As a retired public high school teacher, I’m more than mildly concerned when the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education seems to be on the cusp of removing sworn police officers from all of the city’s high schools.
We barely hear about the positive contributions of officers in terms of their counseling function. It was extremely common for students to seek low-key assistance from officers when they or friends were facing difficulty both in the building and outside the relative safety of the school. Students would reach out to the officers when they were being pressured to join street gangs or were engaging in unsafe and/or illegal activities. The school resource officers were trained to address those issues before they escalated, always anonymously.
