Henrico evaluating SRO program, as new laws take effect

As localities nationwide are examining the roles of police within their individual structures of government, some also are evaluating the presence of police officers in their schools.

It’s a topic the Henrico School Board and Board of Supervisors addressed during their joint work session last week and one that came up again today statewide, as a number of new laws took effect – including several related to school resource officers.

At the crux of the discussion is whether those officers – SROs, for short – belong in schools in the first place, and if so, whether their directives are adequately and specifically defined.

In Henrico, there are 35 SROs in public schools, including one at each middle school and at least one at each high school, according to Henrico Police Lt. Col. Linda Toney. Their intended roles vary from those of protector to investigator, friend to mentor.

"They are considered family,” Toney said of the officers’s relationships with the communities of the schools they serve.

But in some cases, according to some students and others, those roles also may intentionally or unintentionally expand to include intimidator, enforcer or something more frightening.

“We want our SROs in our schools, because we know that we need them,” said Hermitage High School student Jaesean Plummer said during a recent Henrico Schools online forum. “We know that. But when you have SROs in the schools that don’t even attempt to get to know you, that don’t even attempt to build relationships with you, they’re just walking down the hallways with guns, you know they have guns and they threaten to pepper spray you if you get into an altercation, they threaten to tase you – that’s scary. It’s a lot. We want training. We want conversations to be had.”

Plummer, who is Black, said he and other minority students had experienced those fears personally. Stories like theirs prompted the School Board and Board of Supervisors to hear details about the program from Toney June 23 and discuss it jointly.

By failing to examine the program, “we would be tone-deaf to the conversations that are happening around the globe, our nation, our city, with regards to racism and social injustice and how it’s exploding within the context of recent relationships in society,” School Board Chairman Roscoe Cooper, III said that night.

The concerns of some elected officials are whether SROs are disciplining or arresting students in general too often and students of color at a disproportionate rate.

In 2015, county officials examined the SRO program after officers were arresting students at a higher than normal rate following fights in schools and other similar altercations. Varina District Supervisor Tyrone Nelson and others in the community worried that imposing criminal charges on juveniles or students for issues that, although serious, perhaps could have been handled by school officials instead of the police was unfair – and impacted minority students more often.

“My biggest concern has always been the school-to-prison pipeline,” Nelson said at last week’s meeting. “As a Black man, it's hard not to focus on. If students and administrators feel safer because of SROs in schools, they’re the ones in schools. My responsibility is to make sure that our students are not being criminalized.”

Five years ago, a number of SROs were being asked by their school administrators to administer discipline, County Manager John Vithoulkas recalled.

“Ultimately, after a number of conversations, there was recognition that school security officers [and not SROs] had to have a greater role” in how those students were handled, he said.

Officials implemented a change – perhaps becoming the first locality in the state to do so, Vithoulkas said – whereby many students who previously would have been arrested instead were referred to the juvenile justice system through a juvenile violation report, or JVR.

Instead of going to jail, “perhaps they were going to get the services that they needed, whether it had to do with. . .larceny reduction, truancy issues, so that they weren’t necessarily part of the criminal justice system,” Toney said.

Since that change took place, Vithoulkas said, the number of students arrested in schools “are totally different.”

During the past two school years, a total of 23 students were arrested on campuses, Toney said – 15 in 2018-19 and 8 during the just-completed year.

New laws mandate to mandate training, data collection
More changes are coming for SROs statewide, regardless of whether localities implement any of their own.

As of Wednesday, new laws designed to provide more structure for SRO programs in Virginia took effect. They were created in part by Henrico Delegate Schuyler VanValkenburg (D-72nd District), who also teaches social studies at Glen Allen High School.

Among other actions, the new measures:
• establish the Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety and task it with a number of directives, including providing school safety training for public school personnel and a “model critical incident response training program” for public and private schools statewide;

• require localities to update their memorandums of understanding related to their SRO programs at least every two years;

• require school systems annually to report data to the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services showing the use of force against students, “including the use of chemical, mechanical, or other restraints and instances of seclusion; detentions of students; arrests of students; student referrals to court or court service units; and other disciplinary actions by school resource officers involving students.”

The new standards “are important for a variety of reasons,” VanValkenburg told the Citizen. “They’re important for knowing where there’s overreach [by officers], they’re important for knowing exactly how they’re keeping schools safe.”

Training – including best practices for interacting with juveniles – is something that SROs themselves have been asking for, he said. “School resource officers themselves were admitting that they didn’t have the skills necessary for child development.”

That should be a welcome change for students like Plummer who have felt unfairly targeted or threatened at times.

“No, we do not want them out of the schools,” he said of SROs, “we just want better training.”

Though some in the community do believe police officers shouldn’t be in schools at all, VanValkenburg said that their removal would require the creation of more positions for counselors, mental health experts and others to handle student issues in a different way.

“Should they be in schools or not? That’s a separate question,” he said. “But if they’re going to be in schools, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of making them accountable and also giving them the tools to make [schools] safe.”

Toney told county officials that Henrico Police and its SROs are ready and willing to make any changes that are deemed necessary. They’ll incorporate those into their annual SRO training meetings in August, she said.

“We cannot make change unless we're communicating, and so we need to hear what it is that we need to do different and we need to hear what's working as well,” she told them during the June 23 meeting. “We want to be part of that relationship, part of that healing. We are ready and open to have those conversations to make those changes."

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