Denver’s public school system will part ways with in-school police officers who have monitored students and campuses for 22 years.

After four hours of heated comment from the public Thursday evening, the Denver Public Schools Board of Education voted unanimously to order Denver Police Department officers out of school hallways and classrooms. The resolution, sponsored by board members Tay Anderson and Jennifer Bacon, charges Superintendent Susana Cordova with ending DPS’s contract with the police department and removing all “school resource officers” by June 4, 2021.

Thursday’s decision was a mile marker on a long road for advocates who say uniformed officers in an educational setting push young people, especially people of color, into the criminal justice system. Denver’s in-school officers ticketed and arrested over 4,500 students over the span of five school years between 2014 and 2019, according to the resolution. Eighty percent of the students were Black and Latinx, according to Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, a group concerned with educational equity that has led the movement against in-school policing for more than a decade.

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