When classes resume Aug. 14, officers will once again be present at the Midway district’s middle and high schools in Texas, but under a different arrangement.
Starting this school year, officers will be employees of the district’s newly established police department. Forming the district-run department was a massive undertaking for the 8,750-student school system, but it’s what the district determined it had to do because of staffing shortages in the local police departments it previously depended on to provide school resource officers and to stay in compliance with a state law requiring armed personnel at every school.
It’s an example of a district getting creative to fill school resource officer positions at a time when the officers have been difficult to hire because of nationwide police department recruitment challenges. Increasingly, districts have had to be resourceful to ensure they have licensed officers on campus, especially to comply with state laws requiring that schools have armed security and as a brief trend of districts dropping school resource officers following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis appears to have reversed.
In the Midway district, near Waco, the agencies the district previously contracted with to supply school resource officers notified Superintendent Chris Allen last December that they would no longer be able to provide school officers. That gave the district about eight months to come up with an alternative solution, or risk not complying with the 2023 Texas law that requires armed personnel on every campus.
“It’s not like we could just say, ‘Bummer, that’s the end of the program,’” Allen said in an interview. “We had to come up with a plan to comply with the law.”
The solution district leaders settled on was to establish their own police department—an internal agency with its own police chief, rules, and regulations that operates much like a city police department, just with oversight by the school board instead of a city council.
The Midway district is one of several confronting the complex challenge of stretched local police departments hamstringing their ability to have school resource officers.
Two high schools in the Seattle area won’t have officers on campus this school year as the county sheriff’s office struggles with staffing shortages, according to local reporting. And the Baltimore school district’s police department paid more than $2 million in overtime last year to its officers who worked extra hours to compensate for staff shortages within its ranks.
The school resource officer shortages are the product of a “four-year recruiting crisis” in law enforcement, said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. Often, he said, SROs are veteran officers who are closer to retirement, and as they leave the profession it becomes increasingly difficult to replace them.
“We’re really hurting from that standpoint,” Canady said.
Staffing shortages force school districts to find workarounds
It’s relatively rare for school districts to have their own police departments, though the arrangement is more common in Texas and Florida. The more prevalent arrangement for districts to secure SROs is to contract with county sheriff’s offices or local police departments, with the district and police department sharing salary costs. When those agencies have staffing shortages that affect their ability to work with schools, however, districts must find workarounds or put SRO programs on pause.
In Cumberland County, N.C., the district in July established new agreements with city police departments to provide officers after the county sheriff’s office said it couldn’t provide SROs, ending an arrangement with the district that had been in place since the 1980s, according to Superintendent Marvin Connelly. He credited the quick resolution to a “spirit of collaboration” and the community’s “shared commitment to safe learning environments.”
“Right away, when we realized the sheriff’s department didn’t have the capacity to honor what was in place, everyone focused on what was best for students and finding a path forward, rather than playing the blame game or pointing fingers, which helped us find a solution quickly,” Connelly said.
Some districts in Arizona this year will use off-duty and retired police who sign up to work at schools that can’t find full-time SROs, an approach Canady said could prove particularly effective. That’s because those officers maintain their law enforcement certifications and are familiar with the communities they patrol. The challenge is that retirees are often limited in the number of days or hours they can work each week while continuing to receive a pension.
Canady said recent retirees from school resource officer positions are likely the best fit for these roles because the skills needed to work in schools are still fresh, and they have a passion for the job.
“Being an SRO is such a unique assignment that there’s just nothing else like it, which is why it can be difficult to find the right officers to fill those positions,” Canady said.
The topic of school policing—and employing SROs—has been debated for years as the number of school resource officers has grown.
Research suggests that while school police do mitigate some types of violence in schools, their presence also increases certain disciplinary outcomes, including suspensions and expulsions, as well as arrests.
Advocates say the officers are a critical lifeline in emergencies, able to respond to threats more quickly than local police officers patrolling off campus. Opponents, however, argue that the presence of officers and their use by schools to resolve discipline issues can lead to greater student involvement with the juvenile justice system. In addition, research has shown that schools with large populations of students of color are more likely to have school resource officers.
Working for a school district police department provides more flexibility
The Midway district could have turned to existing employees to receive special training and be allowed to carry a firearm as one way of complying with the 2023 state law requiring armed security on every campus, instead of going through the months-long process of starting a police department.
But “we wanted to do it right,” Allen said.
Armed staff members can’t write citations—either to students or adults—and they don’t have the authority to remove someone causing a disruption or posing a threat. It’s important to have that ability outside of school hours, too, including at athletics events where hundreds of people may be present, Allen said.
“If it’s just a matter of having a gun floating around, sure, you can just have [armed staff],” Allen said. “But anybody who knows anything about schools knows it’s more complex than that.”
It took the district, where the police department will station officers at the two middle schools and one high school, about six months to set up its police force of four officers and a chief through the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which regulates and authorizes police departments. The process included establishing regulations on everything from job expectations to a chain of custody for evidence officers obtain. The district’s eight elementary schools do not have SROs. Instead, they are staffed by full-time “security specialists,” who are armed staff members in charge of campus safety and security.
“What you’d see in our police department regulations look very, very similar to what you’d see in a city police department,” Allen said.
The district’s experience with hiring officers has been different, though.
As much as local police departments have struggled to recruit officers, the Midway district has not and is fully staffed, despite pulling from the same pool of licensed law enforcement officer candidates as nearby agencies, Allen said.
That’s likely because working for a school district is a completely different experience.
For one, the work hours are different. Officers will never be called on to work an overnight shift, and will only work holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas “if there’s a really major problem,” Allen said. As school district employees, the officers also won’t have to return to normal patrol duties during the summer and holiday breaks, as many school resource officers do.
“There’s a quality of life that comes with working for us,” Allen said.
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