“Everybody thinks that SROs are all over the place,” said Christine Harms, director of the Colorado School Safety Resource Center.
“Most school districts haven't been able to afford them," she said.
The center provides resources, training and technical assistance to support safe learning environments.
School resource officers are sworn peace officers who work in a school setting.
The campuses that do have an SRO in Colorado tend to be concentrated among larger school districts on the Front Range, Harms said.
Colorado has roughly 300 SROs for its 1,900 school buildings.
The Denver Public Schools (DPS) board voted in 2020 to end all SRO contracts with the Denver Police Department amid protests nationwide following the death of George Floyd after he was handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police officers in Minneapolis. One of the officers was convicted of murder, while three others received prison sentences.
DPS has not had SROs since June 2021.
In the wake of the shooting of two East High School administrators this week, the board reversed course on Thursday, hoping to quell the fears of anxious students and parents.
Armed police officers will be placed on high school campuses for the remainder of the school year.
DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero is expected to devise a long-term safety plan before the end of June.
Critics view their presence in a learning environment as problematic, especially in communities of color, arguing the latter frequently report having had a negative experience with law enforcement.
It is for this reason that the Denver Families for Public Schools is urging DPS to adopt a multilayered approach to addressing gun violence and school safety.
“It’s a tool in the toolbox, but it’s not the sole solution,” Clarence Burton, CEO of Denver Families for Public Schools, said. “I think some big decisions are going to be made here and we just need to make sure the community is at the table.”
Denver Families for Public Schools is a nonprofit that seeks civic engagement to help shape education policy.
At the time its officers were pulled out of DPS, the overwhelming majority of the SROs in DPS were persons of color, according to the Denver Police Department.
While police officers have been in public schools for decades, their use exploded in 1999 after the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton. Demand for officers in school spiked again in 2012 after a gunman killed 26 people — mostly children — at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.
Having school resource officers doesn't eliminate the likelihood of a campus shooting.
In Uvalde, Texas, the police came under heavy criticism for its delayed response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School, where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers, in what’s become a national scandal. The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District had its own officers, who were among the first to respond to the shooting. In a scathing report, a Texas House panel that investigated the shooting blamed “systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making” by the school district and law enforcement.
Still, the National Association of School Resource Officers sees spikes in interest following every school mass shooting, said Mo Canady, a former SRO and the association’s executive director.
And he challenges the outdated view that police officers become SROs as the last stop before retirement.
But school resource officers, he cautioned, should be trained to work with children.
The association offers a week-long SRO training that includes a block on implicit bias, informal counseling skills and teen brain development.
A school assignment, Canady said, also should be something for which officers’ interview and apply. And school administrators should be part of the process.
“Just because it hasn’t worked well doesn’t mean there’s not a path for it to work well,” Canady said.
