The Los Angeles Unified School District voted on Tuesday to eliminate one-third of all jobs in the district that are held by police officers, in favor of replacing them with so-called “climate coaches,” according to the Daily Caller.
The vote by the school board was in favor of a plan to eliminate 133 police-oriented jobs, and also to divert $25 million in funding to “programs supporting students of color.” The vote is the latest evidence of the ongoing far-left effort to defund police departments across the country after the overdose death of George Floyd, a black man, in police custody in Minneapolis last year.
The role of the “climate coaches” will be to, among other things, “mentor students, resolve conflicts, and address ‘implicit bias.’” The vote was supported by far-left activists and teachers’ unions, but heavily criticized by police officials. It is the latest of several anti-police votes by the LSUSD, including a controversial decision to defund the district’s police in June, which led to the resignation of 20 police officers, including Chief Todd Chamberlain.
Kelly Gonez, one of the board members who voted in favor of the proposal, called the vote “a big undertaking [that] required a lot of coordination,” adding that “our black students are certainly worth this effort.”
But even some of the other board members disagreed with the decision, which leaves only approximately 211 officers to serve the entirety of the district’s 650,000 students. George McKenna, a school board member who voted against the proposal, said that “parents expect us to have safe schools, and if you think the police are the problem, I think you got a problem yourself.”