The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
More than half of Vermont’s school districts use armed school resource officers to ensure school safety, according to a VTDigger analysis. But skeptics are casting doubt on whether those officers are effective — and drawing attention to persistent disparities in how they treat students.
As part of a national wave of calls to defund police, activists have pressed school officials in Burlington and beyond to end the use of SROs. There is scant or conflicting evidence that police curb criminality in schools, and research shows that students of color and students with disabilities bear the brunt of disciplinary actions.
SROs and local police departments argue that officers in schools can help foster positive relationships between young students and law enforcement, and limited data in Burlington shows a decline in juvenile arrests following reforms to the district’s SRO program.
But some students of color say that’s not enough to justify the presence of armed officers with the same powers as regular police.
“As somebody who survived ethnic cleansing, as somebody who survived political turmoil and refugee camps — even until today … I still feel scared of police officers,” said Indra Acharya, a 2014 Winooski High graduate whose family came from Bhutan. “They represent somebody to be fearful of, and represent somebody to be afraid of, rather than somebody that we should reach out to.”
**Podcast transcript**
This week: as part of the ongoing debate over police reforms, racial justice advocates are continuing to push school districts to remove police officers from schools. More than half of Vermont’s high schools use armed school resource officers, or SROs, to ensure school safety. But skeptics are casting doubt on whether those officers are effective — and drawing attention to persistent disparities in how they treat students.
On Tuesday night, a subcommittee of the Burlington School Board heard public comment on SROs.
Khadija Bangoura: My name is Khadija Bangoura and I’m an alumni of the Burlington school district…
Throughout the meeting, students of color said the presence of these officers actually made them feel less safe.
Khadija Bangoura: As a young Black girl in these schools, I have experienced the unfair and uncomfortable policing of our bodies, the disciplinary tactics rooted in intolerance, racism in terms of evaluating physical and mental wellbeing of children of color, and an unwillingness to hear and respond to the safety of the Black and brown student body.
On Thursday night, the school board voted to continue to fund the program and set up a task force to evaluate it. But some version of this debate could now be playing out in districts across the state. Our education reporter Lola Duffort has more.
Lola Duffort: We are talking about SROs right now because Vermont, like the rest of the country, has started taking a really serious look at policing in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. And as part of the wider conversation about whether or not to reform or defund police, people are reexamining the use of police in schools.
Khadija Bangoura: By standing behind school resource officers, you are ignoring the direction of the movement of this country. You’re ignoring the trauma that lives in young policed bodies. You are upholding white supremacy by putting white students’ needs above the Black and brown students.
Lola Duffort: Vermont, also like the rest of the country, has been increasingly putting police in schools. I submitted a public records request with every superintendent in the state, and more than half said, yes, we have a police officer in our schools, usually the high school. Vermont schools are spending about $2 million a year on law enforcement services.
This is a lot of money.
Lola Duffort: Yes, which is a lot of money. And the reason that we’re spending all this money, the reason that police have been put in schools, is because of concerns about drug use and also mass shootings.
What does a school resource officer’s job actually look like? What do they do on a day to day basis?
Lola Duffort: School resource officers will say that they’re in schools to provide basic security. So if something does come up, they’re there, right? Their response time is zero minutes.
Jessica Norris: We are there to provide a safe, conducive environment, a learning environment, for the students. So first of all, I would say that we’re brought on board with the staff, and we want to make sure the kids are safe, the staff members are safe, for learning and carrying out their daily tasks.
Lola Duffort: I had a long conversation with the SROs in Burlington — and they also say that it is to create better relationships and closer relationships between police departments and schools — that by being in schools all day, that can really get to know the kids, get to know their families. And that puts a friendly face on law enforcement and gives police better information about the communities that they are policing.
The argument is that when it works well, because students know school resource officers, and they feel comfortable with them, if there is a crisis situation, there is a police officer that they know and trust.
Jessica Norris: For a school resource officer, it’s in that order for a reason. You know, we’re in the schools to help teach. That’s our main thing. Our second thing is the “resource”: we’re there as a resource for the staff, for the students. So like if there’s some type of issue or problem, we work with the staff to provide great resources for the students.
Lola Duffort: Another thing they say is that they exist as this kind of overall social service. That they perform this role of a quasi- counselor and social worker. And that’s something that critics have a really big problem with. Because they say that we’re asking police to perform a role which they are fundamentally not equipped to perform. They say, if you want police to act like social workers, just hire a social worker.
I wonder what these officers look like from a student’s perspective. When you’ve talked to people who have dealt with school resource officers as students, what do they tell you?
Lola Duffort: They’ve, particularly students of color, have said that they could feel threatening. I talked to one Winooski High graduate who remembered in the cafeteria, the SROs always being behind the Black and brown students, particularly black Somali students.
Indra Acharya: Police officers were sitting behind Black and brown students, particularly Black students, most of whom are Somali, resettled Somali. When I looked at a pattern of what we may call — I don’t believe in this wording, but — “disruptive behavior,” it’s not only the students of color. I see white kids jumping on the table. But the words that are used there is, “Hey, sweetie, honey, do you mind?” But when you’re talking to students of color, it quickly becomes, “Hey man, what’s up?” It’s like you are all of a sudden seeing these students of color as grown adults. That’s how the language works.
Lola Duffort: I spoke to Indra Acharya, who is a Winooski High graduate. He just got a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, so he spends a lot of time with education research. He came to the United States as a refugee from Bhutan, grew up in a refugee camp. And he still feels quite uncomfortable with the presence of someone in a uniform with a gun, because of his experience as a refugee.
Indra Acharya: As somebody who survived ethnic cleansing, as somebody who survived political turmoil and refugee camp — even until today, even after doing a lot of work and being successful in a professional way, I still feel scared of police officers.
Lola Duffort: Acharya’s experience is particularly relevant here, because a substantial portion of people of color in Vermont came to the U.S. as refugees. And if you have experienced armed agents of the state engaging in genocide or ethnic cleansing, the sight of someone in a uniform with a gun can be retraumatizing.
Indra Acharya: They represent somebody to be fearful of and represent somebody to be afraid of. Rather than somebody that we should reach out to.
Lola Duffort: A really interesting thing that I kept hearing from students of color is that sometimes the cops themselves were fine, and were nice, and were perfectly professional and didn’t bother them at all. But that there was this concern that they could be called upon by teachers and administrators, and heighten the consequences for preexisting racism within the school.
Indra Acharya: Whenever students of color challenged the teachers — especially like, I was in one ESL class — the teachers were quick to jump, saying, “Hey, do you want me to call officer X?” They were quick to say that. And to me, it’s like: you understand the preexisting trauma among these people, and you’re willing to use that against them. They have a clear sense that they can intimidate, using police officers as a tool.
Lola Duffort: Some former students that I talked to definitely talked about having had and seen negative racialized interactions between police in the schools and students, but plenty of students of color, current and former, that I talked to hadn’t had those negative experiences and generally felt like the police officers had been kind and respectful. And they were still emphatic that they shouldn’t be there, which I thought was really interesting.
They weren’t arguing that, you know, it’s about this particular horror story that may or may not have happened — it’s about the structural function of a police officer inside of a school. They were saying, maybe that one police officer was a really good guy, didn’t treat me badly. But the presence of a police officer still represents an added risk for most students of color and is experienced as such.
I guess a big question here is, what do we know about whether or not school resource officers actually work? How do we quantify whether or not they are actually making schools safer — or making students feel safer?
Lola Duffort: That’s kind of the fundamental question. Basically, everyone I spoke to who was critical of school resource officers kind of brought it back to that question. Like, why are they there? Can we point to really a single metric of success for them?
The evidence that they make schools safer is pretty sparse and conflicting. If we put school officers because we’re worried about mass shootings, there’s basically no evidence that they deter them. And if we want them to curb general criminality, there’s also very little evidence that they curb that. There are some surveys that show that some students feel safer when they’re around, but those students tend to be white. Students of color tend to feel very differently in surveys.
There’s a very big open question about whether or not there’s good evidence that they make schools safer in any measurable way. There is some research that indicates that they might actually negatively impact academic achievement because of their impact on school climate. And there is a substantial body of research that shows that students of color and students with disabilities bear a disproportionate brunt of their punitive actions. School-based arrests on the whole tend to fall on the shoulders of students of color and students with disabilities.
Jay Diaz: You know, an officer’s job is very different than that of an education professional. An officer’s job is to enforce the law. And so when they enter school, they may see the behavior of children with developmental learning disabilities and emotional disabilities, mental health needs, as criminal acts, even when they are developmentally appropriate for kids. And so those officers will give court citations and make arrests.
Lola Duffort: Jay Diaz is a lawyer at the ACLU. And before he was at the ACLU, he was actually at Vermont Legal Aid, where he wrote a report, based on federal data, analyzing exclusionary discipline in Vermont schools. So suspensions and expulsions. His report is basically the only kind of solid analysis we have in Vermont about discipline and how it falls disproportionately on marginalized communities, namely students with disabilities and students of color.
And one thing that he brings up that I think is really interesting is also the idea of oversight and inconsistency in how school resource officers are deployed around the state.
Jay Diaz: If a school is going to have police officers stationed in a school, which we don’t think they should do, it is better to have strict guidelines and procedures around those officers’ role than not.
Lola Duffort: In general, from what you’ve seen, do schools not have very good guidelines about, you know, what a SRO should or should not do?
Jay Diaz: Generally, schools have no guidelines around what the role of a so-called school resource officer will be when they are in the school.
Lola Duffort: People will often say, “the police are not there to enforce the law. They’re basically social workers.” He points out that police officers who are stationed in schools have no specialized training about how to interact with students, or how to interact with students that have particular and sometimes very acute emotional or mental health needs. And that they are not equipped to handle a dysregulated child that is acting out because of a disability, and that they often cannot recognize it as such, and so will react in punitive and sometimes retraumatizing ways.
Jay Diaz: Their job is to enforce the law. So I think that regardless of anecdotal experiences, the result or the idea that police are not going to do their job when they’re in a school is simply not borne out by the facts.
Lola Duffort: In Vermont, the data is not very good, because no one has bothered to really track it. The federal government requires some tracking of this information, but the data is quite old. What data we have does show very troubling, frankly stunning disparities. In the 2013 and 2014 school year, according to federal data, Black students made up just over 2% of the overall student population, but 23.3% of all school-based arrests.
In Burlington, there has been some tracking by the local PD. It’s been very hard for me to get it from them, but they presented some numbers to the school board in early 2019. Numbers from the local police department do show that there has been a pretty significant overall drop in juvenile arrests since the reforms in Burlington were put into place. What data I have seen has shown still pretty shocking disparities when it comes to race.
When you talk about reforms that have been put in place in Burlington, what exactly are we talking about there?
Lola Duffort: Right. So a common critique of school resource officers is that they supercharge this existing dynamic of exclusionary discipline — that’s suspensions, expulsions — falling disproportionately on students of color and students with disabilities. A common critique of police in schools is that they supercharge this dynamic, and that kind of run the mill misbehavior winds up criminalized. So that you get in a fight, and instead of that ending in detention or suspension, it winds up with a simple assault charge.
Burlington tried to address this concern in 2015 with a memorandum of understanding that it signed between the local PD and the school district. This memorandum of understanding states pretty clearly that police are not to be involved in run of the mill disciplinary matters. And it explicitly states the kinds of things that police officers should not be involved in. That includes loitering, or fights that don’t include a weapon. And so it’s very interesting that the debate is happening most loudly in Burlington, that the calls to yank police from schools are happening in a place that has enacted reforms that attempt to address the most common critique and concern about police in schools.
What do we know about whether that MOU has had an effect?
Lola Duffort: Well, I had a long conversation with the SROs in Burlington and they seem to take that really seriously. And a really interesting thing that one of them even said was, it’s something that I have to remind the school employees of.
Cpl. Mike Hemond: We really have to harp on that. You know, we have issues that come up where someone says, “Hey, you know, this kid. He won’t go to class. He is in the hallway. He’s already, he’s loitering in the cafeteria. He…” whatever. That’s not what we do. That’s not what we’re there for.
Lola Duffort: And he even joked about it. He was like, sometimes I see kids who are clearly cutting class and I’m like, “Hey, are you getting your steps in?”
Another thing they said is, we don’t engage in truancy calls. Because again, that would kind of create this unnecessary conflict between us, and we want students to see us as a resource.
Cpl. Mike Hemond: I don’t know how I would file a truancy charge against you one day and then see to mediate dispute between one thing or another the next day. That would be hard for me to.
So they see the MOU as really concretely drawing lines on what they can and can’t do.
Lola Duffort: Yes. And they think it’s a good idea. And in fact, school officials, like the director of equity there, who’s a Black man, will say that because we have these rules in place, the police officers in Burlington are really able to build positive relationships and create trusting relationships with students.
Kind of touting the success of these reforms, the acting chief of police pointed out that overall juvenile arrests had dropped pretty significantly since 2017. He’ll argue that that’s because those relationships have been built as SROs are able to intervene on behalf of students who might have otherwise been arrested, which is interesting. But at the same time, the arrests that do happen still fall disproportionately on people of color.
Given that this has now become this major topic of conversation, what are the possible outcomes here?
Lola Duffort: I think that will depend on what school boards in Vermont decide to do. Advocates on a statewide level are starting to really pressure school officials to reconsider the use of police in schools. So I think we’ll have to see whether or not school boards choose to pick up that conversation. I’ve heard anecdotally that they are.
And I think also something to keep in mind is that everyone is hard up for money. So I think that that will play into this, right? The fact that there is a giant hole in the education fund, and school districts across the state are going to be under pressure to find places to cut.
And this could be one of them.
Lola Duffort: And this could definitely be one of them.
Obviously, this conversation is happening now because of this kind of national reckoning that we’re having about race. And school boards across the country, including in very large metro areas, are suddenly cutting ties with local police departments at kind of a stunning pace. But calls to do this have been coming from advocates for a very long time, and it hasn’t just been racial justice advocates. It’s also been people who work with children with disabilities, and it’s also civil liberty advocates and low income advocates.
So this isn’t just a conversation about race. In a lot of ways, it’s about students with disabilities. I imagine that in a lot of places in Vermont, The conversation will focus on that population, which is very substantial in every community across Vermont.
Right. And it seems like given what you’ve said about the perspectives of students here, in a lot of ways, it’s kind of broadly a conversation about what we want our schools to look and feel like.
Lola Duffort: Yeah. And it’s also a conversation about reform versus kind of a more radical reimagining. And I think that’s why it’s so interesting that the conversation happened first and most loudly in Burlington, which is a place that has done reform. I was talking to Skyler Nash, who is with the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, and he basically said, this is a perfect example of how reform when it comes to police is inadequate. What we need is to think more deeply about what we want our communities to look like.
Got it. Thanks, Lola.
Lola Duffort: Thanks, Mike.
