Sean Havey/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Homeroom (2021)
In between classes, endless scrolling on smartphones, posing for Instagram and rising to TikTok challenges, students at Oakland High School in California undertook an extra dose of the real world compared with most their age: police brutality. The school district employed its own police department and endowed it with an absurd $6 million budget. Officers apparently thought earning their keep involved occasionally visiting excessive force on their charges.
Student leadership pushed for the elimination of school police and the diversion of funds to educational and social ends threatened by budgetary cuts, but their efforts consistently hit the brick wall of adult members on the school board. Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 further fueled the students’ cause, filmmaker Peter Nicks suggests in the documentary “Homeroom,” though he never quite connects those dots.