The nearly 90% decline in police citations issued to Duluth Public Schools students is a remarkable number. It is not, by itself, remarkable evidence that student misconduct, violence or disruptive behavior has declined by anything close to 90%.
That distinction matters, particularly when Duluth Public Schools is asking the public to measure its performance and trust its presentation of data. A citation is an enforcement decision. It is not a crime index, a violence index or a comprehensive measurement of school safety. If we want to know whether Duluth schools have become safer, we need considerably more information than the number of tickets police officers wrote.
My close personal friend Bob Grytdahl knows this subject better than most people discussing it. Grytdahl once supervised the school resource officer program at the Duluth Police Department, and his experience reaches back to a time when juvenile officers regularly tried to keep young people out of court by directing them toward diversion programs, dependency services and social-service interventions when circumstances permitted.
His first question is exactly the question Duluth should be asking now: Have disruptive behavior and minor violations actually declined, or are fewer citations being issued because officers, administrators and prosecutors are handling more incidents through de-escalation, restorative practices, diversion and other alternatives?
There is a world of difference between those two explanations.
The district's own numbers make that question impossible to dismiss. Duluth school resource officers issued 115 citations carrying 128 charges during the 2021-22 school year. The number of citations then dropped to 32 in 2022-23, 23 in 2023-24, 22 in 2024-25 and just 12 in 2025-26. The latest 12 citations still involved 16 charges, including assault and disorderly conduct allegations.
That chronology is especially important because it complicates the easy explanation that Minnesota's recent school resource officer legislation caused the decline. Minnesota law now makes the boundaries unmistakable: An SRO is responsible for enforcing criminal laws and protecting students and staff from criminal activity, but an officer may not use the authority of the office solely to enforce school rules or participate in ordinary school discipline. State-required SRO training also emphasizes de-escalation, mental-health crises, juvenile development, trauma and working with students with disabilities.
Those changes absolutely matter. But look again at the calendar. Citations had already plunged from 115 in 2021-22 to 32 in 2022-23 — a decline of more than 70% — before the major 2023 controversy over Minnesota's school restraint law and before the Legislature adopted the comprehensive SRO framework in March 2024.
So the law cannot possibly be the entire explanation.
Grytdahl points to another part of the juvenile justice system that deserves far more public attention: diversion. The St. Louis County Attorney's Office says prosecutors and victim-witness personnel administer programs allowing juvenile offenders accused of minor offenses to face consequences without appearing in court. Minnesota's restorative-services directory also identifies St. Louis County Juvenile Diversion as accepting pre-charge and court referrals.
That is not softness on crime. Properly run diversion can demand community service, counseling, education, restitution or restorative work while keeping a young person from accumulating a court record for conduct that can be corrected another way. Grytdahl remembers attempting essentially the same thing decades ago. Police did not need to drag every juvenile mistake into court to take the behavior seriously.
But that produces an obvious statistical problem. If more cases are handled through diversion, restorative intervention or administrative discipline, citation totals will fall even if the underlying number of troublesome incidents does not fall at the same rate.
In fact, Duluth's own SRO activity reports strongly suggest that officers are doing substantially more than writing tickets. During 2024-25, the district recorded 261 de-escalation opportunities and 254 restorative actions, along with 1,410 counseling or mentoring sessions. Those are significant activities, and they may represent good police work. They also demonstrate precisely why citation totals cannot stand alone as a proxy for school safety.
That leads directly to Grytdahl's next questions, which deserve answers from the county, police department and school district: How many Duluth juveniles have been referred to diversion in each of the past five years? How many referrals originated with school incidents? How many youths successfully completed diversion? How many cases were returned for prosecution? How many incidents that previously would have produced citations are now handled through restorative action, counseling, school discipline or other interventions?
And while we are at it, publish the annual numbers for assaults, fights, weapons incidents, threats, drug offenses, police calls for service, suspensions and expulsions. Show us what happened, not simply what paperwork followed.
If those numbers also demonstrate an enormous decline, wonderful. Duluth should celebrate it. But if the principal change is that the same problems are moving through different channels, the public deserves to know that, too. Changing the response to misconduct may be excellent policy, but it is not the same thing as eliminating the misconduct.
There is an even more fundamental point in Grytdahl's argument, and this one deserves considerably greater attention from the Duluth School Board: The most effective juvenile crime intervention may occur years before anybody calls a police officer.
It begins with literacy.
The World Literacy Foundation has drawn attention to what it calls an illiteracy-to-prison pipeline, citing national estimates that two-thirds of children who cannot read proficiently by the end of fourth grade eventually enter jail or welfare systems, that large shares of incarcerated adults have extremely low reading skills, and that an estimated 85% of juveniles appearing in the court system are functionally low literate. Those sweeping figures should be understood as national advocacy estimates, not as a mathematical prediction that a child struggling to read is destined for jail. But the underlying connection between academic failure and later delinquency is supported by longstanding juvenile-justice research. The U.S. Justice Department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has identified academic failure, weak school attachment, truancy and dropping out among established risk factors for youth violence and delinquency.
Duluth does not need a national slogan to understand the urgency. Its own academic results are bad enough.
In the district's 2024-25 Comprehensive Achievement and Civic Readiness report, only 55.7% of Duluth students in the tested grades were proficient in reading. Among Black students, the figure was just 16.7%. American Indian students were at 33.6%, compared with 60.4% for White students. Those are not abstract disparities buried in a spreadsheet. They are flashing warning lights.
If Duluth wants a serious long-term public-safety strategy, then literacy belongs near the top of it. Families matter. Teachers matter. Attendance matters. Neighborhood programs matter. After-school tutoring matters. Summer reading instruction matters. Libraries, mentors and community organizations matter. The School Board should be able to tell taxpayers exactly how much money it is committing to intensive reading intervention, after-school tutoring and summer literacy programs, particularly for children who are already substantially behind.
Grytdahl makes an important point here, too: Schools cannot carry that responsibility alone.
"One other emphasis is success in school then life is a shared responsibility of family, school and community," he said. "I encourage people to support out of school programs and volunteer and/or donate to the Boys and Girls Club, Neighborhood Youth Services, Mentor Duluth and a number of youth serving agencies."
That is more than a call for charitable support. It is a reminder that juvenile crime prevention does not begin when a squad car arrives outside a school. It begins in homes, classrooms, libraries, recreation centers, mentoring programs and neighborhood organizations, sometimes years before a young person makes a decision that brings police into his or her life.
That is where Grytdahl's perspective becomes particularly valuable. A man who spent part of his career dealing with young people after problems developed is arguing that the community should work harder before they develop. That is not an anti-police argument. It is smart public safety.
We should want SROs talking young people down instead of arresting them. We should want minor offenders diverted from court when accountability can be achieved another way. We should want restorative intervention to work. We should want families, schools and community organizations doing everything possible to keep children connected, literate and moving toward productive lives. We should also want police available immediately when genuine criminal activity or serious threats occur.
But we should not confuse fewer citations with proof of fewer problems.
Duluth Public Schools has produced an extraordinary statistic: 115 citations became 12 in five school years. Now the district, Duluth police and St. Louis County should produce the information necessary to explain it. Tell us what happened to the assaults, fights, disturbances and other incidents. Tell us how many were diverted. Tell us how many were de-escalated. Tell us how many were handled solely by school administrators. Tell us whether repeat offending declined. Tell us whether children completing diversion stayed out of trouble.
Then show us whether children most at risk of entering that system are learning to read, attending school, finding mentors and connecting with the community organizations Grytdahl believes can make a difference before police intervention ever becomes necessary.
That would tell Duluth something meaningful about school safety.
A shrinking stack of citation forms, standing alone, does not.