“Adults See Everything as Dangerous Except Themselves”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Safety, Policing, and Protection in Schools

Abstract

This article explores how ideologies and discourses of school safety and policing operate within the U.S. educational system and shape broader understandings of safety, punishment, and mass incarceration. Guided by corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it examines three questions: how different educational community members define safety (and for whom), how policing is constructed as safe or unsafe, and how these narratives position certain students as threats. Analyzing school board meetings, online public comments, and conversations with students within the context of a 2020 local decision to remove School Resource Officers from Eugene, Oregon, public schools, the study identifies common and contested discursive strategies about policing and youth across social and historical contexts. A central finding is the role of adultism in sustaining links between schools and prisons, normalizing compliance, silence, and the disappearance of youth who challenge adult authority. These adultist discourses position students as belonging to adults and construct dissent as danger, enabling surveillance, policing, and incarceration to circulate as commonsense approaches to “community safety.” From these findings, the article introduces YouthCrit as an emergent conceptual framework grounded in youth analyses of adultism. In turn, YouthCrit offers a framework for scholars, educators, and practitioners to challenge deficit narratives about students while centering youth presence and perspectives in school-based research and within social movements for community safety.

1. Introduction

Tensions and debates surrounding the presence of police in schools have existed for decades. However, in the wake of racial uprisings that demanded action for the ongoing shooting and murder of unarmed Black people at the hands of the police (Green & Wortham, 2018; Loveless et al., 2017; Turner & Beneke, 2019), advocates have brought police presence on school campuses and the funding of police-school partnerships into greater public awareness. In response to this most recent rise of the Movement for Black Lives (whose central demands include the funding of counselors and removal of police in schools), the American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution calling for the separation of school safety and policing (Charney et al., 2021). Community-led calls to defund the police have resulted in an overhaul of budgets across several large school districts since 2020; these changes, however, have also been met with counterprotests that position gun violence as inevitable and “situate school policing as the only solution” to protecting students (Nolan, 2015, p. 904).

Recent work has shown that these shifts reflect a deeper historical pattern linking schooling and carceral governance (Hirschfield, 2008; Kupchik & Monahan, 2006; Rios, 2011; Simon, 2007; Shedd, 2015) and continue to shape educational discourse through what scholars describe as carceral logics in schooling (Gonzales & Kaba, 2020; Love, 2019). Manifesting through exclusionary disciplinary practices (such as suspension, expulsion, and referral to law enforcement) these logics position control and punishment as necessary for order, even as they have been shown to disproportionately target students of color, disabled students, and other marginalized youth (Losen & Martinez, 2013; Skiba et al., 2011). In doing so, they fail to enhance safety or learning and instead deepen educational disengagement and involvement with the criminal legal system (Gregory et al., 2010).

Scholars have shown how zero-tolerance policies and punitive disciplinary frameworks reinforce structural inequalities and reflect broader systems of social control (E. Meiners, 2007; Morris, 2016). The embeddedness of exclusionary discipline and reliance on police is illustrative of the overlapping interests and ideologies of the educational and criminal-legal systems—systems that emphasize control, discipline, indoctrination, and the rehabilitation of particular bodies and identities (Annamma et al., 2016; Davis, 2003; Rodriguez, 2010). These overlapping systems are not only institutional but discursive, reproduced daily through the language of safety, danger, and protection that circulates within schools.

For this reason, scholars conceptualize the relationships between schools and prisons as a “persistent nexus or a web of intertwined, punitive threads” (E. Meiners, 2007, p. 32). This nexus includes disciplinary policies that merge the language of criminal law with schooling, as well as discourses that produce some students as dangerous, disposable, or unteachable (Annamma, 2017; Horsford et al., 2019; E. R. Meiners, 2010). Annamma (2017) characterizes these convergences (policy, power, ideology, discourse) as the core pedagogy of schooling in the U.S: a “pedagogy of pathologization” through which schools teach who is deserving of protection and which lives and bodies are not.

This study examines this discursive terrain using corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to address three questions: (1) How do different educational community members define school safety (safety for whom, safety from what)? (2) How do these actors discursively construct police as safe or unsafe in schools? (3) What do discourses of school safety and policing show us about how students are positioned as dangerous or as deserving of protection? To answer these questions, this study analyze three interconnected datasets: public comments, school board transcripts, and student workshops collected between 2020 and 2022 in Eugene, Oregon, surrounding a 2020 school board decision to terminate contracts with local law enforcement.

Language is approached in this study not as a neutral reflection of social reality, but as a constitutive social practice through which power, ideology, and domination are produced and normalized within schooling. Scholarship on the school-prison nexus demonstrates that discourses of safety, risk, and order do not merely describe educational conditions; they actively shape how students are governed, disciplined, and rendered visible or disposable within institutions (Hirschfield, 2008; E. Meiners, 2007; Rios, 2011; Simon, 2007). Within this body of work, language operates as a key mechanism through which carceral logics become commonsense, legitimizing surveillance, exclusion, and punishment under the guise of protection.

From this perspective, recurring lexical associations and representational patterns (such as the repeated pairing of students with danger, vulnerability, or immaturity, and police or adults with safety, neutrality, or responsibility) function ideologically. These patterns normalize adult authority, obscure structural sources of harm, and constrain which interpretations of safety are recognized as credible. Attending to such discursive regularities is therefore central to understanding how domination operates in educational contexts, particularly through adultist assumptions that position youth as objects of governance rather than as epistemic agents.

By tracing discourse across public comments, school board deliberations, and youth-led workshops, this study identifies two central findings that organize the analysis. First, adult stakeholders consistently construct school safety through adultist discourses that position adults as rational protectors and youth (particularly those who resist or deviate from adult-defined norms of behavior and identity, including racialized, gendered, and sexual norms) as sources of risk requiring management or control. Within this logic, adult authority is naturalized as responsibility, while dissent is reframed as danger.

Second, students’ discourses of safety directly contest these constructions. Rather than locating harm in youth behavior or external threat, students identify adult decisions, institutional practices, and the refusal to listen as primary sources of unsafety. As one student explained, “Adults think everything else is dangerous except for them—they make rules to enforce that, but don’t create ways for us to hold adults accountable.” Such analyses reframe safety as relational, reciprocal, and undermined by adultism itself.

These findings situate adultism not as an interpersonal attitude but as a structural ideology that organizes whose knowledge is treated as credible and whose experiences of harm are rendered dismissible. To name and analyze this dynamic, the study advances YouthCrit as a conceptual and methodological framework grounded in youth theorizing. Emerging from the analytic tensions of the data rather than imposed upon them, YouthCrit centers students as epistemic agents and positions youth counter-narratives as essential interventions into carceral common sense surrounding school safety.

2. Materials and Methods

Research that is committed to critically analyzing the school-prison nexus challenges a myopic focus on the practice of individual institutions, and instead, foregrounds an expansive view of the social, political, economic, and discursive processes that maintain police, isolation and imprisonment as community safety (Davis et al., 2022). In turn, educational research that is committed to identifying and dismantling these discursive processes aligns with methodologies that demand a deep scrutiny of everyday practices across and between institutions, a naming of social actors, and a view of language that illuminates ideological premises and power grounded in the lived experience of those who are most impacted by school policies (Halle-Erby & Keenan, 2022).

Many studies engage in the work of naming the disproportionate removal of students from marginalized backgrounds (Losen & Martinez, 2013; Skiba et al., 2011). However, even with substantial research on the effectiveness of behavioral interventions, discursive dimensions of school safety remain underexamined, especially those that reveal ideological tensions among students, educators, and policymakers. To address this need, this study engages a multi-step critical discourse process to examine how ideologies surrounding police and school safety are expressed and enacted through written and oral texts within public comments, school board deliberations, and student workshops.

This methodological orientation treats discourse analysis as an inquiry into how power and ideology shape the meanings of school safety and policing as they circulate through language and across educational contexts. Corpus-assisted and critical discourse analytic approaches were employed in tandem, combining computational analysis (AntConc) with qualitative coding (ATLAS.ti) to examine how discourses of safety, policing, and youth identity were produced, circulated, and contested across data sources. Tracking these discourses across datasets offers insight into how exclusionary disciplinary practices and the criminalization of youth persist as normalized and “effective” responses in schooling (Carter et al., 2017; Losen & Skiba, 2010; E. R. Meiners, 2017), and how youth-generated counter-narratives disrupt these constructions.

To explore how these discourses operate across institutional and community settings, the analysis draws on three interconnected datasets collected between 2020 and 2022 in Eugene, Oregon. Each dataset represents a distinct discursive site within local debates on school safety and policing, revealing how educational community members define, defend, and contest dominant constructions of safety during the Eugene 4J School District’s decision to end its contract with local law enforcement for School Resource Officers (SROs).

• Dataset 1: Public Comments. A corpus of 509 written public submissions to the Eugene 4J School Board in June of 2020 was compiled from publicly accessible district archives. These comments reflected heightened community debate surrounding SROs and included contributions from parents, educators, students, and other community members.
• Dataset 2: School Board Transcripts. Transcripts from two school board meetings (June–August 2020) were transcribed verbatim, capturing institutional decision-making processes, as well as the discursive norms shaping deliberations and policy about school safety and policing.
• Dataset 3: Student Workshops. Three student workshops were held between December and April of 2022, including 26 youth participants (ages 13–24) currently or formerly enrolled in local schools. The workshops were co-designed with youth advisory partners and included participatory activities such as the Problem and Possibility Tree and Emotional Mapping protocols (see Appendix A). All youth provided assent or consent (with caregiver consent for minors). Sessions were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and anonymized prior to analysis.

2.1. Analytical Framework

This study integrates Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine how language constructs, legitimizes, and challenges dominant ideologies, particularly through recurring representational patterns that normalize relations of power in schooling. Corpus-assisted methods and critical discourse analysis are understood as complementary rather than interchangeable. CADS is employed to identify recurring linguistic patterns (such as frequency, collocation, and lexical association) that reveal which meanings are stabilized across texts and contexts. These patterns, however, are not treated as self-evident indicators of meaning or intent. Instead, they serve as empirical entry points for critical interpretation.

CDA provides the theoretical framework necessary to interpret these patterns as ideological work. Drawing on critical education research that understands discourse as a mechanism of governance, CDA is used to examine how repeated representational strategies legitimize relations of power while marginalizing others (Fairclough, 2003; van Dijk, 2001). This analytic stance treats linguistic regularities not as descriptive artifacts, but as sites where domination, authority, and resistance are actively produced and contested within schooling. CADS provides a systematic, corpus-based method for identifying linguistic patterns (recurring word choices, phrases, or grammatical structures that reveal underlying assumptions) while CDA situates these patterns within broader social and ideological contexts (Fairclough, 2003; Wodak, 2011). Together, these approaches position discourse analysis not simply as textual interpretation, but as a means of tracing how power, ideology, and representation circulate through language.

This combination provides both a wide mapping of linguistic patterns (through CADS) and deep interpretive analysis (through CDA), revealing how discourses of safety are linguistically structured and ideologically maintained. Selected quotations are presented throughout to illustrate how these linguistic patterns materialize in the ideological constructions of safety, risk, and protection across datasets.

In this study, computational and qualitative tools worked in tandem to operationalize this integration. AntConc functioned as the corpus-analysis engine that identified the surface features of discourse—its lexical patterns (frequently used words and phrases), collocations (words that tend to appear together within a short span), and concordances (lists of every occurrence of a keyword with surrounding context). These outputs provided the empirical foundation for examining how key terms such as safety, students, police, and threat clustered within and across texts.

ATLAS.ti extended this analysis beyond the textual surface by supporting qualitative coding, memoing, and cross-dataset synthesis. Codes drawn from CADS results were imported into ATLAS.ti, where excerpts were contextualized, thematically grouped, and interpreted using CDA frameworks (Fairclough, 2003; Van Leeuwen, 1996).

The iterative movement between these two programs meant that lexical patterns identified in AntConc informed critical interpretation in ATLAS.ti, while insights from qualitative coding guided additional corpus queries. This process allowed CADS to illuminate the linguistic architecture of discourse and CDA to interrogate its ideological implications, revealing how, where, and by whom discourses of safety and risk were produced, circulated, and contested across public, institutional, and youth-generated texts.

2.1.1. Corpus-Assisted and Critical Discourse Approaches

Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) integrates the computational tools of corpus linguistics with the interpretive frameworks of discourse analysis to explore language use in real-world contexts (Baker, 2023; Wodak, 2011). It combines quantitative pattern detection (such as frequency, collocation, and concordance) with qualitative interpretation to reveal how linguistic patterns shape social meaning.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) extends this work by situating language within broader structures of power, ideology, and history (Fairclough, 1995, 2003; van Dijk, 2001). CDA interrogates how discourse constructs social realities and legitimizes inequality, emphasizing three interrelated concepts:

• Power: how language enacts and contests authority (Foucault, 1975; van Dijk, 2017).
• History: how contemporary meanings draw on historical events and ideologies, such as the 2020 racial justice uprisings (Wodak, 2011).
• Ideology: how discourse naturalizes hierarchies of value and identity (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Fairclough, 2003).

2.1.2. Phases of Analysis

The analytic design comprised three interrelated and iterative phases that linked corpus-based patterning with discourse analysis.

Phase 1 (Textual Analysis). CADS methods were used to address the first research question: how different educational community members define school safety (safety for whom, and from what). This phase mapped word frequency, collocation, and lexical choice across three datasets (public comments, board transcripts, and student workshops).

• Social Actor Representation identified key human and non-human participants (e.g., “students,” “police,” “safety”) (Fairclough, 2003; Van Leeuwen, 1996).
• Collocation and Frequency Analysis examined how terms co-occurred within a ±5-word span, revealing how actors and concepts were linked discursively.
• Lexical Choice Analysis explored how terms such as “child,” “youth,” or “student” reflected different representational strategies (Kaur et al., 2013; Vellos, 2018).

Findings from this initial mapping established the empirical foundation for identifying salient lexical associations that informed subsequent CDA phases. Importantly, this phase was not intended to interpret meaning or intention, but to identify points of discursive concentration in which representations of safety, risk, and youth recur with sufficient regularity to indicate ideological significance. These points served as the foundation for the critical interpretive analysis conducted in subsequent phases.

Phase 2 (Ideological Positioning). The second phase examined how discourses of safety and policing were constructed ideologically situated using van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square and Fairclough’s (2003) orders of discourse.

van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square was used to code excerpts according to how language positioned key social actors (such as students, police, and safety) within broader relations of legitimacy and authority. The framework distinguishes how discourse constructs inclusion and exclusion by emphasizing some perspectives while downplaying others. In this study, it served as a systematic tool for identifying polarization in talk and text—who was framed as protector, who as risk, and how those positions were linguistically sustained.

Building from these ideological codings, the analysis extended from mapping ideological polarization to examining the linguistic mechanisms through which these positions were produced and maintained. Fairclough’s (2003) concept of orders of discourse provided the framework for analyzing these dynamics across genres, discourses, and styles.

• Genre—the socially recognizable ways of interacting that organize communication (e.g., policy deliberation, public comment, facilitated discussion). Analysis of genre focused on how communicative formats structure participation and constrain or enable particular kinds of meaning-making.
• Discourse—the recurring systems of meaning that circulate across texts and settings. Attention to discourse identified how different repertoires of meaning (such as safety, protection, or accountability) were drawn upon across genres.
• Style—the linguistic and rhetorical features through which speakers construct identity and stance (e.g., tone, modality, naming practices). Analysis of style traced how these linguistic resources indexed alignment with, or resistance to, dominant and/or oppositional discourses.

Phase 3 (Discourse Clustering). The third phase integrated insights from CADS and CDA to identify recurring discursive clusters and ideological tensions—what Fairclough (2003) terms cruces, or points where competing meanings and social interests intersect. This phase examined how representations of students, safety, and authority varied across data sources and communicative contexts, highlighting how particular identity positions and ideological framings circulated within and between genres.

Drawing on Rogers’ (2004) framework for networked discourse analysis, excerpts were grouped into clusters that shared lexical and ideological features. Revisiting key lexical patterns identified in earlier phases enabled comparison of representational strategies (e.g., “students at risk” versus “students as agents”) across institutional and community domains. Analyzing these clusters through Fairclough’s concept of cruces highlighted intersection points where dominant and oppositional discourses overlapped, diverged, or transformed, providing a deeper understanding of the dynamic and contested nature of school safety discourse.

3. Results

This study examined how discourses of school safety and policing were produced, maintained, and contested across public, institutional, and student-generated texts surrounding the Eugene 4J School District’s 2020 decision to end its contract with local law enforcement for School Resource Officers (SROs).

Across the analysis, two central findings emerged. First, adult discourses of school safety consistently relied on adultist assumptions that position adults as legitimate protectors and youth as objects of risk, management, or control. Second, student discourses of safety directly contested these assumptions, reframing safety as relational, participatory, and undermined by adult authority exercised without accountability.

The results are organized across three analytic phases that collectively illuminate these findings. Phase 1 examines how safety was defined and for whom it was imagined. Phase 2 analyzes how policing was ideologically positioned as either protective or harmful. Phase 3 focuses on how students were discursively represented across contexts, attending to the ways language shaped youth visibility, credibility, and legitimacy within debates about school safety.

In alignment with Critical Discourse Analysis, the patterns reported below are interpreted as ideological formations rather than neutral linguistic features. Across datasets, these formations structured who was understood as dangerous, whose authority was treated as commonsense, and whose experiences of harm were rendered visible or dismissible within school safety discourse.

3.1. Phase 1: Textual Analysis—Safety for Whom, and Safety from What?

Phase 1 used CADS methods (word frequency, collocation, and lexical analysis) to examine how community members defined school safety and who was represented as needing protection. Across all three datasets, students were the most frequently referenced social actor. Yet their representation varied sharply across genres.

In public comments and board transcripts, students were often invoked abstractly as “our children,” “the kids,” or “students in our schools.” This language positioned youth collectively and passively, emphasizing their vulnerability rather than their agency. As one parent wrote: “Our children deserve to feel safe, not scared—without SROs, there will be no one to protect them.”

Collocation analysis revealed that the term safe appeared most often alongside both human actors (e.g., students, teachers, police) and non-human or abstract threats (e.g., racism, bullying, violence). The same lexical pairings (particularly “safe + students” and “safe + schools”) appeared across ideological lines, but with different implied referents. For example, supporters of policing emphasized external dangers (“to keep kids safe from threats and intruders”), while opponents framed danger as structural and relational (“to make schools safe from racism and police harassment”).

Student-generated data, by contrast, shifted both tone and focus. In workshops and written reflections, students consistently linked safety to belonging, respect, and emotional support rather than surveillance or control. One participant explained: “Safety isn’t about being watched—it’s about being known. I don’t feel safe when adults only see me as a problem to manage”. Another noted: “Adults think that everything else is dangerous except for them—they create rules to enforce that but don’t create ways for us to hold adults accountable.”

Such statements recast safety as relational and reciprocal rather than institutional, situating harm not in student behavior but in adultist or exclusionary structures. This linguistic framing echoed across student comments that paired “safe school” with terms like relationships, mental health, and community care. These textual patterns illustrate the central tension that structured subsequent phases of analysis: safety was discursively produced through two competing logics, one grounded in protection from external threat and the other grounded in liberation from systemic harm. These divergent constructions shaped how policing was rationalized or resisted across the broader discourse.

3.2. Phase 2: Orders of Discourse—The Discursive Construction of Police as Safe or Unsafe

Building on the textual patterns identified in Phase 1, the second phase analyzed how police were linguistically constructed as safe or unsafe using van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square and Fairclough’s (2003) orders of discourse. References to police, SROs, and broader concepts of enforcement were extracted and coded as aligning with either dominant or oppositional ideologies.

Dominant discourses positioned police and SROs as necessary protectors (“well-trained,” “neutral,” and “part of our community”). These constructions emphasized external threats and positioned police as guardians of order and innocence. As one commenter wrote: “Removing our SRO’s will put our kids at risk and leave them vulnerable to violence.” Another community member echoed this sentiment, arguing that visible police presence equated to reassurance: “Kids need to know they are safe in school and the resource officers are trained to do just that. With school shootings on the rise, who will be around to protect them?”

These comments relied on affective language and collective pronouns (“our children,” “our SROs”) to frame policing as an expression of care, protection, and moral responsibility, while rendering the sources of danger abstract or external (“violence,” “what’s happening in our country”).

Oppositional discourses, by contrast, constructed police as sources of harm and instability. These texts drew on personal experience and collective testimony to name structural violence and its impact on students of color, disabled students, and queer and trans youth. One student participant described: “I see cops come into our school and everybody tenses up—it’s like safety for some people means fear for the rest of us.” Another student remarked on the unequal distribution of trust and power: “Police don’t make everyone feel safe. They make some people feel like they’re already in trouble.” These narratives positioned police as agents of surveillance rather than protection and called for a reallocation of resources toward counselors, community-based supports, and mental health services.

The data demonstrated that these ideological stances took shape through characteristic configurations of genre, discourse, and style, drawing on Fairclough’s framework of orders of discourse.

• Genre referred to the recognizable communicative formats that shaped how speakers addressed the issue. Public comments followed formal institutional conventions—introducing oneself by name, referencing school or neighborhood, and citing data or policy—signaling participation within bureaucratic norms. In contrast, student workshops adopted dialogic and narrative genres such as storytelling, collective definition-building, and written reflection.
• Discourse captured the recurring systems of meaning (safety as control versus safety as care) that circulated across these genres, anchoring ideological alignment.
• Style encompassed linguistic and rhetorical stance. In dominant discourses, language about race was often abstract (“what happened in Minneapolis”) or generalized to national unrest, whereas oppositional discourses named racialized experience directly (“Black students,” “racist encounters,” “harassment by police”).

3.3. Phase 3: Discourse Clustering—Positioning of Students Across Domains

The third phase synthesized textual and ideological insights to examine how students were discursively positioned within broader narratives of school safety and policing. Drawing on Rogers’ (2004) networked discourse analysis and Fairclough’s (2003) concept of cruces (points of ideological tension) this phase traced how meanings attached to students shifted across genres and speaker roles.

Lexical analysis revealed variation in how students were referenced. In public comments and board transcripts, the terms children and kids appeared most frequently, often paired with affective language such as “our children,” “innocent kids,” and “vulnerable youth.” These constructions emphasized protection and dependence, reinforcing the logic that students required adult control and police oversight. One community member stated: “Our kids can’t focus on learning if they’re scared. Having officers on campus keeps them safe so teachers can teach.”

This framing contrasted sharply with student-generated discourse. In workshops and written reflections, participants consistently used the term student to assert agency and perspective, often paired with identity-rich descriptors that foregrounded intersectional experiences (such as “Black trans student”, “disabled queer youth” and “Latine student leader”). As one student noted: “They believe kids don’t know what they want or need—and believe that we are children.” Another added: “For schools to be safe, adults would have to believe that students have a voice, and let us use it.”

These linguistic choices signaled a reframing of safety from surveillance and control toward legitimacy, care, and belonging. Students articulated that safety is relational, not regulatory, emphasizing mutual accountability and adult responsibility. As one participant explained: “People ain’t built like that they need some extra help—and schools don’t want to offer that. They don’t think it is their job. That taking care of us or helping us live isn’t part of learning.”

Clustering analysis further revealed discursive contradictions: students were simultaneously positioned as needing protection and as potential threats, especially in public discussions of discipline and disruption. In contrast, student discourse redefined safety as a collective and reparative process. One participant summarized this orientation clearly: “If adults really want safety, they should start by listening to us”.

Across data sources, representations of students were consistently shaped by adult-centered assumptions about capacity, rationality, and risk. In public comments and board deliberations, students were frequently positioned as passive recipients of protection, referred to through diminutive or possessive terms that emphasized vulnerability and dependence. In contrast, youth-generated discourse asserted students as knowledgeable social actors, often naming harm produced by adult decisions and institutional practices. This contrast reflects an adultist ideological structure in which adult interpretations of safety are treated as inherently legitimate, while youth analyses are rendered suspect or dangerous through discourse.

4. Discussion

4.1. Reframing the Discursive Terrain of School Safety

This study examined how discourses of school safety, policing, and student identity are constructed and contested across institutional, community, and student-centered contexts. Through a multi-phase analysis grounded in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study revealed how safety is not merely a descriptive term but a discursive technology; one that organizes authority, legitimizes control, and sustains what scholars have identified as the school-prison nexus (Annamma et al., 2016; E. Meiners, 2007).

By centering the perspectives of students most impacted by school pushout and surveillance, this study makes visible the everyday linguistic mechanisms through which carceral logics are normalized and resisted. As Shedd (2015), Rios (2011), Hirschfield (2008), Kupchik and Monahan (2006), and Simon (2007) each show, the criminalization of youth in schools operates through the production of risk identities (a process sustained as much by discourse as by policy). The findings here extend that lineage by demonstrating how those logics are enacted and disrupted in local school debates and in students’ own words.

4.2. Discursive Convergence and Divergence: Overlaps and Crucial Tensions

Across public comments, school board transcripts, and student workshops, there was broad agreement that students deserve protection in schools. Yet beneath this apparent convergence lay deep ideological fissures about who is being protected, from what, and by whom. Consistent with Fairclough’s (1992, 1995) notion of cruces, these moments of discursive rupture illuminated the power dynamics and moral hierarchies that underpin the politics of safety.

Parents and educators who supported police in schools frequently employed possessive language (“our kids,” “my students”) to claim moral and political authority over students. This rhetorical ownership constructed students as dependent and safety as something done to them. In contrast, student workshop participants redefined both the threat and the protector: danger, in their accounts, stemmed not from “outsiders,” but from institutional and interpersonal harm enacted by adults. These findings reinforce Rios’ (2011) argument that schools themselves often operate as carceral spaces, producing criminalized subjectivities under the guise of protection. This discursive tension (between safety-as-control and safety-as-care) illuminates how language maintains the broader architecture of school criminalization while also containing the seeds of resistance to it.

4.3. Naming Race, Avoiding Power

Patterns of racial discourse further make visible the ideological stakes of safety. Consistent with prior research on racial avoidance and coded speech in education (Horsford et al., 2019; Love, 2019), this study found that pro-policing discourse rarely named race explicitly, instead referring obliquely to “what’s happening in our country.” By contrast, those opposing police in schools foregrounded racialized experiences, naming “Black students,” “racist encounters,” and “harassment by police.”

These discursive absences and presences align with what Simon (2007) and Hirschfield (2008) describe as the normalization of inequality through language: racialized harm becomes unspeakable within dominant frames, while narratives of law and order are racialized by default. When race was named within pro-policing discourses (as in one comment beginning “Yes, I am a Black woman and a proud police officer,” they did so defensively, revealing both the discursive pressure of the public debate and the constrained space for social imagination with carceral alignments.

4.4. Student Discourses of Agency and Belonging

Student participants asserted discursive authority over the meaning of safety, identifying racism, adultism, and ableism as core conditions of harm and reframing safety as a matter of belonging and respect. Their analyses positioned safety not as surveillance or adult control but as the presence of care, accountability, and meaningful relationships. As one student explained, “there is a lack of importance of personal mental and physical wellbeing rather than attendance and grades… These are the things that schools value—not who we are”. Another described the absence of care as a threat to safety itself: “people ain’t built like that they need some extra help—and schools don’t want to offer that… taking care of us or helping us live isn’t part of learning”. Such statements reject deficit framings of youth as problems to be managed and instead affirm what Liou and Literat (2020) describe as youth epistemic agency: the capacity of young people to define, analyze, and transform the systems they navigate.

Importantly, student participants consistently paired critique with solution-oriented proposals. They articulated safety as a collective practice rooted in mental health supports, community connection, and adult accountability. One student offered a vision of relational safety: “If schools were safe, there would be teachers who care and listen to all of their students, and [a] school board thinking of the students, safety and enforcing rules based on that”. Another framed safety as freedom to exist fully: “If schools were safe, youth would feel safe to express themselves in whatever way they [deem]”. These visions contest dominant constructions of safety and advance more expansive, relational, and justice-oriented models.

Students also used rhetorical questions not to persuade policymakers, as many adults did, but to name frustration and emotional labor. These questions surfaced when students recounted moments where adult decisions felt illogical or harmful, as in the exasperated: “What do they think is going to happen?”. Such discursive strategies illuminated how students made sense of power, policy, and policing—often with sharper analytical clarity than institutional actors.

These findings extend the work of Bell (1995), Bertrand et al. (2023), and LeFrançois (2013), who argue that adultism functions as a hidden axis of oppression intertwined with racism, classism, and ableism. Student discourse named adults as both the source of harm and as potential partners in care, revealing the contours of generational hierarchy while mapping out alternative possibilities for relational safety and belonging.

4.5. The Discursive Production of Police: Individuals vs. Institutions

Across datasets, “the police” functioned as a flexible signifier, invoked to denote both individual officers and the institutional systems they represent. Supporters of SROs personalized safety narratives by emphasizing relationships with specific officers (“Officer Smith knows our kids”) thereby insulating individual actors from systemic critique. Opponents, in contrast, invoked collective and historical language (“the police,” “law enforcement,” “the system”) linking school policing to broader patterns of state control and racialized surveillance. Their discourse frequently included explicit references to George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, or historical patterns of oppression.

This rhetorical shift (from individualized to institutionalized references) illustrates how discourses of policing shape what becomes visible or obscured in school safety debates. Personalizing police and framing their presence as relational support (as in “Officer Smith knows our kids”) constructs school safety as a matter of interpersonal familiarity and depoliticizes the structural conditions that enable surveillance and control. In contrast, references to “the police,” “law enforcement,” or “the system of policing” foreground the institutional and historical dimensions of school policing, linking it to broader patterns of racialized power and state violence. These contrasting frames reveal how language works to either contain critique at the level of individual actors or situate policing within the wider carceral landscape that shapes students’ experiences of safety and harm.

4.6. Schools as Site, Schooling as Strategy

Across discourses, schools were constructed not only as spaces where safety should be ensured but also as institutions tasked with shaping society. However, the purpose of that shaping differed by ideological perspective. For those advocating continued police presence, schools were framed as preparing students to “become responsible citizens” or to navigate “real-world threats.” Policing, in this view, was part of an inevitable social order.

In contrast, those resisting policing framed schools as transformational spaces, capable of modeling justice and care beyond punitive logics. Students expressed a desire for schools to move away from “cookie-cutter robots” and toward spaces that were “accepting,” “safe to be ourselves,” and places where adults would be “willing to learn and evolve.”

Notably, all data sources acknowledged that schools are currently ill-equipped to meet student needs (an important point of convergence). Yet the proposed solutions diverged: police and enforcement on one side; adult education, institutional accountability, mental health, counseling, and community care on the other.

4.7. Adultism & the Reproduction of Carceral Logics

A central theoretical contribution of this study lies in identifying adultism as a sustaining force of the school–prison nexus. Adultism, as defined by Bell (1995) and expanded by McClellan (2020), refers to the systemic privileging of adult authority over youth autonomy (manifesting through language, policy, and institutional design). Importantly, the adultist norms identified in this study are not neutral; they are racialized, gendered, sexualized, and ableist, privileging whiteness, cisgender and heterosexual conformity, and normative embodiments while rendering students who fall outside these expectations as disproportionately unsafe, disruptive, or disposable within school safety discourse. It is the ideological framework that legitimizes adult control and positions it as both natural and necessary. Operating discursively, adultism functions as a form of epistemic domination by determining whose knowledge counts in defining safety, whose fears are taken seriously, and whose disappearance can be justified as necessary for order.

Across data sources, adults claimed legitimacy through narratives of expertise, proximity, and possession (“our students,” “my children”), while youth were discursively minimized or abstracted. This dynamic parallels what Oto (2023) calls adult supremacy (the normalization of adult power as the moral standard for decision-making) and echoes Bertrand et al.’s (2023) observation that adultist structures mask domination as care. By contrast, student discourse enacted what Mirra et al. (2015) terms youth counterpublics: collective spaces where young people produce alternative narratives that resist adultist epistemologies and assert agency, belonging, and accountability.

This reframing positions adultism not merely as a barrier to inclusion, but as a structural ideology; one that reproduces the same logics of surveillance, discipline, and control that animate the carceral state (Hirschfield, 2008; Simon, 2007). In this context, the exclusion of students from decision-making is not incidental but foundational. Safety, as constructed through dominant discourse, is something done to youth rather than with them.

5. Implications: YouthCrit as an Emergent Framework for Research, Praxis and Policy

The findings of this study do not simply describe competing discourses of school safety; they also point toward the need for a conceptual shift in how youth, authority, and knowledge are understood within educational research and practice. Across student workshops, young people repeatedly named adult authority (particularly when exercised without accountability) as a root condition shaping harm, exclusion, and unsafety in schools. These insights invite not only analysis, but response.

YouthCrit is offered here not as an external framework applied after the fact, but as a conceptual articulation grounded in what students repeatedly named throughout the study. It emerges from youth analyses of adultism as a structural force shaping whose knowledge counts, whose safety is prioritized, and whose disappearance is normalized within school systems. In this sense, YouthCrit functions as an offering to educators, researchers, parents, practitioners, and youth—a way of naming and responding to the conditions students identified as most consequential to school safety.

Building from these findings, YouthCrit names adultism as a foundational axis of oppression and extends critical traditions such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), DisCrit, and TribalCrit by foregrounding age-based power as a central analytic concern. While aligned with these frameworks’ commitments to naming power, centering lived experience, and linking critique to transformation, YouthCrit centers youth not as developing subjects but as epistemic agents whose analyses generate theory, not just data.

The following tenets articulate YouthCrit’s core orientations as they emerge from this study and offer direction for future research, policy, and practice.

5.1. Tenets of YouthCrit

Grounded in the findings of this study and aligned with the commitments of Critical Race Theory and related critical traditions, the following tenets articulate YouthCrit’s core orientations toward naming power, centering lived experience, and advancing transformative praxis.

• Adultism is a structural system of power
  YouthCrit understands adultism as a structural ideology that systematically privileges adult authority and adult ways of knowing over youth autonomy and knowledge. Operating alongside racism, colonialism, ableism, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism, adultism shapes which students are deemed credible, capable, and deserving of protection while rendering others as disruptive, unsafe, or disposable.
• Adultism is reproduced through institutional design and everyday discourse
  Adultism is embedded in school governance, discipline policies, curriculum, and research practices. It is reproduced through everyday language that frames compliance as safety, obedience as maturity, and dissent as immaturity or danger. YouthCrit calls attention to how these discursive practices normalize control while obscuring structural sources of harm.
• Language is a central site of both domination and resistance
  YouthCrit foregrounds language as a key mechanism through which adultism is sustained and contested. While terms such as “at-risk” or “troubled” often reinscribe deficit and paternalism under the guise of care, youth-generated discourse functions as a site of resistance—where young people reframe safety as relational, reciprocal, and grounded in accountability rather than surveillance.
• Young people hold epistemic agency
  YouthCrit rejects developmental framings that position youth as incomplete or “in process” toward full personhood. Young people are knowledge producers whose analyses are shaped by their embodied experiences within institutions. YouthCrit affirms youth epistemic sovereignty which names the rights and capacity of young people to define, generate, and circulate knowledge about the systems that govern their lives.
• Centering youth requires relational accountability, not extraction
  YouthCrit challenges tokenistic approaches to “student voice” that extract quotes or perspectives for adult-defined agendas. Centering youth requires relational accountability, where young people are positioned as co-designers, co-researchers, and co-theorists with shared authority over meaning-making, decision-making, and outcomes.
• Educational justice requires intergenerational collaboration
  YouthCrit positions intergenerational collaboration as essential to dismantling adultism and its carceral effects. It affirms youth dignity and agency while calling on adults to critically examine how inherited norms of discipline, obedience, and control shape educational practice. Transformative change requires redistributing power across generations rather than inviting youth into adult-controlled spaces.

5.2. YouthCrit as an Implication Research, Policy, and Praxis

As an implication of this study, YouthCrit is offered as a framework for rethinking how research, policy, and practice engage young people in conversations about school safety. Grounded in students’ repeated naming of adultism as a source of harm and exclusion, YouthCrit invites shifts in how youth knowledge is recognized, how authority is exercised, and how safety is defined within educational contexts.

Rather than simply advocating for “student voice,” YouthCrit emphasizes relational accountability to youth, recognizing students as co-theorists whose analyses not only inform practice but also generate knowledge. In this sense, YouthCrit extends existing scholarship on school criminalization (e.g., Rios, 2011; Shedd, 2015) by foregrounding youth epistemic agency and situating young people as analysts of, rather than objects within, carceral logics of schooling.

Drawing from critical traditions in youth studies and education (Bell, 1995; Bertrand et al., 2023; LeFrançois, 2013; Liou & Literat, 2020), YouthCrit encourages educators, researchers, and practitioners to examine how adult identities, positionalities, and assumptions shape decisions made in the name of safety, order, or development. It calls attention to how adult authority is often treated as neutral or benevolent, even as students in this study identified it as a central condition shaping unsafety.

YouthCrit raises several guiding questions for future work:

• What hierarchies of knowledge shape how school safety is defined, and whose perspectives are treated as credible in those processes?
• How do educational institutions enforce obedience and conformity under the guise of safety or care, and how do these practices reflect broader carceral logics?
• What would it mean to redistribute adult power in research and decision-making in ways that cultivate intergenerational trust rather than surveillance and control?

These implications point toward the need for educational approaches that move beyond inclusion toward shared authorship and co-governance. Rather than inviting youth to respond to problems adults define, YouthCrit calls for building alongside young people in naming, framing, and addressing the conditions they experience as most consequential to safety and belonging.

5.3. Implications for Policy, Practice, and Research

Findings from this study suggest that addressing carceral logics in education requires confronting adultism as a foundational structure shaping language, policy, and pedagogy. The following implications extend from this recognition.

5.3.1. Policy

• Challenge compliance-based models of safety in favor of approaches grounded in belonging, care, and justice (Kupchik & Monahan, 2006; Hirschfield, 2008; Simon, 2007).
• Move beyond symbolic representation toward shared governance bycreating formal mechanisms for students, particularly those most impacted by policing, to hold decision-making power in safety and discipline policies.
• Audit policy language for adultist assumptions (e.g., “student management,” “behavioral control”) and explore alternatives that affirm youth autonomy and capacity.

5.3.2. Practice

• Interrogate how adultism manifests in educators’ everyday talk, disciplinary responses, and beliefs about student capacity (Bell, 1995; Bertrand et al., 2023).
• Co-construct classrooms with students as spaces of learning and freedom—not compliance (Shalaby, 2017), where accountability is relational and collective.
• Create ongoing spaces for reflection where adults examine how their own schooling experiences shaped expectations of obedience, respect, and control. Healing these inherited legacies of discipline is essential to disruption and the building of intergenerational trust.

5.3.3. Research

• Shift from extractive approaches to collaborative research designs that position youth as co-analysts, co-authors, and co-theorists (Liou & Literat, 2020).
• In critical discourse studies, attend not only to adult talk about students but also to youth-produced discourse as legitimate theory.
• Continue documenting youth epistemologies as knowledge systems that challenge adult supremacy and reimagine education as a site of collective care and freedom.

6. Conclusions

This study contributes to urgent and ongoing conversations about school safety, policing, and youth agency within public education. By tracing how discourses circulate across institutional and student-led spaces, it demonstrates that language is not a neutral medium but a primary site through which power operates and ideologies of protection, control, and belonging are produced, contested, and transformed.

Consistent with scholarship on school criminalization (Hirschfield, 2008; Kupchik & Monahan, 2006; Rios, 2011; Shedd, 2015; Simon, 2007), the findings illustrate ways that carceral logics are sustained through everyday talk about safety and become normalized through adultist assumptions about youth vulnerability and incapacity. These discursive processes do not simply reflect policy or practice; they actively shape how authority is exercised, how harm is defined, and which students are rendered visible, credible, or disposable within schools.

Across data sources, two central findings emerged. First, dominant discourses of school safety relied on adultist assumptions that positioned adults as rational protectors while constructing youth—particularly those who resist or deviate from adult-defined norms—as sources of risk requiring management or control. These discourses normalized surveillance, discipline, and exclusion as commonsense responses to perceived danger, reinforcing the ideological linkages between schooling and carceral governance. Second, student discourses directly contested these constructions, reframing safety as relational, participatory, and undermined by adult authority exercised without accountability. Students consistently identified adult decision-making and institutional practices (not youth behavior or external threat) as primary sources of unsafety within schools.

By centering youth discourse as analytic rather than illustrative, this study extends research on school criminalization by foregrounding how young people theorize the conditions shaping their own safety and belonging. Youth analyses offered not only critique, but alternative imaginaries grounded in care, relational accountability, and shared responsibility—possibilities that remain marginalized within dominant safety discourse.

Rather than treating youth perspectives as supplementary to adult expertise, the findings underscore the need to reconsider whose knowledge is recognized in defining school safety. In response, this study offers YouthCrit as an emergent framework grounded in students’ repeated naming of adultism as a central condition shaping harm and exclusion in schools. Framed as an implication of the findings rather than a lens imposed upon them, YouthCrit is intended to inform how educators, researchers, and policymakers engage questions of safety, authority, and youth knowledge moving forward.

Ultimately, addressing school safety requires more than policy reform or programmatic change; it requires confronting adultist assumptions that structure how danger, care, and legitimacy are understood in educational spaces. Creating schools grounded in trust, belonging, and collective care depends on intergenerational collaboration that treats young people not as problems to be managed, but as partners in imagining and building toward more just educational futures.