AURORA | You can often hear School Resource Officer Carolyn J. Renaud asking students to show her a hall pass as they shuffle in from outside at Aurora West College Preparatory Academy, a combined middle and high school in north Aurora.
Renaud, who is warm and friendly despite being the only school resource officer responsible for corralling over 1,200 students for their hall passes on a daily basis, said patrolling school hallways is completely different from patrolling the streets.
“In a school, you don’t have a lot of the authority you have on the street,” she said. “Most police make decisions based on our knowledge and our training and experience. In a school you work in the confines of a school district.”
But Renaud said she likes operating under a memorandum of understanding with Aurora Public Schools where she knows when she’s supposed to intervene and when it’s better to hand a disciplinary matter over to a school administrator.
“I never feel handicapped by what I can and can’t do in the schools, and I don’t mind working in their confines because I think their confines advocate for kids,” she said.
Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, is sponsoring a bill aimed at reducing incidents between law enforcement and students for low-level misbehavior in Colorado schools through encouraging formal agreements like the one that exists between APS and Aurora police.
House Bill 1240 directs school districts and local law enforcement agencies to create formal understandings for when school resource officers or other members of law enforcement are required to intervene in in-school conflicts.
“What we’ve seen is when schools enter into a memorandum of understanding, there has been a reduction in misbehavior as it relates to law enforcement and student arrests,” Fields said March 13 during the bill’s second reading in the state House.
She said the agreements, though not mandatory for school districts even with the legislation, are designed to prevent students from being arrested or charged with assault for misbehavior that can be handled by a school administrator.
Fields said the agreements also help keep students out of the justice system.
“Once you get caught up in that system, you have a misdemeanor or felony charge, that’s going to impede your ability to be successful,” she said.
Republican Jim Wilson of Salida is critical of the bill and said he didn’t see the point of the legislation because it did not make contracts between school districts and police mandatory.
He added that school resource officers are also not needed in smaller school districts, and that most school districts along the Front Range already have agreements with law enforcement agencies. According to the Colorado Association of School Resource Officers, almost all of the school districts in the state have some kind of agreement with a law enforcement agency.
“I struggle with this bill because there is a divide between schools that have police officers and schools that don’t. We can do contracts, but we don’t a need bill to do that,” Wilson said during the bill’s second reading.
Pete Lee, a Democrat from Colorado Springs, supports the bill and said it would encourage even more school districts around the state to enter into student-arrest contracts. He pointed to a bill he sponsored that was passed in 2013 that created more funding for restorative justice programs around the state. Restorative justice promotes community engagement as a way to rehabilitate offenders rather than through the justice system.
“If you look now, you have restorative justice programs in the Aurora schools, and there is a pilot program for restorative justice in jurisdictions around the state,” he said after the bill’s second reading. “I think anytime we do things at the Capitol that may not be mandatory and prescriptive, they are encouraging the use of those practices. I think people look at that and take that as an impetus to give it consideration.”
Ken Balltrip, president of the board of directors for the Colorado Association of School Resource Officers said the association also supports the agreements.
“That’s what gives the understanding between the police department and the school district for what are the dos and don’ts for school resource officers,” he said.
The Colorado House approved the bill on a narrow final vote of 34-31 Monday. It heads next to the state Senate.
I dunno it seems a sad state of affairs when we must have police officers overseeing the hallways and students in our schools. What does this say about our society?
Didn’t Columbine have an armed officer too?