by Tom Rose
In our recent blog on Keeping Kids Out of Jail we mentioned that revisiting the policies that led to placing school resource officers in Wyoming schools would significantly reduce Wyoming's second-in-the-nation juvenile arrest and incarceration rates. In this blog we will explore some of those policies. While policy direction appears to support expansion of the SRO program in Wyoming it appears that state funding for implementation of the recommendations has not been secured. This means that there may be enough time to prevent implementation of these proposed programs before our prevalent problems expand to include the nightmarish scenarios documented in our blog The Troubling Trend of Elementary School Arrests.
In researching the background materials leading to Wyoming's adoption of the same SRO and other security programs that are sweeping the nation several things jumped out.
- SROs are being installed and security measures tightened for events that have not happened and that nobody has reason to expect in Wyoming
- Only the estimated benefits of these programs are being examined with no consideration of the deleterious effects on the youth that they are purporting to protect
- For decades prior to the institution of SRO programs Wyoming already had significantly less than national levels for violent juvenile crime or crimes against persons.
- The low levels of violent juvenile crimes and crimes against persons should not be permitted to be linked to the presence of SROs increasingly in schools – they are NOT causatively linked.
- This is incorrect logic and is being used to justify an unnecessary program in Wyoming that is leading schools and communities in the wrong direction.
- There may still be time to reverse this trend.
In 2013 Governor Mead established a School Safety and Security Task Force.
During its inaugural meeting in January 2013, the task force determined that Wyoming has no baseline standards for evaluating safety needs, nor guidelines driving continuous review and improvement. It also identified three immediate priorities:
1) Increase the number of School Resource Officers in Wyoming schools
2) Update/modify schools with controlled access systems
3) Develop a comprehensive crisis management training program for district staff. Based on these priorities, the task force was divided into three subcommittees to evaluate and focus on different issues: School Resource Officers, Facilities Analysis, and Response Planning and Training.
No other directions were considered. The blithe assumption that SRO presence and increase was by default the direction to go is based on flawed data that is simply not relevant to Wyoming.
The report out of this committee, written ten months after the initial meeting, confirmed that this committee did not at any time consider any alternative directions for enhancing the security of Wyoming schools. The three subcommittees are focused on the recommendations and eventual implementation of a three-pronged approach to school security:
1. SROs in every Wyoming school – paid for at least partially by state funds
2. Facilities analysis
In other words, secured entrances, metal detectors, closed campuses which we will discuss at-length in a future blog.
3. Response planning and training
This subcommittee made recommendations such as increasing "anti terrorism drills" which are controversial to say the least. National stories on anti terrorism drills include police firing weapons at students, "pretend" bus hijackings, "relocation" drills and many other so-called "security" exercises.
At no point were the demographics and actual needs of Wyoming, Wyoming students and Wyoming families taken into consideration. It does not appear that these recommendations have yet been fully funded. There may be opportunity to become more genuinely informed and less reactive.
In a series of blogs we will consider specific recommendations and findings of this task force. We will compare these opinion-based recommendations to actual proven and demonstrated statistics to show that these policies are being created based on inflammatory stories that have little to no relevance to Wyoming's needs.
Yes, school shootings are tragic and horrifying and we should make sure that we continue not to have them in Wyoming. We should not go about this continued prevention of violence by instituting policies that are designed to criminalize, marginalize and disenfranchise the very people that the policies purport to be designed to protect.