On the topic of the School Resource Officer I'm reminded of stories of schools taught by Nuns who would rap a child's knuckles bloody or slapped for the smallest infraction.
I remember a conversation with a guy I knew in Iowa who recalled his time in school in the 80s:
"Some kid was acting up and getting mouthy with the principal and the principal wrestled him to the ground and then grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt and lifted him up against the wall and we all thought 'he got him! He got him!' and then the principle's wrist broke and the kid fell the the ground and ran and we thought 'OH SHIT! He DOESN'T HAVE HIM!"
Corporal punishment and violence on kids in school doesn't seem to me a particularly NEW thing. Hell...I'm sure we've all got memories of some teacher or principal wrestling some kid to the ground.
What does seem to be gaining prominence however is a growing number of actual police officers...
Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that the number of full-time law enforcement officers employed by local police departments or sheriff’s offices who were assigned to work as SROs increased between 1997 and 2003 before decreasing slightly in 2007 (the most recent year for which data are available). Data show that a greater proportion of high schools, schools in cities, and schools with enrollments of 1,000 or more report having SROs.
The idea of course was to protect the STUDENTS -- I mean...at least rhetorically -- from other students. Unfortunately once we start adding law officers into the mix we start seeing charges for youthful infractions that SHOULD normally be handled outside the legal framework where the kid has a chance of correcting his actions...
Case in point I know of a case where a 14 year old child in Jr. High touched a girl's butt.
Unacceptable.
But in a building full of young adolescents with disparate upbringings...it's going to happen...and it NEEDS to be corrected. But outside the law for the most part.
In this case a police officer was called and the officer had no choice but to report it and the 14 year old found himself in a situation where he was in court facing the possibility of being on a sex offender registry because his parents didn't teach him proper boundaries and respect. Rather than work on that with the child, the school got the law involved.
So a 14 year old kid who was still young enough to learn right from wrong was thrust into the court system and a prosecuting attorney only interested in exacting harsh punishment.
This is exactly the danger we get into when we start welcoming law enforcement officers into our schools.
Schools are places where we LEARN. We learn reading, we learn writing, we learn 'rythatic. But we also learn how to be functional citizens in a theoretically safe environment where sometimes we screw up and while the punishments can be harsh...and sometimes should be...we aren't branded forever with arrest and a rap sheet.
I'm not condoning violence against school children or going back to the days of heavy wooden paddles in the principal's office or Nuns dragging children out of class by their hair or their ear.
I'm simply saying we have no business bringing law officers into a learning environment who are formally arresting school children and dumping them into the correctional and legal environment.
Some folks say the officer in the Spring Valley High School incident should be strung up and did wrong...some say maybe he did right. I believe he shouldn't have been there at all. We haven't stopped violence against kids in our schools. We've just outsourced it to a more malignant force.