By Caleb Moore
University of Connecticut Newswriting II
April 2020

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WOODBRIDGE — For long-time teacher and high school principal Anna Mahon, school resource officers (SROs) provide a valuable contribution to schools. However, not in the way many people think. “[SROs] are less and less the law enforcement agent in the school; it’s more and more the relationship-building and community policing,” she said. 

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Mahon is the principal of Amity Regional High School in Woodbridge, which serves around 1500 students from the town of Woodbridge and two surrounding towns: Orange and Bethany. Amity has had an SRO presence since the early 2000s, a time when increasingly-common school shootings and concerns about student safety prompted many high schools across the nation to consider hiring armed personnel. Mahon, who was teaching at the time of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, said the tragedy was a catalyst for attempts to make schools more secure. 

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However, she doesn’t believe that the defined purpose of an SRO these days is to make schools inherently safer by providing an armed presence. “The purpose of an SRO really has to be about the preemptive and proactive approaches to school safety, rather than just being a person trained to use a gun on school grounds.”

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According to a 2018 report by the State of Connecticut’s Office of Legislative Research, 70 of the 113 school districts in Connecticut employ school resource officers in some capacity. These districts primarily use the SROs in middle and high schools, but some also spend time at area elementary schools. Federal funding of police in schools ended in 2005, but Connecticut school districts have paid to retain SROs through either Board of Education budgeting or memorandums of understanding with local police departments. Many school districts across the country have similar setups.

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Josh Crow, a former student at Amity, remembers the presence of the SRO well. “I never saw [the officer] do anything I would call law enforcement, but he was always around. Especially at times when there were a lot of students in one place, like during the lunch waves and passing time between classes,” he said. He recalled that during those times, the SRO usually chatted with students or just circulated among them. 

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Crow also said that having a police officer in the school made him feel safer. “Personally, the fact that there’s someone in the building with training for crisis situations and the ability to take down a shooter makes me feel better. Obviously something bad could still happen, especially because Amity has a large footprint for one person to cover. But having a cop in the building makes response time exponentially smaller.” 

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While Crow had a positive experience with an SRO, the sentiment on police in schools varies across the board. Some parents and legislators have also criticized the practice of SROs for increasing the “school to prison pipeline,”  by having officers directly in schools and interacting regularly with students. The ACLU defines the school to prison pipeline as “the policies and practices that push our nation’s schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.” In other words, strict punitive measures taken against students for relatively minor offenses drive kids towards more aberrant behavior and eventually incarceration.

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A study published in a 2018 edition of Criminal Justice Policy Review by Mississippi State University researchers indicated that SROs were actually far less likely to report students to the juvenile justice system for status offenses like ungovernable behavior or possession of alcohol. A plurality of these types of reports were generated by the school itself rather than the SROs. SROs were the largest reporters of more serious offenses (labeled “moderate”) such as assault, probation violence and breach of peace. The study also found that over a three-year period, SROs were only responsible for a total of 3% of total reports to the juvenile justice system. The study concluded that the presence of SROs did not increase the size of the school to prison pipeline.

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Some also doubt that the SROs are actually improving the high school experience for students. Former Amity student Nathan Carney is one of those people.

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“First of all, I find it sad that young kids need an armed guard at their schools to protect them from their society and each other. I also think it’s absurd that minor misconduct issues are sometimes turned into criminal issues,” Carney said. “Kids are kids. High school is supposed to be a learning experience and I think minor things should be forgiven and treated as a learning experience.” 

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According to Mahon, the school resource officer at Amity is rarely involved in misconduct issues. Such things are left to Amity’s staff of six unarmed security guards (who are all former corrections officers) and one of the associate principals. The number of security guards on the grounds has increased over the past few years; Amity only employed three in 2017.

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In 2018 when shots broke out during a school shooting in Parkland, Fla. the school resource officer on the grounds of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School didn’t respond at all. Video from the event shows former Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson staying outside the school, and a press release from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement reported that “Mr. Peterson did not investigate the source of the gunshots, retreated during the shooting while victims were still under attack and directed other law enforcement officers to remain 500 feet away from the building.” Peterson was arrested in June of 2019 on multiple counts of child neglect and culpable negligence as a result of the investigation by FDLE. While Peterson’s inaction seems to be an isolated incident, it caused unease and doubts about the efficacy of a school resource officer. 

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Many Amity students both past and present said that they noticed very little (if any) impact on their time at Amity by the school resource officer. While their opinions on the concept of SROs varied, they largely agreed that the average student doesn’t encounter the SRO regularly or in a significant way. 

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School district budget shortages, SRO efficacy, community perception and student safety are all things school officials must take into account when considering instituting an SRO program at their school. These factors undoubtedly vary between districts, making it difficult to identify a program that’s proven to work. Schools also differ in what they seek from an SRO program, as their goals range from improved police-community relations to ending school shootings the moment they begin. “I think it’s important to have law enforcement at Amity just as part of our culture,” Mahon said. “It’s not because [the SRO] is here ‘cracking skulls and giving tickets’; he’s here to be a supportive member of our school.”