When Blaine Crowe attended Poudre High School it was around the election of former President Donald Trump — “a scary and dangerous time to be a minority,” they said. Crowe, who is transgender, was bullied and harassed at Poudre. They were just trying to survive the awkwardness of adolescence. Transitioning added a whole new layer of complexity.
When an anonymous person sent threats to the gay-straight alliance, a group Crowe was a part of, they went to the school resource officer, or SRO.
“And it was pretty much just like, ‘Well, there's nothing I can do. If something happens, then I can do like, whatever. But until then, there's nothing that the police can do about this.’”
Crowe, who is now 22, was already uncomfortable around police and this experience inspired little confidence. “There's a lot of history between the queer community and law enforcement that gets forgotten a lot of the time,” Crowe said.
Crowe was part of the push to remove police from the Poudre School District following the racial reckoning spurred by the murder of George Floyd. The Poudre School District Board of Education ultimately voted to keep police — but they vowed to improve disparities in discipline. Today, Poudre School District SROs say they’re trying to do that at a time when rising gun violence has parents, teachers and students on edge.‘I have more eyes on me than most’
In 2017, Latinos represented 18% of the student population at Poudre schools yet Latino students received 37% percent of in-school suspensions, according to the Department of Education’s most recent civil rights data.
Students with disabilities also faced higher rates of discipline. They accounted for 8% of the student body but received in-school suspensions at a rate of 19%.
Incomplete data for the 2019/2020 school year suggests a continuation of that trend. Poudre School District released data showing that overall, students of color are twice as likely to be disciplined than their white peers.
KUNC made multiple unsuccessful attempts to discuss with Poudre School District officials how they are trying to address better outcomes for students of color and those with disabilities.
Kobi Salinas sees himself in the data. As a Latino student who also fought to remove police from Poudre schools, he had a negative encounter with his school’s SRO that influenced his decision to call for their removal. “It really made me realize, well, simply because my last name is ‘Salinas’ and my skin is a little tanner than somebody else's, I have more eyes on me than most people,” Salinas said.‘Once they’re there…”
Dan Losen, director of UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies and senior director of education at the National Center for Youth Law, warns about the implications of police in schools.
“It's much more likely that once they're there, they're going to intervene in ways that are not ways we want them to intervene with kids,” he told KUNC.
Losen’s research shows SROs do not prevent school shootings. Yet he sees school districts making fast moves after acts of violence, like Denver’s decision to bring police back after two shootings at East High School.
“They're not grounded in research at all. They’re just knee-jerk responses,” he said.
Losen says school administrators have been leaning on police long before the 1999 Columbine shooting — the deadliest school shooting up to that date — and it has resulted in a legacy of discrimination.
In the 1950s and 1960s, police were stationed in schools to deal with desegregation orders and then in the following decades to help tackle the so-called “War on Drugs.”
“So that's where there are some very disturbing routes to the sort of ‘get tough on kids’ that has nothing to do with responses to school shootings,” he said.
Losen is quick to emphasize the school-to-prison pipeline, that SROs tend to target students of color and disabled students, which increases the likelihood that they will be swept into the criminal justice system. But SROs at Poudre schools — who stress they are not involved in day-to-day discipline — say they are trying to keep kids out of that system.
“In the last three years, we've developed a standard operating procedure to try and limit our involvement in low-level offenses,” said Corporal Jared Sargent with the Fort Collins Police Department.
Those guidelines direct police to avoid certain matters, like minor fights or marijuana offenses. Ultimately, Sargent said, they are trying to live up to their titles — and “be a resource.”
“Are we another adult in the building? Absolutely. But we don't enforce discipline,” he said.
They are uniformed — and armed — but their focus is on three things: responding to criminal activity, mentoring students, and teaching them about things like online safety.
Poudre SRO supervisor, Sgt. Andy Ferraro, believes the program at Poudre School District is unique when it comes to police in schools. He was not part of the SRO unit during Crowe’s or Salinas’ incidents. But, he said “officers can investigate incidents relating to threats, and do not need to wait until something actually happens.”
In Salinas’ case, Ferraro said the SROs would likely not be present for such an incident today because it involved a matter that administrators should enforce rather than a school resource officer.
Colorado just passed a law mandating training for SROs. But police at Poudre already undergo roughly 100 hours of annual instruction, including training on racial biases, restorative justice and mental health. Some students have noticed.
“I will say that I feel safer with police in schools, like walking past a police officer in a school, than outside of school. Just because I feel like they're better trained with dealing with kids of color,” said Juliet Atim, a Black student at Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins.
Atim, a member of the student council, has not had interactions with police at her school, though she has heard from Black classmates who have had problems. Still, she has a different focus than former students who worked on the campaign to remove police from schools.
“The SROs — sure, they help. But they don't stop school shootings,” Atim said. “The regulations on guns are what's going to stop school shootings.”
Atim’s classmate, Daniel Mitchell, also worries more about school shootings than the actual presence of police in his school.
“I've been doing lockdown drills since kindergarten,” Mitchell said. “In fact, that's one of the few memories I have from kindergarten, is of the class standing in the walk-in closet.”
Mitchell points out that as a white student, his concerns could be a lot different than students of color or disabled students. Still, his broader worries about school shootings seem universal among his peers today, especially in Colorado, where a continuous string of mass shootings looms over the state, including five this year alone.
“In the Speech and Debate Club, we've had discussions around [school shootings],” Mitchell said. “One of the things is, even if you passed a piece of [gun] control, what will people do? Because we not only have to shift government policies, I feel, but I think we really have to change how we handle guns as an American culture.”
These issues are compelling students to act. Hundreds recently protested at the state capitol. Meanwhile, local chapters of the group Students Demand Action met for the first time last weekend. The national organization that young people established after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, has a list of goals, like enacting common-sense gun laws and electing candidates to local, state and federal office. They have volunteers in every state and Washington, D.C.
Back at the Fort Collins Police Department, Ferraro isn’t pushing back on the research showing SROs do not prevent school shootings. “However, I know and feel confident in our program, our training, our relationships and partnerships and collaboration with recruiters, school districts, their security partners, their security team, their mental health team,” he said.
Ferraro sees protecting children as a “higher calling.”
Meanwhile, students like Atim just want to attend school without the gnawing threat of gun violence. “I feel like the school environment should be a place where I don’t have to worry every day about weapons being brought into school and being shot at,” Atim said.
