This story was updated after the August 26 CPS board meeting.

        These divided votes are rare in a body handpicked by Chicago’s mayor and have broken down along gendered lines. Board president Miguel del Valle, vice president Sendhil Revuluri, Lucino Sotelo, and Dwayne Truss have maintained their support for the SRO program. This despite public protests that included CPS students and recent graduates being assaulted by police and student arrests this week in front of board headquarters, and despite research linking cops in schools to poorer learning outcomes. Board member Luisiana Melendez voted to end the program in June but abstained from voting this week. Meanwhile members Elizabeth Todd-Breland and Amy Rome have steadily opposed the program.



        The district stated that although 10,333 survey responses were received, 4,398 were excluded because they were incomplete (respondents didn’t indicate which school they were part of or what their role was in that community). The district promised to release a “full overview” of the survey results “this summer,” but the votes on whether to keep SROs were already beginning at LSCs throughout the city and the August board vote was fast approaching. After learning that the survey had been built through the SurveyGizmo platform, which allows for easy data export, the Reader filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the data on July 8.



        Of the 5,935 complete survey responses (ones for which respondents answered all questions, including their school and role in that community), 55 percent (3,264) came from respondents self-identifying as students.



        Two schools with SROs (Little Village Lawndale High School Campus, which actually consists of four schools with 1,287 students, and Englewood STEM, which has 414 students) didn’t have any student respondents in the survey.



        In at least one example, the school’s own surveying resulted in higher student participation. At Lake View High School, a student-designed and -administered survey captured 125 responses (compared to just 62 responses from Lake View students in CPS’s survey). Though Lake View’s LSC ultimately decided to keep the SROs in a 9-1 vote, nearly 60 percent of student respondents in the in-house survey said they thought CPS should eliminate SROs and reinvest the money spent on them into other things. Forty percent of student respondents said their school should eliminate SROs even if Lake View wouldn’t directly financially benefit from the decision.