Students stream up Grant High School’s central stairway, a salmon farm of notebooks and budding mustaches. Campus Safety personnel, clad in blue polo shirts, keep watch over the controlled madness, yelling at the masses to “Get to class!” Some students stray behind, starting conversations with the security guards. They talk about their days, trading jokes and in-depth anecdotes. The stairs begin to clear, the raging channel becoming a weak rivulet, then the occasional speed-walking trickle. The safety personnel offer a few additional encouraging “Get to class”s and “You’re late”s for good measure toward the receding backpacks.
According to Education Week, which has been chronicling American school shootings since 2018, there were 46 school shootings in the United States between Jan. 1, 2022, and Nov. 17, 2022. Thirty-six people were killed, 29 of whom were students and seven of whom were employees or other adults. Ninety-five others were injured. By far the deadliest was at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, 2022, which resulted in the death of 19 students and two teachers.
Five days later, on May 29, the National Rifle Association (NRA) held its annual convention in Houston, Texas, less than 300 miles from the location of the shooting. Texas Senator Ted Cruz spoke at the event, saying, “Ultimately, as we all know, what stops armed bad guys is armed good guys.”
The Uvalde school district had four police officers. Almost 20 officers in total stood in the elementary school hallway during the attack, believing that nobody was in danger. Uvalde had armed good guys. They could not prevent 21 lives from being cut short.
Across the country, school districts make decisions about how they will protect their students and staff. One increasingly popular method is school resource officers (SROs) — sworn law-enforcement officers with arrest powers who work part- or full-time on school premises. All SROs are fully armed unless expressly prohibited by the school district they work in. According to the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut, 1% of schools had on-site police officers in 1975. By 2018, school police presence had risen to 58%.
Grant High School does not have SROs, but it used to. On June 4, 2020, Portland Public Schools (PPS) Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero announced via Twitter that he was cutting ties with the Portland Police Bureau (PPB)’s School Resource Officer program. “The time is now,” wrote Guerrero, “We need to re-examine our relationship with the PPB.”
The call came after years-long discussions among PPS administration, students and parents about SROs’ efficacy. In 2018, school board members heard testimonies from approximately 600 students across PPS high schools. “The overwhelming majority of students of color indicated that having the SROs in the building made them very uncomfortable,” PPS board member Rita Moore told Metro News, “There was a really clear message from students that the existing system with the SROs was not working for them.”
Grant Magazine reported on the discourse in 2019.
Outside of PPS, the role that SROs play in American schools has been under scrutiny since federal and state legislation began pouring money into armed school security. An increase in school shootings in the 1990s catalyzed the surge. Soon, “armed good guys” were patrolling the halls of over half of all American schools.
Does their presence increase student safety? Studies show the opposite.
A study by Lucy Sorensen, Montserrat Avila Acosta and Shawn Bushway from the University of Albany, SUNY and John Engberg from the RAND Corporation found that SROs “do effectively reduce some forms of violence in schools, but do not prevent school shootings or gun-related incidents.”
“We also find that SROs intensify the use of suspensions, expulsions, police referrals, and arrests of students,” write the authors. According to the study, Black students were consistently affected over two times more than white students.
An Education Week study found that in 43 states and the District of Columbia, Black students were arrested at school at disproportionately high rates; in 10 states, according to the study, “The share of arrested Black students was 20 percentage points higher than these students’ share of enrollment.”
A Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network study found that when controlling for location and school characteristics, “The rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed guard present.”
PPS is not immune to these racial biases. In the fiscal year 2017–2018, 28 students under the age of 21 were arrested on PPS grounds during school hours. Twenty-four of them were male. Sixteen were Black. There have been no student arrests on the Grant campus since PPS cut ties with the PPB, according to Grant Vice Principal Steven Benson.
Grant’s student body was 71% white and 7% Black in the 2017–2018 school year according to PPS’ School Profiles; in the 2018–2019 school year, the school’s white student population had risen to 72.2%, with the Black student population falling to 6.3%.
According to PPS’ annual Discipline Referral Reports, 5.8% of Black students and 4.8% of multiracial students were expelled or suspended in the 2017–2018 school year, compared to 0.7% of white students. In the 2018–2019 school year, 4.9% of Black students and 4.8% of multiracial students were expelled or suspended; 1.4% of white students received equivalent disciplinary action. Reports for the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 school years are not available due to comprehensive distance learning.
SROs do not only fail to solve the problem they were instated to fix. Sorensen and her colleagues also found that “SROs increase chronic absenteeism, particularly for students with disabilities.”
According to the Neag School of Education, “Only 9% of Black youth, and 17% of Latine youth, and 20% of Asian youth in California responded that the statement ‘the police make me feel safer’ was ‘very much’ true.” Thirty-six percent of white youth did. Having police on school campuses “doesn’t make school feel like a safe place for them,” says Gabe Newland, the director of the Youth Justice Project at the Oregon Justice Resource Center, “So they might be less likely to go to school or they might be on edge and might not learn as much from school when you have (an armed police officer) around.”
“One thing schools could do (to reduce rates of youth arrest) is to get police out of schools entirely,” says Newland. PPS has. Has anything changed?
Grant’s current security staff consists of four Campus Safety Associates (CSAs). Campus safety officers at PPS schools are hired through the district and assigned to schools or request to work at certain campuses. CSAs have no connections to the Portland Police Bureau. They are not armed and do not have arrest powers.
“Some think I’m here to almost be policing,” says Mendel Miller, who has been a CSA at Grant since April 2022, “My job isn’t to police. It’s just to secure.”
“Our job is to make sure that the students and faculty that work here feel safe and that, most importantly, that the kids have an environment at school (where they) can learn, enjoy themselves and feel safe and feel at ease,” says Michael Dyer, who has been a full-time CSA at Grant since the 2021–2022 school year. He held a part-time security position the year before and has worked various security jobs, including seven years at Centennial Middle School.
Dyer has also been a football coach at Grant since 2012 and values the strong connections he is able to build with numerous students. “I want kids to come and talk and build relationships,” he says, “I’m a big part of the community.”
He believes that the relationships he builds with students can be stronger than those with SROs, administrators or teachers, due to his unique position in the building. “We don’t hand out discipline,” he says, “We’re not giving out grades. You can come and literally tell me anything.”
Miller also feels that having relationships with students makes his job easier. “If I’m talking to a kid that I’ve never spoken to before, it may be a little bit more challenging because we don’t have that history,” he says, “Whenever we have a relationship, a preexisting relationship with the student, it just makes the whole scenario go smoother.”
All adults working with kids at Grant, including CSAs, are mandatory reporters.
These relationships build trust in security personnel and allow them to resolve issues before they become physical. “A lot of it’s just trying to put out a fire before it gets big or trying to put out stuff before it becomes a little fire,” says Dyer.
The risk of arrest or severe disciplinary action being eliminated also decreases tensions between students and CSAs.
“I hold a lot of relationships that I have with students very near and dear to my heart,” says Miller, “I feel like we can almost be a bridge between students and staff.”
Dyer worries that the jobs of his and his colleagues are not explained well to the Grant student body, which can lead to misunderstandings and apprehension. Widespread police presence in American high schools has led to misconceptions about the role that campus safety personnel like Dyer play.
“We have more of those relationships because we’re in the building all the time. You see the same students all the time,” says Miller, “And that’s important for students to see, you know, familiar faces, and not just, you know, someone different every few weeks.”
“We’re not the police,” says Dyer, “We’re not trying to get kids in trouble. We’re just trying to make sure kids have a safe environment to get an education.”
In December 2022, Guerrero and PPS administration opened talks with the PPB about reinstating SROs in PPS high schools on a case-by-case basis. The decision came after Jefferson, Cleveland and Franklin high schools experienced gun violence in the 2022–2023 school year — empirical evidence overwhelmingly shows that SROs do not reduce the frequency or deadliness of school shootings.
As of January 2023, no final decision has been made regarding the reimplementation of SROs in PPS schools. Read more about the talks here.
