Many public schools have police on campus to prevent fights, handle weapons brought to classes, and respond to shootings. Frequently, they’re doing more. So-called school resource officers are enforcing student discipline and rules like no running in hallways. Districts are paying these officers a lot, and that money could otherwise go to hiring more teachers. Districts are also not closely tracking how the dollars are spent, or how officers are actually behaving inside campus gates. This is according to a new investigation by EdSource, co-authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Thomas Peele.
Peele tells KCRW that if you read the officers’ contracts, they’re sometimes listed as informal counselors, informal mentors, or teachers, though no requirements exist for what they teach or whether they're certified.
These officers are armed, he points out. “There's a phrase in one of the contracts that I'd never encountered before — they called him a fully-loaded police officer, meaning … all the equipment they'd have on the street, weapons, tasers, things like that, they have in the schools.”
Peele says what the officer does on campus varies by contract. But the U.S. Department of Justice, the National School Resource Officers Association, and the California School Boards Association all advise officers to simply be police, rather than staff who enforce school regulations.
“They are there to enforce criminal law. But not every school district has them do that. Not every school district has those restrictions in the contract. So some have language that is problematic about the enforcement of school rules, and others don't address school rule language at all.”
Peele says he spoke to experts who found troubling language in Fullerton Joint Union High School District’s contracts with three police departments. One bullet point in a contract says officers will investigate situations that arise from “student conduct at school,” which is vague and could be anything, Peele says. Another concern: A school administrator can order a police officer to search a student based on reasonable suspicion, which made one retired superior court judge aghast, Peele says.
Do schools generally welcome the presence of officers? That depends on who you ask.
"A school board member in Oxnard told me they have a fairly high percentage of students who have housing insecurity. And that indicates, perhaps, that the students may live in a neighborhood where police are frequent, or where police use force. … She thought that it was a very entitled prerogative to think every student would not be put off by seeing a police car in front of their school. And it depends sometimes on the ethnic groups and the social groups that the students come from. Police may be thought of as an invading force in their neighborhoods. They may have relatives who have been [the] subject of police use of force.”
Meanwhile, it can cost millions of dollars per academic year to have officers on campus, Peele says.
“The officers are provided by cities and counties. They're either police officers, sheriffs’ deputies, or probation officers. And their positions are budgeted by the city or county that employs them. But a vast majority of the contracts require the school district to pay the full employment cost of the officer, the officer’s salary, the officer’s benefits, sometimes the officer’s cellphone, sometimes the officer’s police car. And there are some school officials that call that double taxation.”
As resources are shrinking for public schools, Peele says board members seem generally checked out on financial oversight.
“A lot of these contracts are approved on … consent agendas, which are a list of things that the board has to vote on. And they can be very minor, mundane things. They can be ‘buy the sports trophies for the football team,’ or ‘okay a class to go on a field trip.’ They put these things together, sometimes 30 things in one vote, and oftentimes that's where the contract for the school resource officers are. … They whisk them through, they're gone as quickly as they can call the roll.”
Peele notes that he found active contracts and money changing hands when a school board hadn’t voted, and they casted their choices retroactively when he started asking questions. “In one case, they had to approve a contract that had expired two years earlier.”
What happens after a district disbands its school police department, like in Oakland? Staff simply dial 911 when they need law enforcement services, Peele says.
However, “the advocates for school resource officers would say that it's better to have the officers in the school where they can have relationships with people, where they're known entities, rather than the patrol cop who's nearest to a school going in on a 911 call. But one of the things we found … is no one should have the impression that there's a police officer in every school. These are district contracts. There are some districts in this state that have 50 or more campuses. They might have eight school resource officers who rotate between the schools. So there's no guarantee that one of these officers is going to be [at] the right place at the right time to prevent a school shooting or similar tragedy.”