Nora Grace-Flood Photo
Under new SRO policy, Hamden High Student Resource Officer Jeremy Brewer will no longer wear above-pictured tactical vest.
As school-based cops joined Hamden students in returning to the hallways this week, local leaders caught up on a late assignment: Writing rules for what the officers should or should not be doing in academic environments.
The Hamden Board of Education unanimously voted Wednesday evening to enact a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the town’s police department and school district. The MOU provides the officers — known as school resource officers, or SROs — with their own dress code, training schedule and spelled-out general responsibilities.
Read through an unsigned but approved draft of that new policy here.
BOE President Melissa Kaplan told an audience at the meeting that “our discussion tonight is not whether or not we have SROs in our school — that is a separate conversation that can be had.
“Tonight we are addressing the fact that we do have SROs in our schools, and as such it is our responsibility to ensure that students are protected, safeguarded, kept safe from harm and rights are not violated.”
The MOU lays out how school administration and SROs — who are police department employees — should work together to minimize law enforcement intervention on school grounds while improving relationships between young people and legal authorities. The policy recognizes that Black and brown children and neurodiverse youth are uniquely susceptible to harm stemming from policing practices.
The MOU was created through the shared efforts of Hamden’s Strengthening Police and Community Partnerships (SPCP), the town’s police department and leaders of the school district and BOE.
Jacqueline Beirne, the SPCP’s head facilitator, launched the undertaking. She said the document was an opportunity to “build out” the SRO program and “truly define it step by step” — to decide “what type of officer is gonna be in our schools.”
According to the new guidelines, the goals of an SRO program according to the Board of Education are to:
Establish a positive working relationship in cooperative effort to prevent juvenile delinquency and assist in student development.
Maintain a safe and secure environment on school campuses that will be conducive to learning.
Promote positive attitudes regarding the role of police officers in today’s society.
Strive to ensure a positive culture within the school community by being present, active and engaged with the student population.
The town resolved to accomplish those goals by ensuring SROs are accessible and approachable members of the school community while making sure their involvement in disciplinary measures is a last resort.
“The parties agree that police and/or the assigned SROs need to follow certain protocols when on school grounds in non-emergency circumstances as follows,” the document reads. “SROs will maintain a presence in the school that promotes social interactions such as eating lunch with students, participating in assemblies and sporting events.”
The agreement states that schools administration may call on SROs to lead lessons on law, drug and alcohol use and safety, internet precautions, mental health support, sexual harassment, and other “pertinent subjects.” It also clarifies that any actual law enforcement intervention should only be taken after “classroom, school and community options have been found ineffective” in response to student behavior that is in violation of criminal law.
“Law enforcement options may include verbal warning; conference with student, family, teachers, and/or others; referral to JRB (juvenile review board) and/or community agencies.”
SROs are also on guard to respond to any external threats and trespassers as a liaison to the police department as directed by school administration, the MOU states.
SROs are still expected to carry approved duty firearms, ammunition and tasers around schools. The new agreement explicitly prohibits cops from storing any such equipment in a school building or on school grounds. For example, an SRO may not leave a gun in their office or desk, but must keep it on their person.
SROs will also no longer wear their typical police uniforms, the document states. They will arrive at school in their Hamden Police Department bicycle polo shirt — an attempt to make sure SROs still dress in easily identifiable law enforcement clothing without showing up in bulky tactical vests.
“A full police uniform can be triggering for some people,” Beirne told the New Haven Independent. “It can look scary.”
And, while officers may wear body cameras, the MOU states they should be turned on only when cops are acting in a law enforcement capacity — not while engaging in typical educational responsibilities around school.
Moving forward, school cops will also be required to engage in bolstered training efforts. Whereas SROs previously were subjected to “three hours every three years of some sort of human interaction training,” according to Beirne, the police department will now be responsible for referring all SROs to classes specifically designed to promote autism awareness, build trauma-informed policing skills, educate officers about implicit bias and teach anti-racist practices, and increase sensitivity to students’ gender identities and sexual orientations.
While the chief of police is in charge of assigning cops to the SRO beat, the school superintendent is granted the power to expel SROs and opt for a replacement officer if they do not believe the individual to be the right choice for a given school’s climate.
Lastly, the MOU sets standards for regular data reports. The police department and school administration must make public the number and types of disciplinary actions taken by officers at each school (including demographic information of students involved) and document each interaction SROs have with students — including positive engagements and argument escalations — on a quarterly basis.
Also on a quarterly basis, representatives of the SPCP are required to meet and review that data and offer oversight of the MOU. Each year going forward, that team will prepare a report of recommendations to improve or amend the MOU.
The document states that the district should place two SROs within the high school full-time, hire another to patrol the middle school, and have a substitute available to travel throughout the broader school district as needed. Because of current staffing limitations, the MOU notes, the Hamden police chief should aim to ensure one SRO remains in the high school and one in the middle school until more officers are free to join the SRO program (currently, due to officer shortages, there has just been one SRO in the high school since the inception of the pandemic).
Update: According to former Superintendent Jody Goeler, Hamden did not previously have clear, written constraints on how many SROs should be in Hamden schools. He said that the police department generally budgeted for and provided two SROs in the middle school and one in the high school.
Jacqueline Beirne, right, with fellow SEPTA mom Claire Mathis at a dance party she organized to bring together both cops and developmentally disabled youth.
Beirne, who is both the co-founder of Hamden’s special education parent teacher association and the leader of the SPCP council, was one of the original signers of a petition that opposed the growth of an SRO program back in 2019 when former Mayor Curt Leng proposed adding two SROs to stand by Hamden’s elementary schools. That petition argued that police in schools don’t make students safer, but instead increase disciplinary actions that often end up hurting Black and Brown students as well as youth with disabilities.
“The reason I signed the document was very personal,” Beirne said. “I’m the mother of a neurodiverse child. And I’m the sibling of someone who literally went through the prison pipeline.”
She said that she got involved with the SPCP in 2020 in an effort to represent Hamden’s neurodiverse student population — and began to see both how the presence of SROs could prepare students who would inevitably come in contact with police down the line to protect themselves as well as the desire of many cops “to do good, to help.” More importantly, she said, she saw how thin the preexisting guidance concerning SRO operations was.
“We’ve had some semblance of an SRO agreement for over 20 years,” she said. The introduction of cops in Hamden schools, she recalled, began after the 1999 Columbine high school massacre.
“It was a couple of pages,” she recalled. “There was way too much leeway.” It was a private document between the then-police chief and superintendent, with no Board of Education oversight, she said.
The decision by Hamden’s BOE to install metal detectors in the high school prompted Beirne and the SPCP to concentrate their efforts on revising Hamden’s SRO protocols.
“If we’re going to have cops in schools, it needs to be truly defined,” she said.
In all, Beirne said, the MOU is “accountability for our school administration and our SROs; it is transparency to the public of exactly what an SRO’s job is and what it is not; and it is peace of mind for public safety.”
Nora Grace-Flood’s reporting is supported in part by a grant from Report for America.
SROs do not make our schools safer. The evidence is inconclusive at best even in the best run programs. Look at Uvalde and Parkland, how did those officers respond?
This seems like a political gimmick, when the cops could be better used walking the beat. What is more surprising is all these Democrats campaigned in ‘21 on removing the SROs from schools