In most Vermont high schools, school resource officers — armed, uniformed law enforcement officials with the same powers as regular police — can be found patrolling the halls.
Their purpose, according to school officials, is to help students address conflicts, provide security, and build bridges between law enforcement and local communities.
But as the country grapples with calls to reform or defund police in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, SROs are facing fresh scrutiny, and districts in some of the country’s largest metro areas are considering severing ties with law enforcement.
A debate about whether to do the same is now raging in Burlington, where Khadija Bangoura, a 2017 graduate of Burlington High, had sharp words for her alma mater’s officials this week.
“By standing behind school resource officers, you are ignoring the direction of the movement of this country, you are ignoring the trauma that lives in young people’s bodies,” Bangoura said. “You are upholding white supremacy by putting white students’ needs above the Black and brown students.”
Her testimony before a school board subcommittee Tuesday comes as the city is under unprecedented pressure by racial justice activists – and hundreds of community members – to dramatically reduce the number of cops in the Queen City and to pull all officers from its schools. In a split vote on Thursday, school board members endorsed keeping the district’s SROs for another year, but said they would create a task force to evaluate the need for the program in the long run.
The call to eliminate school resource officers is loudest in Burlington, the state’s largest city and one of Vermont’s most diverse communities. But it is already echoing elsewhere in the state, where civil liberty and disability-rights advocates also say police make schools less safe, not more.
“Vermont schools are no more secure since the introduction of police in our schools and the criminalization of often age-appropriate behavior, or behavior directly attributable to a student’s disability,” reads an open letter to all school boards released by Vermont Legal Aid this week.
A police officer is now a fixture in a slim majority of Vermont school districts. VTDigger filed public records requests with every school district in the state for their contracts with local law enforcement agencies. A majority of superintendents responded that an SRO was stationed in at least one of the schools they oversaw.
Most districts budgeted between $50,000 and $80,000 for one officer, usually at the high school. But a handful spent much more. The Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union, which is headquartered in Bennington, spent the most – $311,000.
The SVSU is an outlier for another reason. The bulk of the money – $245,000 – was slated to pay for police details inside its elementary schools, according to figures provided by the superintendent’s office.
Parental concerns about school shootings prompted the schools to partner with police, according to Dick Frantz, the chair of the supervisory union board. But he said an added benefit had been to improve the way young people viewed police.
“It turned out to be a real good relationship that developed between kids, who were told about the cops catching you. That the cops are actually human beings and interesting people,” he said.
Collectively, Vermont schools were on track to spend more than $2 million this school year for policing services, according to budget figures and contracts provided by superintendents.
The total cost to the taxpayer is likely higher. Several school districts split the cost with their local police departments, and in Burlington and the Essex-Westford school district, the police, and not the schools, paid for the full cost of the SRO programs. Three school leaders — in South Burlington, Rivendell and the Two Rivers Supervisory Union — did not respond to the records request.
Do police do more harm than good?
Interest in — and taxpayer funding for — school resource officer programs surged nationally in the 1990s in response to concerns over mass shootings and drug use. But there is scant or conflicting evidence that putting police in schools deter shootings or curbs criminality. And a growing body of research suggests an increased police presence might negatively impact academic achievement.
Racial justice activists, and advocates for low-income families and people with disabilities have had longstanding concerns about the use of police in schools. Officers are ill-equipped to handle the needs of marginalized communities, they argue, and in fact more likely to do more harm than good.
A substantial body of national research — and a more limited one in Vermont — has shown that discipline in schools is meted out more frequently, and more harshly, to students of color, students with disabilities and low-income students.
Critics charge that police in schools supercharge this dynamic and wind up criminalizing run-of-the-mill misbehavior. In this way, they say, a schoolyard fight ends not with a detention or suspension but an assault charge. Research on school-based arrests in Vermont is scarce. But what data exists frequently show that arrests fall disproportionately on certain populations, and particularly Black minors.
“If the justification for having police officers in school is to keep people safe – by and large, they have the opposite effect,” said Jay Diaz, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Vermont.
To allay those concerns, and under pressure from school board members, Burlington’s administrators enacted reforms in 2015 to keep police out of disciplinary matters.
A memorandum of understanding between the district and police – which Diaz helped draft – says SROs must be kept out of routine behavioral problems. Public order offenses, like disorderly conduct, loitering, profanity fighting that does not include injury or a weapon, should be handled by school officials, the MOU says, not police.
Cpl. Mike Hemond, the SRO assigned to Burlington High, says he takes that division of labor seriously.
“We really have to harp on that,” Hemond said. “We have issues that come up where someone says, ‘Hey, you know, this kid won’t go to class. He is in the hallway, he’s tardy, he’s loitering in the cafeteria, he’s — whatever.’ That’s not what we do. That’s not what we’re there for.”
Instead, Hemond said he and Jessica Norris, the officer assigned to Burlington’s middle schools, work with district staff to plan and practice emergency drills, mediate conflicts between students, carry naloxone and help direct students to mental health and social service supports. When students have questions about the legal system, he said, they often come to them.
“I showed up at a domestic and the kid that was involved comes running out of the building and runs past the other cops to come talk to me,” Hemond said, “because he knows me.”
Henri Sparks, the Burlington school district equity director, who is Black, said he understands the tension between police and people who look like him.
But he thinks that in Vermont, “we have an opportunity of really setting a different model and building relationships with the police that can be beneficial and healthy for students.”
Mohamed Abdi, a 2016 BHS graduate, recalled the SRO during his time in high school was “the nicest person ever.” And for the most part, the officer’s presence mostly faded into the background.
“And that’s actually the issue right there. Like, kids should not be getting used to having a cop with a gun at school,” Abdi said.
The Community College of Vermont student, who is Black, says he’s had plenty of negative interactions with police while out in the community, which he felt were racially motivated. So for Abdi, the idea of putting a friendly face on law enforcement is backward.
Instead of trying to convince communities that the police are non-threatening by stationing them in schools, he wonders, why not just ensure that officers in the streets treat everyone fairly?
“Our mindset is fine. It’s their mindset that needs to get fixed. They got to make sure that we can see, by their actions, that they are more trustworthy,” he said.
New Americans say police can be traumatizing
Chittenden County’s diversity is thanks, in large part, to a substantial number of New Americans. And for students who came to the U.S. as refugees, the very presence of an armed person in a uniform can be re-traumatizing, said Indra Acharya, a 2014 graduate of Winooski High.
“As somebody who, you know, survived ethnic cleansing, as somebody who survived political turmoils and refugee camp, even until today, even after you know, doing a lot of work and being successful in a professional way – I still feel scared of police officers,” said Acharya, who was raised in a Nepali refugee camp after his family fled Bhutan in the 1990s.
In high school, Acharya remembers the police doing little to mitigate his anxiety. In one class for English language learners, he recalled teachers being quick to discipline students by threatening to call the SRO. In the cafeteria, the officer usually sat behind the school’s Black students – at the time, largely Somalis.
Acharya has just received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and is now back living in Vermont. He’s recently gotten back in touch with the Winooski School Board to demand they eliminate police from the schools and redirect funds to mental health counselors, restorative justice, or trauma specialists.
“We should rather be spending our resources in addressing those root causes,” he said.
Police as social workers
Administrators who defend the use of police in schools frequently say that SROs are there less to enforce the law than they are to act as an all-purpose social service resource.
Dave Wolk, the outgoing superintendent of the Rutland City School District, wrote to a reporter that the district’s last two SROs had essentially functioned “as social workers, playing basketball with kids, sitting with them in the cafeteria, making home visits, etc.”
“It’s been really good and the kids see them as friends and role models. Nothing like we see on the national news,” he said.
But police officers aren’t social workers, Diaz said, nor are they mental health counselors. Individual districts might require police in their schools to attend training, but no statewide mandate requires SROs to have any specialized credentials.
“They’re not trained on how to respond to children, period,” he said. “Let alone how to respond to them in developmentally appropriate ways that will enable the child to learn from an experience as opposed to being traumatized.”
Marilyn Mahusky, a staff attorney with Legal Aid’s Disability Law Project, said the group had represented two students this school year alone who had wound up in the criminal justice system because of a disability-related behavior at school.
In one case, officers handcuffed an 11-year-old autistic boy and arrested him on charges of simple assault and disorderly conduct. In another, a 16-year-old with anxiety and a history of trauma left the classroom — which he was permitted to do under his special education plan — and ran into a police officer in the halls. When the officer questioned the student, the teen swore at him. Mahusky said the officer grabbed the boy, who was then suspended, and later charged him with criminal threatening, disorderly conduct, and unlawful mischief.
“Those are clearly two instances where you have disability-related behavior that’s happening in the schools, and instead of focusing on the students’ disability-related need and addressing it through that mechanism, they’re resorting to law enforcement,” she said.
Juvenile arrests in Burlington are down
No statewide effort tracks school-based arrests or referrals to law enforcement in Vermont. The state’s Agency of Education does not collect such information.
Schools are required to submit such data to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights every two years. But the surveys are old — the most recent is from the 2015-16 school year.
An analysis released by Education Week in 2017, using federal data collected from the 2013-14 school year, showed that Black students in Vermont accounted for a staggering 23.3% of school-based arrests, despite making up only 2.4% of the student population.
At a recent Burlington Board of Finance meeting, acting Police Chief Jon Murad presented data showing a sharp decline in overall juvenile arrests in the city since 2017. And he attributed that to the success of the reformed SRO program in the school district.
“SROs often are now called by patrol officers when patrol officers interact with juveniles. So patrol officers will defer it to the SROs and say ‘Do you know something else about this case that I don’t? Do you know this kid?’ And SROs will often forestall arrests in those instances,” he said.
But statistics provided by the department to the Burlington School Board show that startling racial disparities in juvenile arrest rates remain. Black students only make up about 16% of the district’s student population. But in three of the last eight years, Black minors have accounted for a greater number of arrests than white minors, who currently make up about 61% of all students.
Mahusky, from Vermont Legal Aid, said it’s certainly possible that, with the proper policies and training in place, police might be able to play a positive role in schools. But she’d like to see the evidence to back up claims that such reforms can work.
“Because we do have the data on the other side of the argument, right? We have the data to show the impact that it has on kids,” she said.
Skyler Nash, a member of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, said it’s no surprise that calls to remove police from schools are most forceful in Burlington, despite the reforms put into place in 2015.
An officer’s presence, Nash argues, by its nature escalates the potential consequences for Black and brown youth. The debate in the state’s largest city, the UVM student said, is “such a perfect microcosm of how people are saying we’re tired of these small reforms in place of big, radical action.”
“As people of color, we know that you can put together these nice documents and policy reforms and say, ‘You’re not allowed to do this. You’re not allowed to do that,’” he added. “And it’s still going to happen. And more than anybody, it’s going to happen to us.”
