Sworn to Serve and Protect

As safety concerns mount, the expectations escalate for school resource officers to be a positive force in K-12 schools

School board members in the rural 2,200-student Oroville Union High School District in California made clear to Superintendent Corey Willenberg last spring what they considered their No. 1 priority: campus law enforcement.

No violent acts had occurred in 10 years in Oroville’s schools, located 65 miles north of Sacramento, but a chilling message — “School shooting on Friday” — scrawled on a boys restroom wall in January 2018 followed a month later by the fatal mass shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., elevated the community’s concern that a school shooting could happen in their midst.

At the time, Oroville employed a single school resource officer. He was hard-pressed to cover four high schools. Board members recognized a need for additional coverage. Stakeholders liked the idea of uniformed law enforcement personnel having a presence at all schools.

Increasing Presence

Willenberg’s search for a solution involved Oroville’s police chief, the Butte County sheriff, the five-member school board and the school resource officer.

Early on, the district administration had calculated what an SRO would cost when relying on the police department and the sheriff’s office. When schools opened last fall, Oroville schools had a second law enforcement officer. The district now contracts for 40 hours a week of on-site coverage by each agency.

Over the past 20 years, the growth in the numbers of school resource officers is striking. The National Association of School Resource Officers estimates between 14,000 and 15,000 SROs work today in K-12 education with most of these school districts contracting with local law enforcement rather than hiring their own officers. The popularity of SRO programs remains steady, although a 2013 Congressional Research Service report says “few studies have reliably evaluated their effectiveness.”

Roughly 20 percent of all schools employ school resource officers, according to a 2016 report by the Congressional Research Service.

Challenging Roles

Exactly what constitutes an SRO? According to the U.S. Department of Justice, they are sworn law enforcement officers who are responsible for safety and crime prevention in schools. Like police officers, they are authorized to carry a gun, respond to calls for service and less frequently make an arrest. Beyond their enforcement duties, they also can serve as informal educators and counselors.

Although job duties vary by district, SROs may issue citations to students for aggressive or rowdy behavior; respond to unauthorized persons on campus; patrol for signs of gang or drug activity; perform risk assessments of buildings or grounds; make arrests on school grounds; and educate students on illegal substances, according to the Congressional Research Service.

When police officers transition to a school setting, they may find the expectation of being a counselor a challenging new role for which they haven’t received formal training. Because they’ve dealt primarily with adults, the lack of training in child development can leave new school resource officers unprepared to build trusting relationships with children and youth and unattuned to their needs when asked to deal with trauma-informed practices or students with special needs.

To fill the knowledge gap, NASRO updated its basic training course three years ago. It now includes units on adolescent brain development, social media, human trafficking, violence among youth and victimization. Notably, the expanded training addresses how to develop successful relationships with diverse student populations, says Mo Canady, NASRO’s executive director.

The week-long training, conducted in various locations, recognizes that implicit bias plays a role that disproportionately affects students of color with higher rates of suspensions, expulsions and other disciplinary measures. “Everyone has implicit bias, and it’s something we all have to work through so that it doesn’t become a barrier to engaging students,” Canady says.

Understanding adolescent brain development and the trauma sustained by teens is an especially welcome training component for law enforcement officers assigned to schools, increasing the likelihood of positive relations with youth. Moses Robinson, a school resource officer in Rochester, N.Y., for 21 years before becoming a consultant on school safety, says his mantra “how you train is how you respond” guides his work.

Police Support

Superintendents face complex decisions on whether to hire school resource officers or focus limited resources on “hardening” the school perimeter, updating and expanding security cameras and visitor management systems, hiring behavior specialists and school counselors or introducing a mental health curriculum.

Veteran school security consultant Ken Trump advises school district leaders to look at safety holistically (see related article), but if superintendents hire SROs, it be-comes that leader’s job to set expectations for the officers and to monitor performance.

When Dale Marsden, superintendent of the 53,000-student San Bernardino City Unified School District in California, started his job in 2012, he moved the school district’s chief of police into his leadership cabinet.

“I wanted him, as a senior leader of school police, to have a very clear understanding of how to build a system to support students — and how to use police officers to do that,” Marsden says.

The chief of police understands the mindset of the school board and the community and is well-versed in the mission of the schools, he adds, noting the district has made a conscious effort to move away from “heavy policing to heavy supports.” Creating safe school environments where children can thrive takes deliberate action among all stake-holders as well as the proper training and appropriate professional development, the superintendent says.

The Right Stuff

Not every police officer is well-suited to serve in a school assignment.

“You have to like kids,” says Barbara Malkas, superintendent of the 1,400-student North Adams, Mass., Public Schools, which employs one school resource officer. “That sounds elementary, but you have to be someone who wants to work with children.”

NASRO recommends law enforcement officers being considered for the job of SRO exhibit the strong desire to develop positive relationships with school-age youth and have at least three years of law enforcement experience with no disciplinary actions or complaints involving youth on their service record. Notably, NASRO believes candidates ought to volunteer for a school-based posting.

“SROs can a create a safe and supportive learning environment for students,” says Malkas, who views SROs as one part of a comprehensive strategy to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all students. “If the SRO is seen as part of the community and understands the social-emotional learning components of our curriculum, sometimes children will disclose to the SRO better than they will to us educators. They see uniform and badge as security — the person will make me safe.”

Of course, the symbols of policing can have the reverse effect, what Robinson, the former SRO in Rochester, calls student “triggers.” He says he grew up “in North Philly, in the projects,” a rough city neighborhood where “an officer’s uniform can remind youth of bad experiences with law enforcement.” In his school-based work, he built trust over time by de-escalating situations in a way that maintained a student’s dignity.

Once he was called to deal with a student who had his head on his desk, with a hoodie pulled over his face. When Robinson entered the classroom, he approached the young man and whispered in his ear so no one else could hear. “Son, I don’t know what is troubling you, but do me and yourself a favor. Get up and come with me out of the room.” The student did, then crumpled to the floor sobbing before relaying his best friend had been shot that morning.

It might have looked like belligerence to the classroom teacher, but Robinson learned to not make assumptions.

Prison Pipeline

Criticism surrounding the use of SROs often centers on how their actions in schools contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Research by a Denver-based advocacy group, Padres & Jóvenes Unidos, contended the Denver Public Schools had a record of over-policing students of color by placing SROs primarily in schools where students of color are in the majority. This, the group argued, subjects students of color to overly punitive disciplinary practices and leads to a well-funded school policing apparatus while comprehensive mental health supports are shortchanged.

“Sometimes the natural response is to think that police officers are the solution,” says Jake Cousins, director of communications and development of Padres & Jóvenes Unidos. “But we hear from parents that the district invests in ways to police students rather than support them. If … our safety policies are harming/affecting disproportionate rates of students of color, giving them more tickets, arresting greater numbers of them, the school system is allowing disproportionate rates of harm.

“We want our kids to have more academic counselors. We want the school to hire more mental health professionals,” Cousins explains. “A cop is not a teacher. A cop is not a social worker.”

The ideal situation rarely exists, Canady acknowledges, but he stresses NASRO advocates that SROs work closely with school mental health specialists, nurses and counselors and presses for funding of school-based mental health services.

“When I was an SRO,” he says, “I couldn’t have done my job without our school’s clinical intervention specialist.”

Memo of Understanding

Defining each party’s roles and responsibilities in a memorandum of understanding is key.

The MOU should be viewed as the “bible of the officer’s role,” Robinson says, to safeguard the school board, school leadership and the officer.

Malkas, who has been in North Adams, Mass., since 2016, cites her state’s sample MOU as foundational in creating her district’s agreement. She and the local police chief, with whom she shares her SRO, both suggested changes before a final agreement was brought to her school committee for approval.

Her favorite line in the MOU is the expectation for the school resource officer to have a “demonstrated commitment to making students of all backgrounds feel welcomed and respected.”

She explains, “That is a very different viewpoint than ‘We want a guy with a badge in our schools.’ The bullet points in this MOU made it worth me signing it.”

Good SROs, adds Robinson, “want to help cultivate the view of school being a sanctuary where everyone feels safe. If school is not safe, how can our babies learn?”