Two stories at the Minnesota Reformer about the school resource officer kerfuffle caught Bluestem's attention. I republish them here under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Do cops actually make schools safer?
By Christopher IngrahamGov. Tim Walz is weighing whether to call a special session to address law enforcement concerns over a recently passed ban on putting students in chokeholds and other extreme forms of physical restraint.
Republican lawmakers are urging Walz to act, claiming that the provision effectively outlaws all forms of physical force by police officers in schools, despite an opinion from Attorney General Keith Ellison stating that “reasonable” force can still be used to prevent injury or death. Several police departments across the state have announced they will not place officers in schools until they get clarification on the new law.
Lurking beneath the debate over how much force cops should use on kids is an even more fundamental question: Do police officers (known as school resource officers, or SROs) in schools make students safer?
A forthcoming paper by researchers at the State University of New York and the RAND Corporation explores this question using the best available data to date. They find evidence that the presence of an SRO leads to a reduction in some violent incidents at school.
But that relatively modest reduction comes at a steep cost: a massive increase in suspensions, expulsions and referrals to the criminal justice system, actions that can be ruinous to students’ lives.
Teasing out the effects of school resource officers is a tricky problem. In Minnesota, for instance, they’re present in about 30% of all public schools. Districts that opt to employ those officers may be different in fundamental ways from districts that don’t — they may have more problems with poverty or violence, for instance. Simply looking at student outcomes in SRO schools versus non-SRO schools is likely to confuse correlation with causation.
The SUNY/RAND study sidesteps this problem by way of a clever natural experiment. Police departments across the country can apply for federal funding to pay for putting officers in specific schools. Some of those applications are successful while others aren’t. By examining similar schools on either side of the funding cutoff, the researchers were able to eliminate the effects of confounders like demographics and poverty.
What was left, in isolation, was an estimate of how a new SRO program changed a school.
For a hypothetical school of 1,000 students, hiring an SRO leads to six fewer violent in-school incidents – fights, robberies and threats of violence. That works out to about a 30% decline.
That reduction also comes with a steep increase in severe disciplinary actions against students. There are 24 additional suspensions, one or two more expulsions, and two more referrals to the criminal justice system. Those are increases of up to 90% over the baseline level.
“The kids suspended, expelled, or arrested are far less likely to graduate and more likely to have further run-ins with the criminal justice system,” as the authors write in a recent opinion piece.
That may seem like the system working as intended by removing problematic students from the school environment. But Lucy Sorensen, the lead author of the study, cautions that that’s not necessarily the case. The steep rise in suspensions is particularly concerning, she said, because those typically arise from any number of minor infractions that shouldn’t fall under an SRO’s purview.
“SROs ideally should not get involved in minor disciplinary matters with students,” she said via email. “They are only supposed to deal with law enforcement related to serious delinquency and crimes. However, the fact that they increase discipline for minor incidents means that they are contributing to a more punitive school climate overall and not fulfilling appropriate roles and responsibilities.”
She also notes a lack of evidence in the existing literature that suspending or expelling problem students has any beneficial effect on other pupils.
The students suspended or expelled, on the other hand, face real, well-documented threats to their own future stability. They lose classroom time, become more likely to drop out, and are more likely to face a lifetime of criminal justice system involvement — the so-called school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately affects Black students.
Sorensen says that ultimately, she does not believe the reduction of violence SROs bring is worth the steep cost of increased disciplinary consequences for students.
“I do not think that SROs are particularly sound investments from either a cost-benefit perspective or an equity perspective,” she said. “There are alternative school safety approaches out there, such as restorative justice practices or mental health supports, that do not produce as many negative spillovers onto students.”
But discussion of those sorts of tradeoffs has, so far, been lacking in the debate over SROs and physical restraints in Minnesota schools.
And there's resistance to the idea that a special session to change the law will make schools safer as well.
Progressive Democrats a hard ‘no’ on calling a special session for restraint ban
By Michelle Griffith
A bloc of progressive, mostly Twin Cities House and Senate DFL members are opposed to a special legislative session to change a new law that bans using certain restraints on students.
The law says district employees, including police known as school resource officers, can’t use prone restraints on students — meaning place them in a face-down position — and they can’t use restraints that inhibit a student’s ability to breathe or voice distress. However, they may use these kinds of restraints “to prevent imminent bodily harm or death to the student or to another.”
Numerous law enforcement agencies over the past few weeks pulled officers from their local schools because they say it has opened them up to potential lawsuits if they use any amount of physical force in certain situations. Republicans last week advocated for Gov. Tim Walz to call a special session and drafted a bill that would get rid of the physical restraint ban.
On Thursday afternoon, MPR News reporter Brian Bakst tweeted a leaked draft statement from 44 DFL members — 34 from the House and 10 senators — saying they do not support changing the law.
“Anyone advocating for the repeal of this law is working to take us backwards. We do not support a special session to repeal this law,” the statement says. “Repealing this law would make our schools less safe and remove critical measures that are necessary to protect students in their learning environment.”
The House DFL majority has 69 members, and the Senate 34, which means the statement of opposition was signed by a minority of DFL members. Still, their opposition suggests division in the party that has been largely unified this year.
For their part, House leadership seemed unaware of the statement’s provenance. The Reformer asked House DFL Communications Director Matt Roznowski for a copy of the statement, but he said he didn’t have one.
“To be honest I don’t know who sent that statement out. I wasn’t involved,” Roznowski said. Senate DFL Communications Director Marc Kimball did not immediately respond to a request for the statement.
Earlier on Thursday, the Reformer reported in its daily newsletter that a progressive bloc is against a special session, with one DFL source calling the entire issue a “ruse.”
House Minority Leader Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, on Thursday hammered the Democrats.
“With dozens of school districts currently without SRO coverage across Minnesota, it’s incredibly urgent that we fix this problem, get SROs back in schools, and keep our students safe. It’s disappointing to see so many Democrats opposed to a special session and continuing their irresponsible anti-law enforcement rhetoric,” Demuth said in a statement.
Education Minnesota President Denise Specht said in a statement the teachers union supports a special session if lawmakers decide it’s necessary.
“School administrators have a clear responsibility to provide a safe environment for our students to learn and our staff to work. School staff also need clear guidance from their administrators and the state of Minnesota about when and how they can intervene to protect themselves and students in situations that pose a risk of bodily injury,” Specht said. “If state leaders decide that a special session or any other means of providing clarity for our school districts is needed, we support them in doing so.”
The education advocacy group EdAllies on Thursday held a press conference at the Capitol to highlight their support for the law, urging Walz to refrain from calling a special session.
Multiple speakers at the press conference argued that the new law keeps students safe.
“Do not restrain our children unless absolutely necessary. We must hold ourselves to the highest standard here in Minnesota, and that includes our safety measures around our children,” said EdAllies executive director Josh Crosson.
Here's MPR's Brian Bakst's tweet of the document:
More than 40% of #mnleg DFL members (44 between House and Senate combined) go on record opposing a special session to repeal a new law around physical restraint standards in schools.
— Brian Bakst (@Stowydad) September 7, 2023
The law approved this spring has led to a pullback of school resource officers in some places. pic.twitter.com/5yC0rjLNZc
Photo: EdAllies Executive Director Josh Crosson, surrounded by community advocates, urged Gov. Tim Walz to refrain from calling a special session during a Capitol press conference on Sept. 7, 2023. Photo by Michelle Griffith.
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