Alternative Directions for In-School Discipline

Police officers stationed at schools are generally known as School Resource Officers (SROs). According to the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), the formalized organization of SROs began in 1991 although alternative sources predate the existence of SROs by several decades.

Irrespective of the history of SROs there is little disagreement that school shootings in the United States have prompted SROs to be the single largest growth category of law enforcement officers in the U.S. According to a 2013 survey by Campus Safety Magazine 88% of responding K-12 schools have made security and emergency management changes in reaction to tragic school shootings and particularly the mass killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in December of 2012. The Congressional Research Service published a report on School Resource Officers in June 2013 which led to an even more rapid increase in SROs in schools.

According to Kevin Quinn, President of NASRO in June 2014, an estimated 10,000 SROs work at K-12 public schools in the U.S. The Everytown website reports that there have been more than 74 school shootings in the U.S. since the Sandy Hook incident.

Despite the widespread installation of police officers on school campuses, or perhaps because of it, school-based arrests for juveniles have not decreased. In fact, there are indications that the presence of SROs actually increases criminal activity on school campuses by criminalizing the behavior of children which would previously have been handled by in-school disciplinary measures.

A heated report posted on the Huffington Post posits the widespread opinion that these SROs whose intention was to prevent tragedy, are actually creating the Troubling Trend of Elementary School Arrests.

"So here's an American reality of 2013: we will soon have more police in our schools, and more seven-year-olds like Joseph Andersons of PS 153 in Maspeth, New York, getting arrested. (He got handcuffed after a meltdown when his Easter egg dye-job didn't come out right.)

Brooklyn State Senator Eric Adams, who represents one of the most liberal districts in the country, has helpfully suggest(ed) that Velcro handcuffs might be more suitable than metal ones for arresting young children.

The metal detector at the schoolhouse door is threatening to become as iconic an American symbol as baseball or type 2 diabetes."

Is there an alternative to turning our schools into police states? According to a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, there is. They found that "…schools without police or metal detectors actually get significantly better educational results (higher graduation rates, lower truancy) than their heavily policed counterparts." The Annenberg report also located juvenile judge Steve Teske of Clayton County, Georgia who has reduced juvenile court referrals by 70% by "…forcing schools to handle minor disciplinary infractions without handcuffs or police arrests…"

Perhaps the most powerful example of a school which has chosen with deliberation to resist metal detectors and in-school police officers is Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

Columbine did not add armed guards or metal detectors to their campus following the 1999 school massacre. In fact, Columbine still remains an open campus where staff and administration have focused on communication between students and supervising adults. Columbine parents have supported this approach, wielding the considerable influence of their affluent community to resist the criminalization of their children as some misguided preventative measure.

The following chart shows categorized juvenile incarcerations comparing Wyoming to national statistics.

For a state like Wyoming where the actual incidents of juvenile crimes against persons are significantly lower than the national average, we should learn to be less reactive and more communicative. The increased presence of SROs in our Wyoming schools is not appropriate for the needs of our communities. Perhaps by talking more and arresting less we can take some steps to tangibly improve the life experiences for our Wyoming youth.