Fort Worth school board grapples with role of campus police

A year after the Fort Worth school board passed a resolution condemning several high-profile police killings of Black people across the country, the board is still grappling with the role of school resource officers on the district’s campuses.

Meanwhile, a group of parents is calling on the district to follow the lead of several other districts across the country that have removed police from their schools.

Last year, the district’s Board of Trustees approved a social justice resolution proposed by the district’s racial equity committee. The statement called for the district to be a part of the dismantling of racial injustice and white supremacy.

It included language acknowledging that communities of color have had traumatic experiences at the hands of police. In the resolution, members of the racial equity committee wrote they were “horrified, outraged, and saddened” at the killing of Atatiana Jefferson, a Black Fort Worth woman who was shot to death in her home by a police officer in the early morning hours of Oct. 12, 2019, as well as the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.

In an article published in the April edition of the National School Boards Association’s magazine, Jacinto Ramos, president of the Fort Worth district’s Board of Trustees, and Devin Del Palacio, president of the association’s National Black Council of School Board Members, wrote that the issue of school resource officers creates “an ongoing balancing act” for school leaders as they try to create safe and healthy learning environments.

Fort Worth’s school board is looking at including constraints in school resource officer contracts “to prioritize the mental well-being of students and educators,” wrote Ramos, who didn’t respond to interview requests for this article. That contract language would allow the district to bring in additional health and mental health support resources, he wrote.

Board member Quinton “Q” Phillips said the board’s conversation about the role of school resource officers is still active, though it slipped down the board’s priorities list during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Phillips, who serves as co-chairman of the district’s racial equity committee, said some students in his district have told him they don’t feel comfortable having police in their schools. But other students, as well as some teachers and administrators, have told him their resource officers are a part of the fabric of their campuses. They have good relationships with students at their schools and even offer counseling, he said.

Some parents want police removed from Fort Worth schools

Lizzie Maldonado is one of a group of parents who are calling for the Fort Worth school district to remove school resource officers from its campuses and put the money it saves toward counseling and other student support services.

One of her biggest frustrations is what she calls a lack of transparency about how school resource officers interact with students. Her group has been in contact with school board members about getting access to that information, she said, but those conversations have largely gone nowhere.

Maldonado’s 7-year-old son is in Teaching to Academic Potential, a special program for students with autism. She worries about what would happen in an interaction between her son and a police officer who hasn’t been trained on how to deal with people with autism. Her son has meltdowns, and sometimes when he’s really angry, he lashes out against anyone who tries to get him to stop, she said. When someone gives him a set of instructions, he often doesn’t acknowledge them.

She doesn’t think it will be a problem for some years — “He’s seven, so he’s still really cute and little,” she said. But as he ages through the school system, she gets more and more concerned, she said. She can imagine a scenario when her son is older in which a police officer gives him a set of instructions, her son doesn’t comply and the officer misinterprets it as a threat. And because her son is nonverbal, he can’t explain himself to anyone who doesn’t understand, she said.

Adam Werner, another member of the parents group, taught art for 11 years in the Castleberry school district, at the elementary and middle school levels. During that time, he taught on campuses with school resource officers. In many cases, resource officers seemed to escalate situations once they were called in, either through their own actions or because the presence of a police officer led students to react more strongly than they might have otherwise, Werner said.

Werner said he thinks the question of how police officers affect school climate is the same as how the presence of law enforcement affects any other setting in society. He compares it to how travelers react to security personnel in an airport. When they walk into an airport terminal and see TSA agents and airport police, do they feel safer, he wonders? Or do they feel more anxious, like they’re being surveilled?

Werner said he didn’t spend much time thinking about how resource officers affect school climate until Floyd’s murder last year. Now, he thinks there are better ways of handling incidents at schools. Students will always get into scuffles, he said, and adults will always need to step in and break things up. But those adults don’t always need to be police officers, he said. In most cases, he said, teachers or counselors could handle those situations just as well.

School resource officers have three-pronged role

Lynelle Sparks, training coordinator for the Texas Association of School Resource Officers, said removing officers from schools would be “a very grave mistake.” Sparks said she thinks that impulse comes out of a misunderstanding of what school resource officers do.

Sparks, who works as a resource officer in the Hillsboro school district, said resource officers have a three-pronged role in schools. They’re primarily there as law enforcement, she said. At its most extreme end, that role would have them responding to an active shooter situation, she said. But they also might help handle a situation in which a student ran away from home over night and then showed up at school the next morning.

For some students, resource officers are also informal mentors, she said. Nearly every student has at least one adult at school they feel comfortable confiding in, she said. Not every student feels comfortable talking to teachers, but some may find it easier to talk to their resource officer.

School resource officers also act as educators, Sparks said. Although they aren’t classroom teachers, those officers often talk with students about issues like human trafficking and cyberbullying, she said.

An effective school resource officer can be a huge asset to a school, Sparks said. But it’s important that those officers be carefully selected and well trained. Officers in schools need to be ready to help in an emergency, she said, but they also need to have compassion and empathy for students who are having a difficult time. And unlike patrol officers, who usually spend only 20 to 30 minutes on each call, a school resource officer might see the same students at school each day for years. So it’s important that those officers are good at building relationships, she said.

School resource officers also need to be able to work effectively with children, Sparks said. Sparks’ organization’s training includes a section on brain development, so officers who have gone through that training should understand developmental differences between children and adults, she said. But it helps if those officers have the right personality before they’re assigned to schools, she said.

Police can’t enforce school discipline

The nation’s first school policing program began in 1958 in Flint, Michigan. But school districts across the country began bringing in school resource officers in larger numbers after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, said Kathy Martinez-Prather, director of Texas State University’s Texas School Safety Center, which trains law enforcement officers to work in schools.

Many districts across the state are having conversations about what the role of a school resource officer should look like, Martinez-Prather said. That role is a specialized one, and it’s vastly different from that of a street officer, she said. Ideally, those officers will become one more trusted adult at those schools.

Because the role of a school resource officer is so specialized, it’s important that officers who are assigned to schools go through training beyond what they get in police academies, Martinez-Prather said. For example, they need to understand that a student who appears to be acting out may be doing so because of some special need, she said. Texas law requires school resource officers to undergo training on topics like de-escalation, working with students with disabilities and positive behavior intervention and support, she said.

School resource officers also have to navigate cases where they’re called upon to perform duties that fall outside their role, Martinez-Prather said. Officers are only allowed to handle incidents that involve some sort of illegal activity, she said. They can’t help enforce school policy. But campus administrators don’t always understand that delineation, she said, which leaves the officers in the position of having to explain where their role begins and ends.

“They have no business dealing with a student who refuses to put away their cellphone or refuses to go to class,” she said.

Other districts removed police from schools

Over the past two years, school boards in a number of districts nationwide, including Minneapolis, St. Paul, Portland, Seattle and Denver, have voted to phase resource officers out of their schools. After Floyd’s murder, the Minneapolis school board voted unanimously to end the district’s contract with the city’s police department. The district then hired civilian public safety support specialists to serve at each of its high schools.

After the vote, Minneapolis board chairwoman Kim Ellison thanked students in the district for pushing for the change and said she hoped students would continue to be a part of the district’s safety plan.

“The board today decided to vote our values,” Ellison said.

A Minneapolis district spokeswoman told the Star-Telegram that the district couldn’t easily evaluate the safety support specialist program’s success because the district spent much of the year either in remote learning or hybrid learning. But not everyone is happy with the plan the district implemented.

Documents obtained by the nonprofit education news outlet The 74 Million showed that more than half of the Minneapolis school district’s specialists came from law enforcement, corrections or private security backgrounds, a fact that angered activists in the area who had hoped to see the district move further away from its relationship with law enforcement.

Activist Marika Pfefferkorn, executive director of the Midwest Center for School Transformation, told The 74 Million she didn’t think the school board committed to “decriminalizing their approach to safety” when they voted to end the district’s contract with the police department.

No easy answer to school police question

Phillips, the Fort Worth school board member, said he has mixed feelings about the presence of police officers on campus.

Phillips, who is Black, said he had a few negative run-ins with police in his neighborhood when he was growing up. But when he was a student at Dunbar High School, the resource officer was an active part of the school community, he said. She supported students during the school day and was a regular presence at athletic events and other after-school activities, he said.

The question of whether police should be in Fort Worth schools is a complicated one without an easy answer, Phillips said. There are dozens of factors school leaders need to consider when figuring out how to keep their schools safe, he said. Some of the details are as minute as deciding which doors to keep open during the school day and which to keep closed and locked.

The district can’t provide a blanket security plan that deals with all those details, he said, so school board members and district officials need to talk with principals and teachers and figure out what works best for each campus. In some cases, that solution might include a school resource officer, he said. In others, it might not.

“It’s not really a cookie-cutter answer when it comes to this,” Phillips said.