Throughout the nation, public school districts enlist law enforcement personnel known as school resource officers (SROs) with the intent of warding off violence and protecting students during the school year. Though school resource officer programs have been around since the 1950s, the rise of school shootings in recent years has led to their increased presence. In cooperation with public school administrators, these officers perform “community-policing and criminal investigation functions” throughout the academic year. However, this year, in the wake of police killings of Black Americans around the country, some cities are rethinking the effectiveness of cops in schools.
Two of those cities are in Colorado—and they have responded in very different ways.
While Denver made the effort to remove SROs over the summer, the school boards in the more conservative city of Colorado Springs haven’t mentioned them at all in their recent meetings.
In an interview via Facebook messenger, school board Vice President of Colorado Springs School District 11, Julie Ott, told me, “The District has no plans to discontinue its SRO contracts. At this time, there has been little public pressure to remove them.”
In fact, District 11, which encompasses 33 elementary schools, nine middle schools, and four high schools, has plans to phase in five more SROs this year alone, as mandated by the 2017 Mill Levy Override Implementation Plan Budget. The budget is a bond measure (a question on the ballot often regarding the raising of property taxes to support local or district schools) that Coloradans voted for to support education within their community.
“The District is funding some of them through its 2017 Mill Levy Override; it could be argued that meeting the public's expectations for fulfilling that funding requires us to continue using SROs in our schools,” Ott added.
The five new officers will be specifically assigned to the nine middle schools in the district, and each will receive $71,000 in salaries and benefits.
Meanwhile, about an hour north of Colorado Springs, the Denver Public School District (DPS) plans to do the opposite.
In June, the DPS Board of Education unanimously voted to phase out SROs from its public schools, reported the Denver Post. This was largely due to a push from the DPS Secretary At Large Tay Anderson, who, at 22, is the youngest member of the school board and an avid activist for the Black Lives Matter movement.
In a formal resolution, DPS mapped out its plan for the 2020-2021 academic school year:
“The action taken by the board directs us to reduce the number of SROs by 25% by the end of the calendar year, to end the SRO contract with the police department at the end of the next school year, and to convene a taskforce to develop the transition plan.”
“Our goal is to add full time nurses, counselors, and restorative practices,” said Anderson on social media. “Our schools will no longer be ground zero for the school-to-prison pipeline.”
The school-to-prison pipeline, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, is a disturbing phenomenon happening across the country; public school students are funneled into the prison systems after years of in-school contact with law enforcement and experiences with suspensions or expulsions.
For Anderson and DPS, the move to cut ties with the police department was important in preventing juvenile incarceration and protecting students from SRO arrests.
According to The New York Times, several studies have shown SROs to criminalize young people for “ordinary misbehavior” that is common during adolescence, such as rowdiness, impulsivity, or aggressiveness. In a 2011 report by the Justice Policy Institute, research showed that students of color and those with disabilities tend to be more affected by school-mandated disciplinary policies.
Yet, for some in Colorado Springs, SROs are not seen as a threat but as a necessary presence for security.
“SROs are there for a [sic] resource . . . their job is not to punish,” said Sgt. Jason Newton of the Colorado Springs Police Department.
Newton is a former Campus Resource Officer (CRO) for Colorado College in Colorado Springs. He said the relationship between students and trained officers in schools is “extremely strong.”
Now working in community relations for the CSPD, Newton advocates on behalf of resource officers. This past October, Newton participated in a Colorado College virtual town hall meeting about policing protocols, which was hosted by the student-based group the Collective for Anti-Racism and Liberation. His prominent Blue Lives Matter flag in the background of his picture during the virtual meeting sparked rage from many students. The open display of the flag was seen by most as insensitive toward the recent attacks against the Black community and antagonistic towards efforts to combat police brutality and systemic racism.
According to Newton, the SRO programs in the Springs focus on restorative justice and think of alternative modes of discipline, understanding that “arrests are not productive.” District 11 currently requires all SROs to undergo a total of 40 hours of training to learn “crisis prevention, first aid, CPR, school law and juvenile law,” and Newton fears the removal of SROs in Colorado Springs’ public schools will lead to fewer conversations between students and law enforcement.
According to Newton, without SROs working with students on campus to address their misbehavior and “talk about it,” officers called to the scene may become “reactive” and resort to the easiest form of discipline: arrest.
During a phone interview, Newton expressed how SROs are aware of child misconduct as an intrinsic part of “growing up.”
“We’re not perfect. We’re human,” said Newton. “And we can turn a student’s bad moment into a learning moment.”
According to Newton, the CSPD is not quick to criminalize adolescent misbehavior. Instead, they try to counteract disorderly conduct with restorative measures, which could include facilitated conversations or collaboratively working with students to determine consequences.
Yet, the arrest and suspension of 12-year-old Isaiah Elliot this past August tells a different story.
On Aug. 27, Isaiah, a Black student who attended Colorado Springs’ Grand Mountain School at the time, was arrested by SROs in his own home for waving a toy Nerf gun during a class Zoom call. What was seemingly a harmless act quickly escalated into a five-day suspension and a “record” with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office. Or, as The Washington Post called it, “a mark on his school disciplinary paperwork saying he brought a ‘facsimile of a firearm to school’—even though he was in his own home doing a virtual class.”
Indeed, the punitive actions inflicted on Isaiah do not quite align with the “restorative practices” that Newton claimed the CSPD supported.
Isaiah’s story and many others points to the ineffectiveness and harm of SROs in school settings. Although seen as defenders against school shootings and school violence by some, SROs have the abusive power to turn “academic punishment” into “criminal punishment,” as the advocacy organization Rethinking Schools points out.
A review of minutes from school board meetings from August to October of three school districts in the Colorado Springs area reveals no discussion about SROs. They include Colorado Springs School District 11, Falcon School District 49, and Harrison School District 2.
This lack of effort to incorporate policing into school district discussions can be disheartening for many students and family members like Dani Elliot, Isaiah’s mother, who told the Post in an interview that it was “irresponsible” for the school to send SROs to her house “given the frequency of police violence against Black people.”
Around the nation, however, the debate over SROs rages on.
School districts in cities such as Portland, Seattle, and Oakland are making the call to terminate their contracts with law enforcement and rid their schools of police officers.
But, for Colorado Springs, as long as the district school board members choose to ignore the issue altogether, the SROs—at least for now—are here to stay.