Our Turn: SROs and the impact of policing in schools
For the Monitor
Published: 4/19/2021 2:47:02 PM
The article “School Resource Officers: The ‘Gatekeepers’ of Juvenile Court Diversion” (Granite State News Collaborative, posted April 19 at concordmonitor.com) paints an inaccurate, incomplete picture of the role that police officers, called school resource officers (SROs), play in New Hampshire schools.
It ignores data-driven evidence and fails to question the unsustainable propensity to place society’s problems (mental health crises, substance misuse, and education deficits) at the feet of law enforcement, regardless of cost or result. We have put too much responsibility on police officers, trapping us in a false narrative that ultimately paints the role of SROs as partisan. It is not.
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Highlands School Board will vote Monday on hiring a new firm to provide unarmed security services for the district.
The board will be voting on a three-year agreement with Universal Protection Service, doing business as Allied Universal Security Services, of Conshohocken, Montgomery County.
The agreement began March 5 or 25; both dates were used in the service agreement. District officials did not respond when asked to clarify which date was correct.
District officials also did not respond when asked how the district could have entered into the contract beginning before a school board vote to approve it.
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Ames Tribune
After two girls allegedly got into a fight in the Ames Middle School restroom, an associate principal reported the incident to the school resource officer.
The officer referred the 11-year-old and 12-year-old students to juvenile court for disorderly conduct, a simple misdemeanor.
That same month, November 2018, Ames High School staff saw a 16-year-old boy walk out of a bathroom that purportedly smelled of marijuana. A series of resulting verbal confrontations ended with the student being escorted out of the building and charged with disorderly conduct for loud and raucous noise, according to a police log.
The Ames Tribune analyzed summaries of the 45 total incidents in which the Ames Police Department said students were charged at school during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. The reports were obtained from the police department through an open records request. A review of the incidents provides a glimpse into how administrators and officers decide when
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