By: Oluwatobi Omotoso and Chase O’Neal
A recent story in the Daily State News praised the “trust” and safety fostered by the expansion of school resource officers and constables in Delaware public schools ("Constables, SROs bring trust to schools as Delaware lawmaker weighs expansion"). Research indicates that increasing the presence of law enforcement in schools has no meaningful positive effect on school safety or student conduct. Often, school resource officers reduce school connectedness and exacerbate disparities in how marginalized students are disciplined.
SROs often receive limited specialized training about students with disabilities, de-escalation and their unique role in educational settings. Since they are generally former or current law enforcement, SROs often rely heavily on training inapplicable to educational settings. This leads to arbitrary punishment and minimal improvement in public safety, while intensifying the use of suspension, expulsion, police referrals and student arrests — all tools of police, not educators. In Delaware, it is difficult to specifically identify the impact SROs might have already had, given the lack of transparency about their deployment; nonetheless, disciplinary disparities abound along lines of privilege across several Delaware schools.
A 2021 Center for Public Integrity analysis of U.S. Department of Education data found that “school policing disproportionately affects students with disabilities, Black children and, in some states, Native American and Latino children.” Specifically, it found that, on a national scale, Black students and students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement at “nearly twice their share of the overall student population.” This is partially because SROs are more likely to be placed at underfunded schools with a greater percentage of marginalized students.
In terms of effectiveness, another study of 12 schools using SROs found no significant relationship between student interactions with SROs and their feelings of safety. Notably, Black students felt less safe than their White counterparts. A nationwide school safety survey found that SROs “are not effective at preventing or reducing violence.” Because SROs are unable to reliably predict where student misconduct or danger will occur, they can only react to the incidents and record them after the fact.
SROs tend to have a negative impact on social harmony and achievement outcomes in schools. The atmosphere SROs can create often leads to a decrease in school connectedness, with students fearful of getting pulled into the disciplinary process for minor infractions — and for good reason. Students caught up in the overly punitive dragnet of in-school or out-of-school suspensions and expulsions tend to have severely worsened outcomes in academic achievement, high school graduation, General Educational Development acquisition and college attendance. This is likely because increased exclusionary discipline makes students less bonded with both their classmates and their teachers, particularly among Black, Hispanic and low-income students.
When students believe that they will not succeed in education or careers, they will have fewer incentives to obey school rules and are more likely to be punished by teachers and SROs, which leads to the pushout of low-performing, often marginalized students into the juvenile legal system. A 2017 report from the University of California, Irvine found that on-campus arrest rates for children under age 15 increased in areas where the federal government made grants available for SROs in 1999, showing a direct relationship between removal from the educational system due to these policies.
But none of this is particularly shocking, given that the racially charged moral panics around child “super predators” immediately predated the expansion of SROs in American schools. This tense atmosphere produced carceral solutions with complicated drawbacks, such as SROs.
In Delaware, the doubling down on SROs as good educational policy is particularly troubling, considering the significant achievement disparities facing the very groups SROs tend to negatively affect: minorities, low-income students and students with disabilities. Rather than address the enormous funding shortfall facing these school demographics, and Delaware learners generally, many administrators have instead decided to expend resources on ineffective programs that create an atmosphere of distrust, fear and danger for young Delawareans.
