Having law enforcement officers in schools is not a new concept. The first school resource officer (SRO) was assigned to a school in Flint, Michigan, in the 1950s. But after several high-profile acts of school violence, such as what occurred at Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School, SROs are more commonplace than ever before.
In 2003, there were nearly 20,000 SROs. The National Center for Education Statisticsrecently estimated that in 2013 there were as many as 30,000. As our nation begins another school year, it is quite possible that the number of SROs will continue to rise.
One measure of how some schools’ priorities have changed is that, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, 1.6 million children attend a school that has an SRO but not a school counselor. Further, minority students are more likely than white students to attend a school where an SRO is present but there is no school counselor.
The reasons why schools have SROs vary, ranging from attempting to keep students safe from intruders, to taking a proactive measure to reduce crime in schools, to trying to promote a more orderly school environment, to fostering more trust among police, youth and communities. There is still a dearth of research substantiating whether SROs actually create safer, more orderly learning environments for students or foster more trust. Further, too many of us still fail to fully appreciate the serious repercussions of having more law enforcement involvement in our schools.
[For more of this story, written by Jason P Nance, go to http://jjie.org/teachers-sros-...stice-system/303258/]
Comments (0)