The Denver school board will meet Thursday to discuss potential changes to its policy barring armed police in the city’s schools, including a proposal that would allow school resource officers on campuses and another plan that would not.
Denver Public Schools’ Board of Education is considering a different approach to school resource officers, or SROs, in response to growing gun violence among teens and the recent shooting of two administrators inside East High School.
The board temporarily suspended its 2020 policy prohibiting SROs following the East shooting, but now will consider whether to make permanent changes as Superintendent Alex Marrero works on a new districtwide safety plan.
One of the proposals, put forward by board member Scott Baldermann, would allow Marrero to decide when to station police officers inside schools. While the decision would be left to the superintendent, the plan also sets guidelines on how SROs should operate in schools. For example, they wouldn’t be allowed to discipline students or to store guns on campus.
“What this policy does is open the door for the superintendent to utilize SROs on an at-needed basis when it comes to safety,” Baldermann said.
A separate plan, proposed by board members Auon’tai Anderson, Michelle Quattlebaum and Scott Esserman, would not staff district-run or charter schools with armed police. Instead, it would have DPS work with the Denver Police Department to use community resource officers, who would be assigned to regions across the district rather than stationed inside a school.
That proposed policy would limit law enforcement involvement on DPS campuses to when they are needed to protect the physical safety of students and staff, when there is criminal conduct by someone outside of the school community, and when required by law, according to the proposal.
“We must be resolute,” said Anderson, one of the leaders of the 2020 effort that removed police from schools, during a news conference Wednesday. “We must remember that the presence of law enforcement on our campuses has been harmful for Black and brown children.”
If the board approves the plan, DPS and the police department would still need to create a day-to-day job description for community resource officers and decide how many should work in the district, Anderson said.
The board is still in the early stages of drafting a new policy regarding SROs and isn’t expected to vote on either proposal at its meeting Thursday.
Both policy changes to be considered by the board would place limitations on what police could do within schools and would require the district to routinely monitor how often students are ticketed or arrested. Both would require DPS to find external funding for SROs, such as from the city or state.
The policy put forward by Anderson, Quattlebaum and Esserman also would prohibit community resource officers from searching students without probable cause.
The board voted in 2020 to remove SROs from Denver’s public schools following the protests over the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Members have said that having police in schools harms students of color and fuels the school-to-prison pipeline.
“We made a dent in dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline,” Anderson said of the 2020 resolution, adding that fewer students are being ticketed ever since the district removed SROs.
Baldermann agreed. He said in an interview that he wants to continue that progress by keeping student interactions with law enforcement low, but he also believes SROs can help curb the rise in weapons being discovered in Denver schools.
As of late March, DPS had reported finding 14 guns and 22 fake guns on its school campuses this school year, up from two real guns and nine fake guns found at Denver schools five years ago.
“The biggest concern is the increase in the number of weapons that are showing up at schools,” he said, adding, “We can’t have SROs there for discipline when we have district policies that handle those procedures.”
But DPS has faced scrutiny from parents and community members about its response to safety following the March 22 shooting at East, in which a student shot and injured two administrators.
A day after the shooting, the board suspended its policy barring police to temporarily allow officers to be stationed in school buildings through the end of the academic year. The policy is set to resume on June 30, unless the board acts.
The board’s review of the policy comes as Marrero is working on a new safety plan for the district. So far, he has proposed reinstating SROs in both of his drafts.
Initially, he proposed having individual schools decide whether they wanted police in their buildings. But last week, he changed his recommendation slightly to say that the school board should set a districtwide policy on whether to allow SROs in comprehensive high schools and schools with sixth- to 12th-graders.
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