DALLAS — Anna schools Superintendent Michael Comeaux says his police department is barely keeping up with the district’s booming growth. The Collin County district has one officer for every 1,000 students. As the district’s enrollment hits 5,000, it is adding a fifth officer – but Anna has seven campuses.
If Comeaux had to staff an officer at every school, he would have to cut elsewhere. Anna now receives about $40,000 from the state for security. But the cost of one officer, equipment and a vehicle is roughly triple that amount.
“It’s really difficult. We’re adding basically a campus a year in our district now,” Comeaux said. “It’s not only adding all the teachers and the staff to that, but then also adding the security measures.”
Districts like Anna face even more pressure to increase security – and particularly law enforcement presence. Many Texans are calling for a police officer at every school after the tragedy in Uvalde. But limited money and staffing shortages make such a feat difficult.
Texas schools don’t have the resources to place officers at every campus. Even if they did, experts question whether boosted police presence would prevent shootings, or whether it could negatively impact students as some research suggests that their presence can lead to more children of color facing criminal charges for minor misbehavior.
Following Uvalde, Gov. Greg Abbott asked the state’s education commissioner to encourage districts to increase the number of trained law enforcement officers or armed educators in schools. He also directed the state education agency to create a new chief of school safety position to oversee security efforts.
Last week, the chairman of Dallas City Council’s public safety committee, Adam McGough, sent a memo to the city manager and the Richardson ISD superintendent asking for more officers in that district’s schools and to explore creating a police department in RISD, whose boundaries include parts of Dallas.
Texas school leaders worry about where money for more policing will come from as the funds the state provides for campus security don’t stretch far enough. They also note that not enough officers are available as it is.
A push for more campus police is a common response in the wake of school shootings.
Florida — which experienced the deadly Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 — now requires all its campuses to have a police officer, deputy sheriff, armed educator or school security guard.
Other states have followed suit as the frequency of mass shootings at schools has increased in recent years.
Still, such occurrences are “quite rare,” noted F. Chris Curran, an associate professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Florida.
“Most school resource officers, on a day-to-day basis, are not responding to an active shooter situation,” Curran said. “They are engaged in other roles.”
And the presence of law enforcement does not necessarily deter or prevent school shootings.
In Parkland, Florida, an armed school resource officer — a deputy sheriff — failed to respond, staying outside of a building for 45 minutes as a gunman killed 17 and wounded 17. Last month at Robb Elementary, police officers were on scene for more than an hour as a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers inside a classroom.
Many schools in Texas had already added officers or increased security efforts after the deadly 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting.
“Even with the successful agenda that moved forward … where ultimately (Abbott) was able to get more funding for police in schools, still this happened,” said Andrew Hairston, the director of the Education Justice Project at Texas Appleseed. “Still we are facing Uvalde.”
On patrol
The way Texas funnels officers onto campuses varies, but it’s hard to guarantee one per school — especially with limited funds.
Around 300 districts in Texas — including Uvalde — have their own police force. Dallas ISD, for example, has a department of about 200 officers for its 220-plus campuses, at the cost of $17 million annually.
Following Santa Fe, Texas lawmakers passed a major school safety law that gave schools money for security through a new safety allotment. Districts receive $9.72 per student — based on average attendance rates — which amounted to just under $50 million this school year, according to preliminary state budget records.
For Anna ISD, that $40,000 for security doesn’t cover one full officer’s costs. The salary midpoint for its officers is about $69,000, Comeaux said. On top of that, the district must provide them equipment and a vehicle — all of which can add up to $125,000 in the first year of bringing one in, he said.
Sunnyvale ISD, a district on the eastern edge of Dallas County, enrolls about 2,000 students. Its share of the safety allotment — about $20,000 — would pay for about a third of the base salary for one school resource officer – not including benefits, noted Superintendent Doug Williams.
School resource officers are sworn law enforcement officers from a local police force or sheriff’s department who work full time or part time on campus. Their salaries are typically paid in part or in full by the school district. Sunnyvale, for instance, partners with the local police department to cover the cost of its officers.
Blue Ridge ISD, a rural district about 27 miles northeast of McKinney, relies on its partnership with the Collin County Sheriff’s Department, which provides one deputy who serves as a school resource officer for its three campuses.
The district has three schools and about 970 students. All campuses are within a quarter of a mile of each other, allowing the officer to patrol and spend time at each one. The district pays the deputy’s salary while the sheriff’s department provides transportation and other such necessities.
Blue Ridge Superintendent Matt Kimball has talked with the sheriff’s department about possibly adding another school resource officer next year, but the district must figure out where to carve out funding.
A priority for such officers is “building relationships with kids” so students feel safe about reporting suspicious activity they think might place someone in danger, Kimball said.
The hope is that their presence in schools is a deterrent for anyone who might want to bring harm to the campuses, he added.
“They’re visible and so kids and teachers and parents know that there’s that presence,” Kimball said. “People are aware that there is security in place.”
Many administrators — especially in rural or smaller districts — say Texas doesn’t give schools enough money to have their own police departments or even to afford school resource officers at each campus.
More funding from the Legislature to beef up school safety would alleviate pressure for many districts, the educators said.
“If funding stays the same, then you’ve got to make some concessions in the budget,” Kimball said. “You can never get comfortable with school safety, and anything that the governor or the Legislature can do to support us and that measure will help.”
Florida law
Florida’s response to Parkland may provide a blueprint for Texas leaders who want more police officers on campuses.
Florida lawmakers passed legislation requiring all campuses to have a “safe-school” officer, mandating the presence of a police officer, deputy sheriff, armed educator or school security guard. Other states have enacted similar laws.
Curran, the Florida education professor, noted that others adopted similar measures as Florida. Maryland passed a law requiring all schools to have “adequate” law enforcement presence. In Kentucky, legislation states that police presence is required, budget dependent, Curran said.
But police have often been present on campuses where school shootings have taken place. Even in 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado, law enforcement was present when two shooters opened fire, killing 13 people, he said.
Research suggests that the presence of law enforcement or school resource officers does not reduce the number of casualties in the case of a shooting, Curran said. There are times when officers have responded effectively during school shootings, the professor added, knowing that it’s complicated to know what would have happened if an officer had not been present.
Staffing issues complicate the matter further.Some Florida districts struggle to hire enough officers. For instance, in Palm Beach County School District, 70 positions were vacant this spring, nearly a quarter of its force.
That follows national trends, noted Tarleton State University associate dean and criminologist Alex del Carmen.
“We are seeing a drastic shortage of individuals that are interested in positions related to law enforcement in general — and specifically, we’re seeing a shortage of applicants for municipal law enforcement,” he said.
Locally, staffing shortages across police departments is a hurdle that prevents getting more officers on campuses, administrators said.
Princeton ISD has two school resource officers provided by city police. The district itself also has three school marshals, civilians employed by the district as teachers or staff members who have access to a handgun on campus.
Brent Collins, Princeton ISD’s director of security, would like to have about 20 school resource officers from the police force, but he knows “that’s not realistic” for the district of 10 campuses.
“With today’s climate, it’s not something that people are jumping in line to want to do,” he said. “I don’t know if they can provide more officers to the school without taking away from what they need to have on the streets.”
Meanwhile, the increased presence of law enforcement on Florida campuses has shown an increase in student discipline.
A 2020 report by the Florida chapter of the ACLU highlighted that the number of youth arrests at school increased 8%, while the number of youth arrested in the community declined by 12% in 2018-19. Meanwhile, the number of students expelled from school increased by 43%.
Texas Appleseed’s Hairston said he wasn’t surprised by that data. A 2016 report from the group found that Texas students were arrested, sent to adult criminal courts or referred to juvenile probation often for relatively minor misbehaviors.
Advocates worry about the school-to-prison pipeline, which they describe as practice of punishing kids in a way that funnels them to the criminal justice system rather than graduation.
School policing increases the number of use of force incidents on students and youth arrests, Hairston said, stressing that these discipline trends are disproportionately felt by Black children, those with disabilities and LGBT students.
The ACLU also found that in the years after the new law went into effect, Florida schools employed more police officers than school nurses, social workers and school psychologists.
Texas schools dealing with finite funds would likely have to decide whether adding an additional officer would mean the loss of another role elsewhere, Hairston said.
“Budgets are moral documents,” Hairston said. “We’re choosing to fund a very punitive response to what is a period of incredible suffering for young people.”
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(The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Todd A. Williams Family Foundation and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.)
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