NWA EDITORIAL: School-focused law enforcement agencies help keep the focus on students, their future - Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

What’s the point?

School-based law enforcement is a good mechanism to ensure students, their education remain the focus of public systems.

Most parents and educators, we suspect, would agree public schools need to be safe environments set apart from the outside world where educators can teach and students can learn and grow into their full potential.

What a wonderful world that would be.

The truth, however, is that the real world creeps into public education all the time. Administrators discover and report physical abuse. Students show up having had nothing to eat or lacking a coat when the temperatures outside turn brutal. Drug use finds its way into the student population. A teacher is arrested. Kids and their families are homeless. A young girl struggles to cope with an unexpected pregnancy. Classmates mourn the loss of a friend who decided leaving this life was preferable to waiting for the darkness to lift.

Life, unfortunately, does not give students a free pass just because they're kids or because they're taking classes. As much as many parents work to protect their children, the perils of living cannot always be shielded by the walls of a schoolhouse.

Indeed, too often the secure educational world communities attempt to create are shattered by someone devoted to violence, either by someone invading or, most heartbreaking of all, by one of the students.

Safety simply cannot be assumed these days, so school boards and administrators take on the burden of protection in addition to the job of educating. Having law enforcement officers assigned to schools got its start back in the 1950s, but school shootings in recent decades have intensified debate over their roles. More recently have come questions about fairness and discrimination -- particularly involving how law officers treat or are perceived to treat Black students or other minority populations.

In Arkansas, state lawmakers have embraced law enforcement in schools. In 2019, a new law empowered school districts to create their own police departments rather than relying on local police agencies or sheriffs' offices to provide officers in schools. In recent news coverage, we learned 15 school districts have taken that step, including Fort Smith Public Schools.

The goal isn't to make arrests, one official said.

"Our primary focus is to divert that student back to the school when it comes to discipline or counseling and so forth," said Bill Hollenbeck, a former Sebastian County sheriff who now is chief of the Fort Smith schools' police agency. "So we're a tailor-made police department with the purpose of academic success for that school.'

Advocates say the approach allows local authorities to focus primarily on law enforcement within their communities while school officers can keep their focus and skills honed for addressing the needs of students and educators. We agree entirely that law enforcement within schools needs to look very different than street-level enforcement.

In-district police agencies can be fashioned specifically to operate within that special environment educators and administrators work to create within schools. Speeding a response to a crisis is a benefit, but the day-to-day shift of focus of officers hired to work within the schools can have a lasting influence beyond just armed protection.

Hollenbeck noted the power of diversion, communication and counseling for students who very well could have been arrested based on their behaviors. As long as these police agencies can fully embrace the value of building connections with their constituents -- that is, students, teachers and staff -- it seems keeping them school-focused is a promising development, even if, in a perfect world, they wouldn't have to be there at all.

We understand some people have concerns that police in the schools can lead to treating students like law-breakers instead of young people finding their way and, occasionally, needing a dose of disciplinary action. It seems clear, though, that police protection is vital as a deterrent to those who could contemplate violence and as a rapid response if someone should lash out. Creating in-school agencies is a new approach -- in Arkansas, anyway -- that deserves a chance. Perhaps, best of all, it's a strong way to just let teachers teach and students learn.

source: https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2021/dec/28/nwa-editorial-school-focused-law-enforcement/

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