“Safe School Zone” Proposal Dies in Committee

After three months of debate over a “safe school zone” that would extend policing powers around Evanston Township High School, a formal intergovernmental agreement for its creation appears to have died quietly in a city committee meeting. 

At the suggestion of Ald. Jane Grover (7th ward), members of the human services committee agreed Tuesday to keep the “safe school zone” proposal in committee, rather than move forward with an intergovernmental agreement with the school district. ETHS District 202 recently obtained a legal opinion stating that there is no intergovernmental agreement required in order to enforce the “safe school zone” law—meaning police officers can already make arrests under the law.

“What I’m proposing is that we continue to have and work on all those issues that the school and the city had been working on for all these years and that we, for the time being, keep in committee and hold in committee any kind of formal implementation from the city, and let our school and police do what they do best,” Grover said.

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“Safe school zones” were made possibly by an Illinois law passed in January 2012, which allows police to arrest or cite people for trespassing who have been barred from school property and given proper notice. They can make those arrests within a radius that stretches from the school to the sidewalks on the other side of the street. This June, the District 202 school board unanimously passed a resolution to enter into an intergovernmental agreement with the city to create a safe school zone around the high school—at which point all that was required was city council agreement. The school board hoped to have it passed before the school year began.

When the proposal came before the city, however, several people who lived around the high school or owned businesses nearby showed up to protest the safe school zone. They said the safe school zone would hurt businesses and property values and unfairly target people living in the neighborhood for arrest.    

City council members held introduction of the ordinance for several weeks, rather than taking action.

Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl has also been vocal in her opposition to the safe school zone.

“I think that the idea of arresting a kid…for standing on a public sidewalk and not moving on when a police officer asked them to move on would be a mistake,” she told reporters during a recent taping of the ECTV show The Reporters. “I think we’re working hard to have our police department to have a better relationship with the community, and that would not help.” 

At a meeting of the city-school liaison committee in September, Tisdahl suggested that the city should gather a month of data before coming to a decision on the intergovernmental agreement.

Now it appears that the proposal will simply remain in the human services committee indefinitely. Speaking before committee members Tuesday, Grover explained that the city didn’t actually need to create a “safe school zone,”—that in fact, the zone already exists under the Illinois law established in 2012. That means no intergovernmental agreement is required for police officers to make trespassing arrests under the law, and that the "safe school zone" law is enforceable not just around ETHS but around every other school in the city.

“This criminal trespass statute is just another tool that the city and school can use,” she said. “I think maybe we can agree that by simply implementing the state law as it has been passed should work for us as well.”

Grover noted that the city is installing additional lights on Church Street and blue light phones around the high school. 

“We want to avoid the trouble that results in arrests, and this statute allows for that to happen,” school board president Gretchen Livingston told board members during a recent meeting. “We don’t tolerate violence or the threat of violence in this community, and we especially don’t tolerate it near the high school, where every student comes together.”