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Jadine Chou is leaving her role as Chicago Public Schools Chief of Safety and Security after 14 years — a tenure not often seen in district leadership roles.
Chou oversaw the safety plans after the closure of 50 schools in 2013, grappled with spikes in youth violence, dealt with the disconnection brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and managed the removal of police from schools beginning in 2020.
She first came to CPS in 2012 under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel from the Chicago Housing Authority, where she served as senior vice president. She was the first Asian and first female to hold the role, which was historically filled by someone with a law enforcement background.
Chalkbeat sat down with Chou recently for a conversation about her time at CPS and what’s in store next. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been at the school district for 14 years, through three mayors, seven CPS CEOs, dozens of board members, Taylor Swift released nine different albums in that time. Looking back, how do you define the eras you’ve been here?
There’s a cliche that the only thing constant is change. And going into this, I knew that was going to be the case. One could argue maybe it shouldn’t have happened as often as it happened. It happened a lot. We had a lot of change here, but one thing that was very helpful was in the Office of Safety and Security, with me being here 14 years, and with my team having high retention, they’ve stayed with me this whole time, we’ve been able to keep things steady while everything else was moving on around us.
How did you do it? Was it ever tempting to leave or to not stick around? It’s a long time for a chief to stay in any organization, particularly CPS.
For one thing, I feel like I had landed at a place where I really felt like I was at home. I felt like all of the roads leading up to this were the reason I came here. I felt good about the work I had at CHA (Chicago Housing Authority) but coming here expanded that to at the time, over 400,000 families. Making connections with individual families, parents, students and principals and teachers really felt a natural fit for me.
What is the role of the Office of Safety and Security and has it evolved?
When I first arrived, we were kind of like Domino’s Pizza. People would just wait until you got a call: “We need you at the school” or “We need you to handle this situation.” Very reactive. That is something we don’t like to do in safety.
When I was at the Chicago Housing Authority, if you wait until something happens, it’s too late. It’s already happened. And so we immediately said: How can we move upstream from that? How can we find what is happening before it happens, so we can prevent it? That was one of the first things we did.
But people thought, “Oh, why are you here? We didn’t call you.” It was really changing, sort of the culture and the mindset to say, “We’re here not because we want to be in your way. We’re here because we want to be helpful in making sure that bad things don’t happen.” You can only do that by building relationships. Once you have those relationships, and they see the value that the team can add, then they start being a little bit more receptive to that culture evolution.
Do you think that it’s a misnomer that the security department is meant to be another level of policing?
That’s absolutely intentionally what it was in 2011. That was security’s role. I mean, they weren’t police officers because they’re not sworn, they don’t carry weapons, but they are meant to be enforcers. If a student violates the Student Code of Conduct, security is the first person that’s going to come address it. They’re going to pick you up out of the room and walk you down to the principal’s office.
We heard from students over and over again that doesn’t make anybody feel safer. Even if I’m not the person who’s committing the infraction, when I see my classmates being walked out of there like they’re criminals, I don’t feel safe because maybe I’m next.
That’s what we tried to turn around. What is the role of security? That first summer that I was here, after interviewing all those students and principals, we totally turned it on its head. And we’re saying, Okay, we’re going to have to do this differently,
I had buy-in from the top all the way up to the mayor to turn this out on its head. So it wasn’t just one person doing this by myself. I had buy-in from the cabinet level. People said, “Let’s figure this out, because this is not working. We’re suspending too many kids, and every week there’s a big fight, every week we’re arresting too many kids.”
So, what does it mean to build relationships? What does it mean to support students? How do you change that mindset? And the answer is: we brought that security officer’s personal experiences into it. What did you experience when you were in school? They would talk about their traumas, and we had a lot of grown adults break down and cry because the trauma came back. We said, “Obviously you’ve made yourself a career and you’re a security officer. Now, what changed?” And they said, “An adult reached down to me and told me I was worth something.” And we said, “Guess what? You’re now that adult.” And that really resonated with them.
I knew it worked, because that first fall that we came back after that training, I was getting complaints from principals saying, “What did you do with my security officer? He’s soft. He’s a different person. What did you do?” That’s when we realized, Okay, now we need to train the administration.
One of the first things you faced in this job was the closure of 50 elementary schools. What are your memories of that time and how do you feel like that went?
It feels like a million years ago. The decision had been made at the upper levels and so knowing that that decision was going to happen with or without any of us, the next thing was: How can we do this in a way that can make sure children are safe?
We believed back then, as I do now, as I did even before that, it’s all about the engagement. As much as people did not like that decision, we had to go in there and face families and talk to them about it. What are we going to do to keep your children safe? What are your fears? What can we do about their physical and emotional safety?
We had, I’m not exaggerating, hundreds of parent meetings individually, and I attended every single one, and the importance of that was to build the relationship so people knew: I’m not hiding from this. You can call me, you can email me, and I will respond. You’re going to see our plans. And for those of you coming to this meeting, you will have a say in the creation of the plan. If you don’t like it, we’ll talk about it. We’ll figure it out. Those are safety transition plans — the safe passage maps — parents wrote those maps with us.
More recently, amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the police killing of George Floyd, there was an effort to remove police from schools, which culminated in the board ending the contract last spring. How did you evolve on the question of whether or not police should be stationed in schools?
I can talk about that quite openly now. My job, I feel, has been successful because of my partnership with the Chicago Police Department. I am so grateful. We didn’t count how many superintendents I had to work with at CPD, but those come from relationships as well. All the commanders, all the chiefs over there, I just want to put on the record that they have been amazing partners.
When the reckoning around police and schools came, I knew that people were not on the same page. We had many schools that wanted them removed. We had many schools who wanted to keep them. The board was mixed too at the time. Some of them said, “We absolutely want to remove police.” And the other half are like, “We absolutely do not want to remove police.”
We brought in five organizations, four of whom are still with us on the effort. These are community organizations who care deeply about this topic. They wanted police out of schools, but they also understand we have to honor the spirit of the engagement.
I got the board to agree, “Let us do this engagement.” They wanted to just pull them out wholeheartedly and they might have had the votes to do that. Other school districts were pulling them out left and right.
If you pull police out without engagement, if you do it unilaterally, and one bad thing happens. Guess what? They’re going to come right back in. That flip flopping is actually more dangerous than either solution.
We’re equipping schools with the setup, the circumstances, and the buy in. They need to make sure this sticks. Because once we remove them, I am not going back to CPD and saying. Oh, we need you back, and that’s not the right answer for communities, right?
We worked with these partners to develop a process where we allowed Local School Councils to vote, and this was created out of the engagement and interviewing tons of people, thousands of people, doing surveys with thousands of people. We came up with a process to vote. And it really backed up my hypothesis. Almost half the schools removed them. Almost half of them kept them.
And just last summer, the new board decided, “Okay, four years. We’ve given you four years. Let’s start moving them out.” I think it would have been helpful to have more time.
Have you gotten feedback from security officers or school administrators that wish sworn Chicago police officers were still in schools?
I haven’t had a single person, not a security officer, not a parent, not a principal, not a teacher, say, “I want or I need them back.” And here’s why, because the police are still partners. If we have a catastrophic situation where we need their support, we have a process in place where we can work with them, and that’s the benefit of having that partnership and relationship. So it’s not like we’ve cut ties with the police. It’s just a matter of reassigning the role.
I think that was the difference in some other school districts. It was a more hostile separation, almost like a divorce, where they were cutting ties. And that was never something I would have supported. That doesn’t work. We need each other. Let’s talk about how we define that relationship and how we do it so that we’re both successful.
Looking back, do you have any regrets, or anything you would do differently?
I try to live my life with no regrets. I think that there are lessons learned versus regrets. I might have said a few things in a different way, but I think how I approached every challenge and every interaction — if there was something to have learned from it, then I’m constantly correcting course. But as far as regrets, this has been the best opportunity of a lifetime for me.
I really wasn’t looking to leave. And I’m not leaving because I don’t like it. I actually love it here, and I’ve delayed my departure. I really could have left a lot earlier, and I just delayed it because I’m so committed and I love it. I love the people. I love the students. I love the mission. I love all my security officers, and so it’s a hard separation. The good news is, I’m not separated. Everyone’s going to have my contact information. I’m staying in Chicago. I have not announced yet what I’m doing yet, but it’s going to be in school safety, and it’s going to be connected to this work from just a different vantage point.
Where are we as a city with youth violence, and where do you see it going from here? Has it gotten better? Has it gotten worse?
This is an important question to me. Thank you for asking.
When I joined CPS, if a student was shot and killed outside of the school, there really wasn’t much of a follow up, to be real honest. I mean, there was a crisis team back there for grief counseling, so that existed, but the follow up to what happened? Why did this incident happen, and what are the effects of this child’s friends, his family, and how do we know this isn’t going to happen to one of them?
The answer at the time was, “Well, it didn’t happen on school grounds.” Which, by the way, it usually doesn’t. And people were like, “This is CPD’s job.” That mindset was not sufficient, that was not acceptable. And so we started to make it our business.
We have a whole approach. How are we going to go into school? How are we going to respond? Who were this child’s friends? How do we make sure that we have the appropriate plans for friends, opposition, whatever, to make sure there isn’t a cycle of retaliation?
We’re also providing emotional support, and that’s where the crisis team comes in. I think most adults have lost a loved one at some point in their life or other. That grief as an adult is tremendous. As a child, it’s unspeakable, because it’s not natural.
When you lose a child, a friend, your best friend, how do you process that? We worked hard to make sure that we had protocols in place. Not just following a list, but making sure from the human side, how are we supporting this child and their family?
To answer the question of: where are we now in terms of youth violence?
We had the spike from COVID. Now, it’s going back down and my team knows the goal is still to get it to zero. Violence is very stubborn, and there’s all these other things that have beyond the pandemic that have arisen. I think that we are on track to reclaim that progress, and it is still our goal, because if we’re here to educate children, we can’t do it if they’re not safe physically and emotionally.
With the city, we’ve worked with the state’s attorney, we work with the public defender’s office, we work with the community organizations. We’re all connected. So if there’s something we can’t do, we have someone that we can work with who can do it, and vice versa.
Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.
