Districts take stock of armed police
Allentown, Bethlehem weigh safety over concern of effect on students
For children growing up after the 1999 Columbine school shooting that left 13 people dead, seeing an armed officer patrolling the hallways is a common part of the school day.
Bethlehem Area students start encountering officers in school in sixth grade. All together, the district has seven school resource officers — two at Liberty High, and one at Freedom High and each of the four middle schools.
All seven wear a police uniform and carry a gun. And
Superintendent Joseph Roy believes the officers, six of whom are employed by the city police department and one by Bethlehem Township, are the best of the best. After school, they coach basketball teams, organize clothing drives for students and run clubs.
“They do what you would want a [school resource officer] to do as far as being embedded in the school community and getting to know kids,” Roy said.
But as the nation examines police violence following the death of another unarmed black man by a white police officer, many districts are reconsidering the decision to put armed officers in schools.
“I’m listening to the argument that police don’t belong in schools,” Roy said. “For students coming from communities that don’t have the best relationship or the police aren’t viewed in a positive place, having a police officer in the school might not make them feel safer.”
The district will review the purpose of its school resource officer program, Roy said, and put that purpose in writing, which is something the district has never done.
It’s a shift in the conversation after 20 years of placing armed officers in schools to keep students safe from shootings. Now advocates and many students believe policing does not belong in schools and contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline, especially for Black and Hispanic children.
Two-thirds of high school students, 45% of middle schoolers and 19% of elementary school students attended a school with a police officer, according to a 2018 report from the Urban Institute, which found that schools that educate mostly
Black and Hispanic students were more likely to have school resource officers.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education released numbers in 2014 showing that students of color are disciplined and arrested at a much higher rate than white students in schools.
Bethlehem’s review comes as a Dieruff High student called on the Allentown School District to remove its eight officers — one in each of the four middle schools and two each at Allen and Dieruff high schools.
Nasheera Brown organized a rally that drew dozens of students and others, including school directors, to Allentown’s ArtsPark on Tuesday, with students saying some officers have been more intimidating than helpful.
Ashleigh Strange, with Lehigh Valley Stands Up, asked the Allentown School Board at its meeting Thursday to end its contract with the police department. And Justan Fields, an organizer with Allentown’s Black Lives Matter who also goes by Justan Parker, said his group is collecting information on how Lehigh Valley districts use school resource officers.
“We need to know that these school resource officers are really a resource in the school,” Fields said.
Allentown and Bethlehem, the Lehigh Valley’s two largest districts, have the highest percentage of students of color. In Allentown, more than 85% of its 17,000 students are Black or Hispanic, while more than half of Bethlehem’s 13,600 students are.
Allentown Superintendent Thomas Parker said the district has been reviewing its school resource officer program since December. Among the officers’ duties are responding to “any articulable and significant threat to the health or safety of students or other individuals in the school.”
“Specifically, we want to ensure that we avoid any practices that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline, while also including space for community voice and input,” Parker said in a prepared statement.
He said the district will look at whether the officers’ presence and practices align with the goal of “cultivating a culture in which students feel, safe, valued and nurtured.”
Shift in conversation
School resource officers gained popularity in the early 2000s as school shootings become a reality. But they were present in the Lehigh Valley before that, as Allentown in 1997 became the first district in the area to have full-time armed officers — one each at Allen and Dieruff. The district started discussing officers in schools as a way to quell violence in 1994.
After Columbine, other Lehigh Valley districts added officers, some picking up the tab and some applying for grants to cover the costs. Bethlehem’s school resource officers were paid through a federal grant, but when the grant ended, the city and district split the tab. The district pays $400,000 for the six city officers.
Allentown pays $40,566 annually for its officers.
In the years since, major school shootings, such as the one in 2012 that left 20 children and six staff members dead at Sandy Hook Elementary, prompted schools to add security measures. Most recently, after 17 people were killed in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, several Lehigh Valley school districts revisited the discussion about armed security in schools. That summer, The Morning Call reported 50 armed police or security guards were in 17 school districts in the Lehigh Valley, with some districts considering adding more. The Pen Argyl Area School District, for example, added three armed guards at the time. Tamaqua even proposed arming teachers.
Roy believes the solution of armed officers in schools is likely somewhere in the middle.
“You have to find that balance between the feeling of safety you want from an external intruder and then the internal school climate you want where kids feel comfortable and safe in school,” he said.
The state Education Department collects school safety data, including how many officers are posted at schools. For the 2018-19 school year, there were eight school police officers, 14 school resource officers and 65 security guards in Lehigh County schools. Northampton County schools had 31 school police officers, 11 school resource officers and 32 school security officers.
School police officers are typically those employed directly by a district, while school resource officers are usually from municipal departments. Unlike police officers, most security officers are unarmed.
Some districts, such as Easton Area and Northampton Area, operate their own police departments. Northampton, which has six schools, has two armed officers and no plans to eliminate its police department, Superintendent Joseph Kovalchik said. Northampton hired its first police officer in August 2006, three months after a student used a guitar case to sneak a rifle into the school, then threatened to kill himself.
In a 2018 nationwide survey, parents appeared to want armed officers in schools. The survey, conducted by Phi
Delta Kappa International, found 80% of parents who responded supported that measure.
But after George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, was killed on May 25 when an officer pressed a knee into his neck for more than eight minutes, the conversation about police brutality spread to schools.
Several large districts, such as Seattle and Minneapolis, recently promised to end contracts with local police. On June 18, the American Federation of Teachers, one of the country’s largest teacher unions, passed a resolution calling for the separation of school safety and policing.
Some also argue that instead of officers, schools should employ more counselors to help students. Federal data analyzed by the American Civil Liberties Union shows millions of students, especially students of color, attend schools that have police officers, but no nurse or school psychologist.
That’s something that Fields, with Allentown’s Black Lives Matter, advocates.
“When you have mental health issues and other social issues that would require counselors or therapists, is a school resource officer being a first responder for those instances?” he said. “Because if they are, then that’s maybe a problem.”
Those against police in schools point to some national cases where students were harmed by school resource officers. In 2019 in Florida, a school resource officer was fired after a video showed him grasping a middle school student’s hair and yanking her head during an arrest for a fight near school grounds. A few weeks later, an officer assigned to a school in North Carolina lost his job after he repeatedly slammed an 11-year-old boy to the ground.
Locally, in 2016, Allentown paid $100,000 to settle a city woman’s lawsuit over a police officer’s use of a stun gun against her 14-year-old daughter as the girl left Dieruff High School in 2011.
The girl was walking near the high school when a resource officer ordered students to get out of the road. According
to court documents, an officer grabbed the girl’s arm and pushed her against a parked car when she pulled away. A struggle ensued, and the officer fired his Taser at the girl’s groin, causing her to fall to the street.
Video of the incident was captured by security cameras.
“We have some great leaders but some of our leaders don’t understand what we go through, and we need more understanding people to enforce positivity.”
‘Police on their backs’
In Allentown, Dieruff High student Nasheera Brown, who organized Tuesday’s rally, said, “A lot of students feel they shouldn’t have to have police on their backs.”
Brown believes students should be disciplined for misbehaving in school, but minor incidents should not involve the police. She thinks that the district should also employ more staff members with a better understanding of Allentown students, most of whom live in poverty.
“We have some great leaders but some of our leaders don’t understand what we go through, and we need more understanding people to enforce positivity,” she said.
According to numbers the Allentown and Bethlehem districts provided to the state, 74 Allentown students and 95 Bethlehem Area students were arrested at school in 2018-19. The report does not list what the arrests were for, nor does it include the gender and races of those arrested. The Morning Call recently filed Right-to-Know requests for that information from both districts and is waiting for responses.
By comparison, Parkland High School, the largest high school in the region with more than 3,000 students, has one school resource officer and had 16 arrests for the 2018-19 school year, according to information from the district. The two Parkland middle schools share a school resource officer.
Bethlehem school Director Winston Alozie agrees with Roy’s call to review the school resource officer program.
“I want to make sure that teachers and administrators understand the roles of SROs because I feel like sometimes that area can get very gray very fast and
— Nasheera Brown, Dieruff High student
maybe lead to situations that shouldn’t happen,” he said. “You don’t call an SRO if a kid isn’t listening to the teacher. That’s not an SRO call.”
Alozie said when he ran the Boys and Girls Club in South Side Bethlehem a few years ago, he heard students talking about an officer using a stun gun on a Freedom High student.
“I remember them talking about that and the indelible impact that was left on their memories,” he said. “As a school community, you need to ask how something like that can happen.”
Since the protests against police brutality started, including marches and rallies every week in the Lehigh Valley since late May, Roy has met with current and former students who told him they don’t think officers belong in schools.
Roy believes school resource officers should be used only for matters that school officials would call the police for, such as weapons in schools or assaults. They shouldn’t be pulled into theft and other cases that school officials can handle.
The argument students at Tuesday’s rally made was that when resource officers get too involved with enforcement, schools start to resemble prisons. And that’s the last message Roy and Parker want to relay.
“The possibility is always there when there is a police officer nearby that they get pulled into things that we wouldn’t otherwise be calling the police for,” Roy said. “If it’s a child that’s a Black or Latino child getting into the system, that’s not what we need.”