools to cut ties with police departments and remove officers from campuses in response to a national uprising against police brutality. And school leaders in Minneapolis and Portland, Ore., have already taken that step.
While debates over the role of coppers in schools have raged for years, activists say the latest high-profile examples of police violence against black people — the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky.,— have fueled the argument that coppers don’t belong in schools.
The public school board in Minneapolis voted unanimously to terminate its contract with the city’s police department on Tuesday in response to Floyd’s death. "I firmly believe that it is completely unnatural to have police in schools," school board member Kimberly Caprini said during the meeting, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
On Thursday, the superintendent of Portland Public Schools said he was "discontinuing" the presence of school resource officers (SROs) and would increase spending on counselors and social workers, the Oregonian reported.
Advocates for police reform and racial justice are hoping more school districts will follow. "It is a huge, huge, huge moment. It feels unprecedented," says Jonathan Stith, director of the Alliance for Educational Justice, which advocates for police-free schools. 
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