LAUSD still has school police, but the district also built a broader system around mental health, student support and crisis response. Five years later, what do the results show?
The death of a student at Benjamin Franklin High School in Highland Park has reopened a painful question for families: What should happen when a student is being bullied, threatened or showing signs that something is wrong?
Our earlier story about the Franklin High School death and concerns about bullying and mental health in LAUSD, the student’s relatives have described bullying as part of what he was experiencing before his death.
The circumstances surrounding his death remain under investigation. Those accounts should not be treated as proof that bullying caused his death or that the school failed to respond.
But the tragedy has brought a question many parents already have back to the surface:
Should more police be in LAUSD schools?
One Parriva reader put it bluntly on Instagram:
“LAUSD needs to bring back school police.”
It is a question worth asking.
But it is not the only question.
LAUSD still has school police. It also has administrators, counselors, psychiatric social workers, crisis teams, threat-assessment procedures and a formal police-mental-health response team.
So here is the harder question:
Is the approach LAUSD chose actually improving what students and families experience at school?
In 2021, the LAUSD Board approved a $25 million reduction to the school police budget while reallocating that money toward a different approach to school safety, including investments focused on Black student achievement.
LASPD did not disappear. The department remains part of the district’s safety structure and currently lists 262 sworn officers, 55 school safety officers and 36 civilian support staff.
What changed was LAUSD’s strategy: the district expanded the role of mental health, prevention, intervention and crisis response alongside school policing.
That decision created a responsibility of its own:
How does the district know whether the approach is working?
The first response to bullying is supposed to happen at school
LAUSD tells students and families to report bullying to school administration or a designated complaint manager. The district says allegations are investigated and asks families to allow at least two school days for a preliminary response. LAUSD bullying resources for families
The district’s bullying investigation materials also provide for involvement by administrators, counselors, psychiatric social workers and other school personnel. LASPD or local law enforcement can become involved when circumstances warrant it.
That means a police officer is not supposed to be the person who notices every student who is being bullied.
A teacher might notice.
A counselor might notice.
A parent might report it.
Another student might say something.
The first opportunity to catch a problem can happen long before a situation becomes a police matter.
LAUSD’s school mental-health system includes psychiatric social workers, crisis intervention, suicide prevention, threat management and other services for students and families.
And police and mental-health professionals are not operating in completely separate worlds.
The district’s Mental Health Evaluation Team, or MHET, pairs a mental-health practitioner with an LASPD officer in serious mental-health situations. The team assesses risks including suicide or homicide and works with students, families and school staff on an action plan.
LAUSD’s own Every School Safe blueprint describes MHET as part of a broader safety structure that includes school mental health, school police and other student-support resources.
So the district’s model is not simply police or mental health.
It is supposed to be a network in which different people respond at different points.
That brings us back to the results.
The need has not disappeared
LAUSD’s own reporting shows that the demand for mental-health support remains high.
In its 2023-24 accountability report, the district said student and family needs for school-based mental-health services remained high and identified recruitment and retention of mental-health staff as an ongoing challenge.
In 2025, then-Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said, “We continue to be in a youth mental health crisis.”
The district’s safety measures are also mixed.
In 2024-25, 64.3% of students surveyed said they felt safe at school, up from 63.5% the previous year. But the share of parents who said their child was safe on school grounds fell from 86.9% to 84.9%. Staff-reported safety increased slightly, from 94.1% to 94.6%.
Those numbers do not provide a complete picture, but they don’t give families a clear basis for saying the underlying problems have been solved, either.
Parriva has previously reported on student mental health, the pandemic and academic struggles in LAUSD.
Three years later, the district is still describing youth mental health as a crisis and school-based demand as high.
The problem the new approach was built to address is still here.
What the evidence does and does not tell us
Based on the available reporting we were able to review, we cannot say that reducing school police caused worsening student safety or mental-health conditions.
We also cannot say that restoring routine police presence would have prevented what happened at Franklin High School.
What we can say is simpler:
LAUSD made a major change in how it approached school safety. The problems that prompted that change have not disappeared.
That makes one question especially important:
Is the district measuring whether its approach is producing better outcomes?
The public still can’t see the whole chain
LAUSD publishes School Experience Survey data on safety and bullying. Students are asked whether they feel safe. Parents are asked whether bullying reports are taken seriously and whether their children are safe at school.
But those public data do not allow a parent or a journalist to follow what happens after a student asks for help.
We could not find a publicly available LAUSD dataset connecting:
bullying report → school response → mental-health referral → threat assessment → LASPD involvement → outcome.
That does not mean LAUSD does not maintain those records internally.
It means the public cannot easily see the complete chain.
If a child says, “Someone is hurting me,” who makes sure the report does not disappear after the first conversation?
Who follows up?
Who decides when a counselor or psychiatric social worker needs to become involved?
When does a threat assessment begin?
When does LASPD become involved?
And who remains responsible for making sure that student is still getting help tomorrow, next week and next month?
The accountability question is bigger than police
The debate should not force families to choose between police and mental health before the evidence is in.
LAUSD made a major decision about how it would approach school safety. It built a broader structure around that decision.
Now the district should be able to show the public how that structure is performing and whether it is producing better outcomes for the students it is supposed to protect.
The issue is not whether police or mental health should “win.”
The issue is whether the approach LAUSD chose is delivering results that students and families can actually feel—and whether the district can show the public how it knows.
LAUSD changed its approach to school safety.
Now it has to show whether that approach is working.
