BVSD commits to community conversation on police officers in schools
Boulder Valley School District leaders on Tuesday committed to having a broader conversation about school resource officers, but didn’t immediately agree to a call by Boulder community leaders to eliminate the program.
The NAACP is leading a local effort to remove police from Boulder Valley’s schools, mirroring a similar effort underway in Denver Public Schools. The effort gained momentum amid nationwide protests and outcry over police brutality and killings of black people.
“The blindfold has been ripped from the eyes of many Americans,” Kristine Johnson, co-chair of the Boulder County NAACP education committee, said at Tuesday’s Boulder Valley school board meeting. “Now is the time to question the role of police in schools.”
Boulder Valley Superintendent Rob Anderson urged the board to “begin a thoughtful conversation with our community” on the issue of police in schools, saying students, parents, teachers and school administrators need to be included. He plans to present a process and timeline to the school board at its June 23 meeting.
In Broomfield, the police department has school resource officers at Broomfield and Legacy high schools, West Lake Middle School, Thunder Vista P-8 and Aspen Creek K-8. Police spokeswoman Rachel Welte said the three officers at middle schools also cover all the other schools in town.
As of this week Adams and Boulder Valley say they will continue to have SRO’s.
Adams 12 Five Star Schools Superintendent Chris Gdowski said district officials are aware of ongoing conversations other districts are having regarding their SRO programs.
“We stand with our Black community and are also appreciative of the good relationships we have had with our SROs and police departments over the years,” he said in an email Friday. “In the spirit of continuous improvement, we evaluate all programs each year to ensure we are doing right by our students and community. Our SRO program is no different and we will continue to evaluate with our Board of Education as we plan for the new school year and beyond.”
Two BVSD board members, Richard Garcia and Lisa Sweeney-Miran, said they support removing police officers from schools. Sweeney-Miran said there’s no evidence to show that school resource officers make students safer.
“We’re just criminalizing our kids, I think, with these SROs in our schools,” she said, adding that more training for school resource officers won’t fix the main issue. “A police officer is not a social worker or mental health worker, no matter how much training they have.”
Other board members said they want to continue the discussion, supporting Anderson’s proposal to start a community conversation that includes students and staff members and data specific to school resource officers in Boulder Valley.
“There are a lot of questions here we really need to consider and evaluate,” school board member Donna Miers said, noting a black school resource officer at Boulder High had a “wonderful relationship” with students.
Boulder Valley has 10 school resource officers from police departments in Boulder, Broomfield, Lafayette and Louisville and the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, according to district officials. The officers are paid by their respective agencies and do not cost the district any money.
About a dozen people on Tuesday spoke in favor of eliminating school resource officers, while the school board received about 200 email messages on the topic.
“I would really like BVSD to take a stand and say they’re not going to be participating in the school-to-prison pipeline,” said Boulder Valley parent Anna Segur.
Debbie Pope, YWCA Boulder Valley CEO, suggested the district require school resource officers to be trained in restorative justice and racial justice and to prioritize community policing.
Her biracial daughter, Southern Hills Middle School student Bella Pope, said she’s experienced white friends using a racist slur — and refusing to stop when she asked — because they claimed a person of color had given them a pass to use it.
Her suggestions included a more diverse counseling staff, more staff training and a support group for students of color.
“It would be nice to know we were all together in this,” Bella said. “I never felt like I belonged in school.”
Liz Barcheck, a teacher librarian at Lafayette’s Angevine Middle School, said the presence of school resource officers creates fear for undocumented students.
“Students can’t learn when they’re scared or disproportionately removed from class,” she said.
NAACP leaders said eliminating the school resource officer program is part of a broader effort to reform the school district’s discipline policies.
After a year of work to revise and consolidate the district’s 12 core discipline and student policies, the school board on Tuesday approved a consolidated six revised policies. Anderson has described the policy changes as “the first and right step” in addressing disproportionate discipline.
In Boulder Valley, students of color are disciplined — sent out of the classroom, suspended or referred to police — at higher rates than their white classmates, according to 2018-2019 data from the Colorado Department of Education, which is the most recent data available. So are English language learners and students receiving special education services.
Based on information requested by Garcia in 2018, 335 Hispanic and Latino students were given out-of-school suspensions in the 2017-18 school year — almost 40% of the total suspensions, though they made up only about 19% of the district’s total student population.
Along with disproportionate disciplinary actions for students of color, concerns Anderson has heard include inconsistency among schools and a lack of clarity on appeals. Because of the absence of good districtwide policies, he said, schools have their own discipline codes and decide what does and doesn’t get reported.
The revised discipline policies incorporate feedback from the NAACP, the District Accountability Committee and the district’s Latino Parent Advisory Council. The changes also require the school board to annually review discipline data and consider policy revisions.
The NAACP’s feedback includes asking the district to focus on restorative justice, counseling, conflict resolution and other positive interventions instead of sanctions that remove students from regular instruction. Those sanctions, according to the NAACP, should be reserved for “only the most severe disciplinary infractions.”
In other business, the board approved a positive evaluation and three-year contract extension for Anderson.
Anderson, who was hired as Boulder Valley’s superintendent in 2018, will follow other administrative employees and won’t receive a cost-of-living raise. He will receive a 2% “step” raise for experience, increasing his annual salary of $264,849, pending approval of the 2020-21 budget.
The board on Tuesday postponed adopting the budget because the state Legislature has yet to approve the School Finance Act.
