Guest Post: Open letter to MoCoBoe in Support of the Montgomery County, MD SRO Program

Published on February 27, 2021

Dear Board of Education Members,

The first priorities of government are public safety and public education, and without public safety, public education suffers – we all know that students cannot learn in an unsafe school environment. My name is Susan Burkinshaw. Many of you know that I have been a proponent of the School Resource Officer (SRO) Program since I became involved with MCCPTA and became an advocate for public safety and school safety and security in 2008. I am one of the authors of the 2010 MCCPTA SRO Resolution that equitably resolved to have an SRO in each high school in MCPS so all schools would enjoy the benefits of the program equally.

You should also know by now that the SRO program is a best practice in community policing. The SRO Program supports efficiencies for the police department, for school administration and for students, their families and the surrounding school neighborhoods. SROs allow access to a police officer dedicated to the school buildings to address reporting and investigations not afforded by beat officers and their disparate shift schedules (as compared to daily school schedules). Calls for service are also significantly reduced by having a dedicated SRO in a school building.

Please do not turn a blind eye to the fact that the MCPS principals have unanimously come out in support of the SRO Program – they are the ones who rely on these officers in their school buildings to keep their staff and students safe every day and they can attest to the benefits directly.

As a community member I am comforted knowing that there is an officer in the school building a quarter mile from my home to keep students safe from both internal and external threats, while allowing the rest of the department to patrol the community and provide backup for the SRO as needed – with upwards of 3,000 students and staff in many of our high schools on a normal school day, this is an extremely efficient use of police resources and tax dollars. These resource benefits are compounded by the added benefit to students of SROs maintaining positive relationships and contact with students, participating in Restorative Justice Circles, providing wellness checks and mental health EAP for students in crisis, leading school drills, and the myriad other functions they perform daily.

It should also be noted that our county’s SROs are majority minority – there are 26 total SROs in the program with demographic composition as follows: 10 Black males, 5 Black females, 1 Hispanic male, 8 White males, and 2 White females. If you speak to these officers directly you will find out that they are in the program because they want to help students – not to arrest them for no reason.

The debate about eliminating the SRO program has stemmed from political unrest and the resulting anti-police sentiment nationally without looking at facts and hard data from right here in Montgomery County. The real question is, are minority students being targeted? If so, that should be a question for you and the school administration, not the SRO program. Ninety-seven percent of SRO arrests were initiated by school administrators. Eliminating the SRO program without hard evidence against it is extremely shortsighted and dangerous.

Since reported incidents are down historically across the county since the implementation of the SRO program (a total of 136,832 students were enrolled in MCPS during the 2001-02 school year and 7,104 serious incidents were reported; in the 2010-11 school year, with 144,064 students enrolled, 4,475 serious incidents were reported; In 2018-9, the most recent reported year, there were 162,680 students and 3,447 [pending confirmation] serious incidents, down another 30%), since most arrests are driven by MCPS, and when data is adjusted to reflect individual school populations and disaggregated, the bias against minorities becomes less statistically significant, it becomes clear that there is less of a problem statistically than opponents would have you believe.

Vocal support for the SRO program is generally much quieter than the knee-jerk politically motivated attacks against it have been. Many students and families, minority or otherwise, who have the most potential to directly benefit from the prevention and intervention methodologies provided by the SRO program (i.e., those being recruited into gangs, such as MS-13; those whose suicide was prevented by an SRO; or those who are victims of domestic abuse) might be less likely to testify in favor of the program because of the sensitivity of their individual circumstances. Add to that the prevention and intervention benefits that cannot be measured (since there is never statistical data on incidents that did not occur and/or were diffused because of the presence of an SRO), it would be irresponsible of the Board of Education and/or our County Council to eliminate the SRO program without concrete evidence against it.

I would further assert that the need for mental health interventions and supports is undeniably great – yet it is not mutually exclusive of the county's SRO program. Both are needed, especially following our collective national and global experience in 2020. Moreover, eliminating the SRO program before or shortly after most students return to school after a year of virtual learning could be catastrophic.

I caution you that the SRO program must not be reduced or eliminated until such time that we have those additional mental health resources in place, AND/OR we have concrete evidence that explicitly supports any potential benefit of reducing it. Until then there is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater – if there are problems with bias against minority students in our school system, we need to address those issues and prove that they are caused by the SRO Program before this best practice program is eliminated. The SRO program data clearly supports a reduction in the number of serious incidents, it is unanimously supported by MCPS principals and it is a proven best practice in community policing nationally.

The numbers don’t lie and MCPS School Safety and Security data proves the SRO program works here in Montgomery County, Maryland and in Montgomery County Public Schools – a 51% decrease in the number of serious incidents annually in MCPS with a student population increase of 19% since the inception of the program should speak for itself.

Respectfully submitted,

Susan Burkinshaw

Germantown, MD

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