Recommendations for School Resource Officers

The committees came to agree that the SRO must at least be integrated more completely into the school community, operating with more communication with administrators and more public input.
The Reform Committee’s report recommends that “the SROs be included in the PSB teacher training/professional development that is relevant to student safety, racial justice, bullying and social media/online usage, and additional topics deemed relevant.”
Malcolm Cawthorne said that in looking for case studies in which the SRO program has been most effective, the Task Force found the Evanston, Illinois school district. The Task Force spoke with a representative from Evanston about how their SROs used a similar integration strategy, attending professional development trainings like Brookline’s SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), faculty meetings and administrative meetings.
“They’re truly entrenched in the community. There, it’s as if yes, they’re Evanston police, but they’re also Evanston township high school staff,” Cawthorne said. “And that’s the thing I keep trying to push the police on. If you tell me it’s community, this is what I want to see.”
But the Task Force, motivated by what they learned about transparency and communication, went a step further. Their report recommended the removal of SROs from schools, saying their presence “undermines the pillars of safety and community that are needed for students to thrive in our schools.”
Since 2014, state law required that each school district have at least one SRO. Though it did not mandate that the SRO be stationed within any schools, the model Memorandum of Understanding provided in the law made it difficult to avoid. Compliance with this law was the chief reason for the beginning of the SRO program in 2018, the Task Force found. On December 31, 2020, Governor Baker signed into law a Police Reform Bill that ended the SRO requirement. According to Cawthorne, the recognition from the state that SROs were not needed solidified the Task Force’s conviction to remove them.
The Task Force’s report also contains a fallback plan Cawthorne said he was confident would improve the program if the recommendation for removal is not taken. The plan includes integrating the SRO more thoroughly, as the Reforms Committee also recommends and as Evanston has successfully done, and opening the discussion up for more people to weigh in.
“If the town insists upon the SRO position, that insistence must be done through a rigorous public process,” the report states. “It cannot come solely from the Select Board––not after the profound lack of transparency surrounding the implementation of this position.”
For Emy Takinami ‘12, a former Steps to Success (STS) student, current STS board member and local organizer, the key to all of the Task Force’s recommendations is this public process. So long as the community is being listened to fully, she said, the outcome will be an improvement.
“Who is determining that that is exactly what these students and young people need? It did not seem like a community-driven, student-driven process. I don’t think the Steps students got together with METCO and Scholars and said, okay, out of everything we could ask for from this pot of money, this pot of resources, we want this SRO position,” Takinami said. “If they land on that after a thorough community engagement process, then that’s a different story, but that’s not how the process went.”
According to Takinami, STS has been requesting a social worker, specifically for its K-8 program, for some time. Filling that position would to her be a just and equitable use of the money saved by removing SROs – investing in “upstream” mental health resources that address the root causes of problems so that those students can avoid needing more serious intervention later on.
“It’s a community who knows their needs asking for something tangible. They’re not just saying, we need more support. They’re saying we need a social worker in the K-8, and they have not received one yet,” Takinami said. “And that, I think, is saying something to whose needs are we prioritizing. Who are the SROs for? Clearly not the group of people who’ve been asking specifically for a tangible role that probably those resources could have gone towards.”