SCASD Board Renews Agreements for School Resource Officers

The State College Area School Board on Monday voted to approve agreements that will continue to provide three school resource officers from local police departments .

As in the past, one State College police officer will be assigned full time to the high school and another to the Delta building and Mount Nittany Middle School. A Patton Township police officer will be assigned 20 hours a week to Park Forest Middle School. All three also will check in with elementary schools and extracurricular activities.

According to the memoranda of understanding with the municipalities, the school district will pay 75% of the State College officers’ salaries and 50% of the Patton Township officer’s salary.

SROs “figure prominently in school and campus security,” but are not involved in student discipline, Interim Superintendent Curtis Johnson wrote in a memo to the board. District officials have previously said SROs can assist in criminal cases involving students but do not make arrests or determine charges.

“…[I]t is important to note that SROs serve in multiple capacities, all of which are grounded in keeping students and employees safe,” Johnson wrote. “Moreover, SROs provide our district with specific training regarding emergency response, lead security audits of our campuses, and serve as a liaison between the district and our community’s first responders.”

The board voted 8-0 to approve the agreements, which are renewed on an annual basis. Carline Crevecoeur abstained, saying she felt the issue needed more community input.

“I really wish that we had a chance to get a lot of community input in this discussion because of all the emails we received and all the discussion that this had,” Crevecoeur said. “So this is what really kind of bothers me with this vote today, because I don’t think people really understood what we’re doing and I don’t think we had enough community input.”

Crevecoeur noted that among members of the public who spoke about the issue at a Climate, Culture and Learning Committee meeting in August, “not everyone sees SROs in the same light. Not everybody had the same experience.”

Some community members have urged the district to maintain or increase the number of SROs, citing the lack of officers in the elementary schools. (The district also employs two in-house security professionals at the high school and contracts with Standing Stone Consulting Inc. for up to 10 security officers at the high school and one each at the two middle schools.)

But others have questioned whether police officers should be in schools and asked the district to consider research that has found students of color tend to feel less safe with a school police presence and have a disproportionate number of negative interactions.

Cynthia Young, a member of the district’s Race and Marginalized Population working group, said perspectives often aren’t simply for or against having SROs. At an open house organized by the working group two years ago, it was the number one issue, she said..

“I was actually surprised that that was the number one issue because it’s not as if there had been an incident with an SRO in our district that had prompted it,” Young said. “But I think it speaks to the fact that this issue is complicated and it’s actually not just kind of pro or against. It’s very multi-layered. I say that as someone who knows a lot about these issues and what I think is missing in the discussion is that the issue of a SRO in the school isn’t just about whether we like the person doing it. It’s actually about the national climate and the regional climate and the state climate and the ways in which police violence is constantly in the news.”

Because of that, Young said more public education about the role of SROs is needed.

“If we had more public education around what an SRO does then we might also have discussions that were substantive and evidence-based and also based on research that is out there on the impact of SROs,” Young said. “But I guess most importantly we would have a clear sense of what the impact of having an SRO is on our students, which seems to me to be the most important point.”

SCASD is using the Pennsylvania School Climate Survey to help collect data about safety and security, including the perception of SROs within our schools and how they can best utilize them throughout our district,” Johnson said, adding the the survey and specific questions about SROs will be discussed at the next Culture, Climate and Learning Committee meeting.

Board member Peter Buck suggested the district hold a public issues forum “a really well-done, mediated, focused conversation,” about SROs. He also said the district should have liaison to the State College Community Oversight Board for the police department.

Young, who also chairs the Community Oversight Board, agreed.

“The COB can absolutely work with the school district to gather feedback, to think through the kinds of issues that an SRO presents,” she said.