Race/Related: Texas school police pepper-sprayed, tackled and Tasered students
Texas school officers used heavy-handed tactics on children, often in response to minor misbehavior.
Race/Related
May 29, 2026

Since the massacre at Robb Elementary in Uvalde in 2022, school districts across Texas have spent billions of dollars to station police officers on every campus in the state. The effort, the most ambitious in the nation, was intended to protect students from similar tragedies.

But the constant presence of officers has transformed the way many public schools manage discipline, subjecting students to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have landed them only in the principal’s office, The New York Times and The San Antonio Express-News found.

An image of a hallway in a school. Officers are walking alongside students.

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Read more on the increased police presence in Texas schools here.

EDITORS’ PICKS

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Racial and religious attacks are rising in Britain because of online disinformation, global instability and divisive political rhetoric, experts say.

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Mary Lovelace O’Neal, an artist and activist who made her name with monumental paintings that explored not only blackness as a color but also Blackness as a metaphor and a lived experience, died on May 10 at her home in Mexico. She was 84.

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