School Resource Officers

The high school has a School Resource Officer (SRO), currently Kaitlin Conneely, a liaison from the Brookline Police Department (BPD) intended to build positive relationships with students and offer support. The position started in 2018 and, according to METCO Coordinator Malcolm Cawthorne, that fact alone is telling about the necessity of the position.
“When {the position} started, Brookline High was 175 years old,” Cawthorne said. “What happened in the 21st century that made us feel like after all this time we needed a police officer in the building with an office?”
Cawthorne joined the Task Force SRO subcommittee to learn more about it. But as their research progressed, the subcommittee realized not much else was known by anyone.
“This position was established very nearly under cover of night,” the subcommittee’s final report stated. From what they determined, the state law that mandated SROs was put into effect in 2014 as a measure against school shootings, but only after a 2018 update including a model Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was put into place did the town comply and start the program.
Cawthorne said that the idea of SROs as a safety measure is a flawed one; data shows SROs have rarely been effective in preventing school shootings. But the main concern of the subcommittee, he said, was the lack of communication at the time of its signing.
“Our interim superintendent last year, Ben Lummis, was the one who actually signed the Memorandum of Understanding. The police chief who’s no longer the chief, who had barely been chief, signed it. And then nobody else in Brookline seemed to know about it,” Cawthorne said. “The School Committee didn’t see it. The Select Board didn’t know about it, and they’re supposed to be commissioners of the police. It just felt so bizarre to me, not only that we would have a School Resource Officer, but that we didn’t have to go through any process, any public process {to get one}.”
Since then, the report suggests, transparency has only marginally improved. As part of a survey of Brookline residents administered by Tufts University and Task Force member Eitan Hersh, residents who identified themselves as parents in the school district were asked if police were stationed in the schools. Only 14 percent correctly said yes; 47 percent said no and 39 percent were not sure.
“You can’t tell me it’s community driven if nobody knows what’s going on,” Cawthorne said. “We don’t even know who supervises and evaluates the School Resource Officers.”
SROs are in the Community Service division of the BPD. Casey Hatchett, the sergeant of this division, said overall awareness of the program should be of less importance than the interpersonal connections that Conneely has with students that do know about her.
“It’s important to indicate that there’s no mandatory meeting with Kaitlin,” Hatchett said. “Students aren’t told they need to go and see her, but her office is full all day with students.”
Conneely could not be reached for comment. Cawthorne said that while she excelled at the intangible parts of her job, the intangibility itself concerned him.
“They keep talking about building relationships with kids, and I actually think Kaitlin is fairly good at that. But there’s also no data,” Cawthorne said.
Kimberley Richardson has children at the high school and served on the Task Force’s SRO subcommittee. She said that the absence of any data collection was one of the biggest red flags of the program.
“How’s it that you’re a police officer, you’re a public servant, you’re serving the public and you’re not recording or keeping an account of the people that you’re making contact with,” Richardson said. “You’re at the school and you’re talking with my kids, but you don’t have a record of talking with my kids, that doesn’t make sense to me.”
With origins seemingly ambiguous, few parents knowing about the program and no-one tracking the day-to-day operations, the subcommittee decided that the unknowns of the program were hindering its success.
Strategies For Youth (SFY), a non-profit focused on improving the way police interact with youth, has done extensive work with SRO programs across the country. According to founder and executive director Lisa Thurau, a lack of open communication between officers, administrators, students and parents often gets in the way of what may be an earnest attempt to build relationships and divert students away from the criminal justice system.
“We don’t see articulated visions of this in many schools,” Thurau said. “When you don’t have folks listening to the parents, when you don’t have transparency, you’re going to get a lot of anxiety. And a lot of this comes with schools failing to answer families’ questions about what could happen to their kids and not providing that kind of transparency.”
SFY created a Parent’s Checklist for SRO’s in Your Children’s Schools, which Thurau said parents should use to actively evaluate the SRO program the high school has in place. If it cannot meet the criteria, such as a publicly-developed Memorandum of Understanding and highly visible guidelines for how the officers interact with teachers, administrators and staff, the program should be eliminated or renovated to meet them.
Part of why transparency and open communication is so important, Thurau said, is that without it, racial disparities may arise without being uncovered and addressed. In a recent report, SFY found several ways in which Black and brown students can be harmed more than others by the presence of SROs.
Conneely has made zero arrests in the high school. However, the report suggests that her presence could have a negative impact on mental health, given the increased attention and outrage towards police brutality. Students of color might feel that negative impact disporportionately – not only because of a higher rate of distrust towards police given the ongoing history of police brutality in the nation, but also because of their proximity to her office in daily life.
The SRO office is in the front wing on the first floor, directly across from the METCO room, and within a few hundred feet are the African-American Latino Scholars Program (AALSP) room and the Steps to Success (STS) room. With the three community spaces designated specifically for students of color and low-income students in such close proximity, Cawthorne and others, such as parent Donelle O’Neal Sr., have raised concerns about the population of students Conneely comes into contact with on an everyday basis.

“When I found out that the office was near my son all the time, when he walks into that building, it bothered me,” O’Neal said. “That’s what really kind of hit me in the gut. Like, are you serious?”
According to Hatchett, when the office was chosen, Conneely raised the concern with the interim METCO Coordinator at that time, who did not voice any objection. The Task Force report said “that productive conversation was never directed toward STS or AALSP.”
Because she did not hear any objections at the time, Conneely’s office did not move. However, Hatchett said, student input could still change that at any point.
“If they do have an issue with the location, then we move her. It’s a no-brainer,” Hatchett said. “If they don’t, I would hate to see other people telling these students how they should feel about it. I think that there’s some danger to that. But she’s happy to move if that’s the consensus. Or even other than the consensus, if there’s several students that feel that way.”
Hatchett encouraged open communication about any concerns, having to do with office placement or not. However, Cawthorne said it may not be so easy for students of color.
“Are you so sure they feel empowered to complain?” Cawthorne said. “If you don’t provide the space for them to do that, where they can feel comfortable saying that, they’re not going to. And that takes time and work.”