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Contact Us!
thepascocoalition@gmail.com
(727) 371-6199
About the PASCO Coalition
Welcome! We are the PASCO Coalition: People Against the Surveillance of Children and Overpolicing. Our Coalition includes over 90 individual members and over 30 local, state, and national organizational members working together to end the Pasco Sheriff’s Office predictive policing program.Â
For decades, the Pasco County School District was sharing school records with the Sheriff. It is unclear how the District is going to address the harms that have flowed from sharing so much information. But what we do know is that the District is still sharing student information with some of the Sheriff’s employees, and that there are still not enough measures in place to protect private student data.
Regardless of what the District has, or has not done so far, Pasco Sheriff’s Office continues to pull information from child welfare files, student records, family information, and past experiences with law enforcement to put children on secret lists. Based on the Sheriff’s scoring criteria, we have grave concerns that its program disproportionately impacts children of color, children with disabilities, and families without financial resources. At the Sheriff’s last count, it has targeted 420 children.Â
Join us to end the Sheriff’s targeted harassment of students, their friends, and families, and to end the violation of families’ civil rights and privacy rights.
Our Demands
On May 4, 2021, the PASCO Coalition sent an open letter to the Pasco County School District highlighting our strong opposition to the District's practice of sharing confidential student data with law enforcement and its participation in a school-based predictive policing program with the Pasco County Sheriff's Office. We urged the District to immediately end all student data-sharing agreements used by the Pasco County Sheriff's Office to surveil and harass students and families.
Also on May 4, 2021, the District held a regularly scheduled school board meeting. Without any notice to the public and without any opportunity for the public to comment the District voted to approve amendments to the data-sharing agreement between the District and Pasco County Sheriff's Office. The community never had a chance to see the amendments before they were approved. We were only able to obtain a copy of the revised data-sharing agreement through a public records request after the school board meeting.
Unfortunately, the amendments to the data-sharing agreement are not good enough. Various individuals at the Sheriff's Office still have access to student data. We know from the Sheriff's own policies that they are required to use all information gathered in its predictive policing program – including student data. Moreover, neither the District nor the Sheriff addresses what happens to the 20 years' worth of data that the Sheriff still has, or the harms that have come to students' and their families as a result of that. Lastly, the District must have better safeguards on who accesses student data and how that is tracked.
Below are our seven demands that the District must take to protect student privacy and to meaningfully advance racial equity for Pasco County students and families:
- Immediately end all data-sharing agreements with the Pasco Sheriff's Office.
- Permanently erase any database or list currently or previously used to identify or label students at-risk by the Pasco Sheriff's Office.
- Do not renew any School Resource Officer ("SRO") funding agreement with the Pasco Sheriff's Office that requires the disclosure of legally protected student records or permits "intelligence led" police surveillance of Pasco County schoolchildren.
- Affirmatively notify every parent/guardian, in writing, if their student(s) has ever been identified as "at-risk", "off-track", "on- track", "critical" or any other similar designation by the District or the Pasco Sheriff's Office. The District must be transparent and provide families with all necessary information to determine and/or challenge their students' "risk scores".
- Enact policy reforms that explicitly ban predictive policing technologies and unlawful data sharing practices with law enforcement.
- Cease all retaliation against students, parent/guardians and District employees.
- Ensure that Pasco County School District administrators and educators undergo regular student privacy training.
