What's Going on with New Security Spending?
The community deserves to know how new security money from a tax increase will be spent, and the evidence that such spending will work.
The East Penn school board will likely adopt next year's final budget at their meeting next week. And one of the biggest changes that's been made to this budget over the last several weeks is the creation and growth of substantial new spending on what has only been described vaguely as "safety and security."
This spending was not part of the "Budget Priorities" plan presented to the board and public in March. But by April the administration presented a revised list of priorities that took $200,000 from proposed special education funding for a new safety and security priority. Then, just last month and without public comment, the proposed new safety and security funding more than doubled-- to $420,000 total.
The district has spent hours providing detailed presentations on the new educational spending they propose for next year. Yet they have said virtually nothing about this new safety and security funding, which now comprises almost 20% of proposed new spending. Superintendent Campbell made only a single, short, reference to this spending, before the proposed dollar amount more than doubled, saying it would be spent on "personnel whose primary responsibility would be to enhance safety and security" in the middle schools.
There needs to be greater transparency about this funding, given that it is a significant dollar amount, will be a recurring expense year after year, and is being paid for by a tax increase. Yes, there are some aspects of school safety in which the exact details can't be publicly shared. But surely there is more that can be shared-- and should be shared-- about how this money will be spent and for what purpose.
My concerns are magnified by the fact that "personnel whose primary responsibility would be to enhance safety and security" sounds awfully similar to the stated responsibilities of a School Resource Office (SRO) or similar kind of position. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, an SRO is a police officer who is supposed to have additional training in working with juveniles and schools. The district has been paying for a full-time SRO for Emmaus High School since 2016.
If the plan is pay for additional SROs or similar security staff, then the community deserves to first see a report of the effectiveness of the existing SRO program in reducing crime and increasing safety in the high school over the seven years it has now been in place. Indeed, such reporting was presented to the board as a best practice when the program was initially adopted, and the administration at the time committed to evaluating the SRO program. And if you are going to double down on a strategy, shouldn't you first do an objective evaluation of how that strategy has worked so far?
Such an evaluation is all the more important because there is no evidence that adding SROs or similar policing to schools improves safety and security outside of East Penn. This was true when the high school's SRO was introduced in 2016, and many additional studies since that time have confirmed the same thing. Here are a just a few of the conclusions reached in the most recent research on SRO programs:
"The study findings suggest that increasing SROs does not improve school safety...We recommend that educational decision-makers seeking to enhance school safety consider the many alternatives to programs that require regular police presence in schools." (Criminology & Public Policy, July 2020)
"SRO presence and SRO prevention were not significantly associated with either nonviolent or serious violent incidents reported to police in the middle level sample...Only mental health availability had a significant influence on reducing school problem behavior across middle and high schools." (School Psychology Review, April 2021)
"The majority of evidence supports the notion that SROs decrease safety, increase rates of crime and violence, and negatively impact school climate." (Arizona State University, 2021)
One of the reasons to do systematic research, like the studies quoted above, is precisely so that we can draw on data and expertise to make well-informed decisions about our schools. We too easily rely on personal anecdotes and experiences, or what sounds right or plausible to us, rather than information on what actually works or is effective.
If our school district is going to raise taxes in order to hire "personnel whose primary responsibility would be to enhance safety and security," the community deserves more details about this spending. And, more importantly, they deserve to see the evidence that it will work; that is, that they will get what they are paying for in the form of improved school safety.
Here are some additional thoughts on police in our schools and school safety more generally:
PS: Parents are rightly concerned about school safety. And there are plenty of effective, evidence-based programs for improving the security of our schools that work better than school policing, including mental health services, peer mediation, trauma-informed care, mentoring programs, and restorative justice practices. See this recent technical report for additional evidence and data.