Though most of Washington’s largest school districts hire police to patrol school hallways, these officers are largely unregulated and the cost of their presence — both academically and financially — is significant, according to a report released this week by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The advocacy organization examined data from the 2013-14 through 2015-16 school years in more than 100 districts.
“We were surprised by the degree to which officers have almost unfettered ability to enforce in school discipline,” said Vanessa Hernandez, youth policy director at the ACLU who wrote the “Students Not Suspects” report. “That’s a pretty dangerous road to go down, to have student discipline in an educational environment handed to a law enforcement agent, and it really sends a troubling message to students about how we perceive them.”
National data show a strong correlation between placing officers in schools and increased youth referrals to the criminal justice system, she added. And in Washington, state law makes it a misdemeanor to cause a disturbance within school walls.
“Any student misbehavior — from talking back to a teacher, to making an off-color joke, to throwing spitballs — could be treated like a crime,” Hernandez said.
Yet no state agency systematically tracks police in schools, or the impact on students. Most commonly, officers are contract employees who report to their police departments, not district administrators.
In recent decades the number of officers patrolling the halls has ballooned — from fewer than 100 nationally in the late 1980s, to an estimated 17,000 today.
In Washington, Hernandez added, at least 3,400 kids were either arrested on campus or referred to law enforcement for prosecution during in the 2013-14 school year, which is the most recent data available.
In a time when state lawmakers are wrestling with a multibillion-dollar hole in funding for education, schools are spending millions on police officers, the report found.
Expenses add up
Seventeen districts pay the entire cost of their school police, covering salaries, benefits and even, in two cases, leasing patrol cars. On average, schools contribute about $62,000 annually for each full-time officer, and up to $125,000 at the high end.
That adds up fast in districts that use officers in multiple schools. Spokane, for example, paid more than $1 million for school officers during the 2014-15 school year, the report says. And Kent — which is facing an $18 million budget hole — spent almost $500,000 in 2015-16.
Other approaches, like restorative justice and trauma-informed teaching, have been shown to reduce disciplinary incidents by addressing the underlying causes of misbehavior, and the ACLU suggests that money for police might be better spent on school psychologists, social workers or teaching assistants.
Yet momentum has moved in the opposite direction. Nationally, 24 percent of elementary schools and 42 percent of middle and high schools routinely hire police officers, according to the report.
But not all schools have police officers. In high-poverty schools police are a much more routine presence. In small-town Walla Walla, for example, the alternative school where 80 percent of kids are low-income has an officer. But the regular comprehensive high school, where only 45 percent of students are low-income, does not.
