GUELPH – “Police-in-schools programs endanger Black and racialized children.”
That’s according to the Upper Grand District School Board (UGDSB) Black Parents Council, a grassroots collective founded by a group of parents who say there’s an urgent need for advocacy, support, and accountability within the school board.
The group is holding a Sept. 27 event to “discuss safe and inclusive school environments without the presence of police officers.”
The event will take place from 2 to 5pm at Shelldale Family Gateway and the EarlyON Centre at 20 Shelldale Cres., Guelph.
The event will feature guest speakers Andrea Vásquez Jiméne and Robyn Maynard.
Vásquez Jiménez is the founder, director and principal consultant of Policing-Free Schools (Canada), “where she works with communities to advocate, strategize, mobilize and organize for the uprooting of policing and carceral infrastructures, practices, policies, culture and logics in educational spaces,” according to her bio at policingfreeschools.ca.
She is an Afro-Latina community organizer who “strives to co-create transformative, healthy, equitable, life-affirming, liberatory, healing-centred and policing-free educational spaces.”
Robyn Maynard is a Black feminist writer, scholar, and assistant professor of Black Feminisms in Canada at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.
She is the author of the acclaimed books Policing Black Lives and Rehearsals for Living.
Maynard’s writing on borders, policing, abolition and Black feminism is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe.
The event aims to bring parents, students, and community members together to learn about the ongoing struggle in Ontario, beyond the fight against Bill 33, officials state.
Bill 33, or Supporting Children and Students Act, 2025, amends acts related to youth services and education and would require school boards to partner with police to implement School Resource Officer (SRO) programs and provide police access to schools.
“Together, we will discuss the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline, the profiling of Black students, and how police-in-schools programs endanger Black and racialized children,” event organizers state.
“We will learn about strategies aiming to shift to policing-free schools and dismantling the school–prison nexus and co-creating liberatory education.
“We believe that schools should be safe, affirming environments where Black children can thrive, yet this has not been the reality in the UGDSB, nor across Ontario more broadly,” Black Parents Council members state.
