A nationwide reckoning over race and policing has renewed scrutiny on school resource officer programs — essentially, stationing a police officer in a school. In several Vermont school districts, officials are under pressure to cut ties with police.
The state’s K-12 schools collectively spend about $2 million a year on partnerships that post armed officers inside hallways, a VTDigger analysis has shown. Now, some parents and students say cops in schools do little to actually improve safety, and the money would be better spent elsewhere.
In the Montpelier-Roxbury district, the school board is forming a committee to advise whether to get rid of the school resource officer, whose salary is split between the Montpelier city government and the school district.
At a recent school board meeting, several students said the district needs to do so if it wants to make good on the promises it made when it raised the Black Lives Matter flag to much fanfare in 2018.
Main Street Middle School teacher Bibba Kahn weighed in, too, with a brief statement about the difference between intent and impact.
“The intent of the program may be valid and lofty. That is clearly not the impact it’s having on our community,” said Kahn, who was named Vermont Teacher of the Year for 2020. “I think we need to act according to what that impact is and prioritize mental health resources and social workers for our students.”
A debate about a school resource officer is also raging in the Onion City, where a group of current and former students, who call themselves the Winooski Students for Anti-Racism, successfully lobbied their school district earlier this summer to adopt a slate of racial justice reforms.
The group’s demands included getting rid of the school resource officer and hiring trauma specialists to work with students. The board at first agreed, but reversed itself in mid-September, saying it needed more feedback from the community.
Sarah McGowan-Freije, former president of the Winooski PTO, said she doesn’t think the board should have accepted the group’s demands without wider input first. While “there’s a lot of systemic racism in police forces across the United States,” she’d like to see evidence that that’s true in Winooski.
“They are obligated to involve the community, engage the community, and get their feedback before they make any decisions,” McGowan-Freije said.
Indra Acharya, a Winooski High School graduate and an organizer with the student group, said a wider community conversation about safety is probably a great idea. But he said focusing on process is also a way to distract from the actual issue at hand — race.
“We use policy, we use process as a cover-up, as a veil to really hide our discomfort in talking about this. And that to me is concerning,” Acharya said.
Critics of school resource officer programs note that there is scant research to suggest that police in schools have succeeded at either deterring school shootings or curbing criminality. Meanwhile, a significant body of evidence nationally (and a smaller one in Vermont) shows that it is disproportionately students of color and students with disabilities who are arrested by cops in schools.
The term “school resource officer” is a misnomer, says Reier Erickson, a Maple Run Unified School District parent and a member of Neighbors for a Safer St. Albans, a community group calling for police reform.
“They’re not really providing resources to schools; they’re basically handling the things that principals and educators handled when I was in school 20-25 years ago,” Erickson said. “They’re breaking up fights. They’re stopping kids from doing the things that kids do, which is just act out.”
Research — in Vermont and nationwide — shows that suspensions and expulsions are doled out more often to low-income students, students with disabilities, and students of color. Disability and civil rights advocates frequently say that police in schools amplify this dynamic, and criminalize run-of-the-mill misbehavior.
That was apparently the case at BFA-St. Albans in 2019, when a teenager was handcuffed and arrested after administrators called on a school resource officer to search the boy’s backpack for contraband.
Body camera footage reviewed by Seven Days showed the teenager telling police the only thing in his bag was cologne. Ultimately, the student was not arrested for possessing an illegal substance, but instead was charged with disorderly conduct, a low-level misdemeanor, for yelling profanities at Officer David French.
The outcome of the criminal case is sealed, but the city government and the school district later paid the student’s family $30,000 to settle a civil rights complaint filed because the officer at one point told the 17-year-old, who had a disability, that he was “acting retarded.”
News of the incident and payout has fueled calls in the community for change. The school board now plans to form a committee to study whether to maintain the program, which costs nearly $250,000 a year — an outlier in cost for Vermont.
But the program has its defenders. At a Maple Run school board meeting earlier this month, several parents called in to say police stationed at the schools had built very positive relationships with their own children.
Steve Messier, a parent from St. Albans Town, said a “vocal minority” wanted to end the program, and said critiques were “based on a completely inaccurate and uninformed view of what the day-to-day interaction and responsibilities of an SRO consist of.”
Criticism of school resource officers “is steeped in a deep and oftentimes incoherent disdain for law enforcement on the whole,” he said.
Erickson says he believes school officials are taking the matter seriously, and giving genuine thought to reforming or ending the program. But he said if the ultimate decision is to keep police in the schools, the fight will continue.
“I’m just gonna keep attending school meetings until they stop. Because it’s just — there’s no sense behind it,” he said.
