Principal Michael Doran knows first-hand the benefits of having a Montgomery County police officer stop by Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville to walk the halls and talk with students.
He’s seen how the relationship that develops between an officer and students can be “very positive and very powerful”—and how that relationship can help situations from escalating should school officials need to involve police in an incident.
And that’s why Doran is not happy to hear that the police department’s School Resource Officer program is on the budget chopping block. Budget cuts in recent years had left only nine officers assigned to county schools. County Executive Ike Leggett has recommended eliminating funding for the remaining officers for fiscal 2012.
“If we really are going to be a system that says we value safety, but also value relationships, then I think it’s worth the money,” Doran says. “The sad news is that you can’t quantify it.”
But MCPS statistics on school safety do tell a story. According to an MCPS report for the 2009-2010 school year, police officers were called to high schools dozens of times for serious incidents—84 times to deal with drug issues, 66 times for physical assaults and attacks and 49 times for incidents involving weapons, among others.
Having an officer who knows students and the school creates “peace of mind” when dealing with these incidents, said Doran, who needed police assistance for eight incidents last year. Other police officers come in “ready to take action,” while the SRO program “knew how to deal with the situations and didn’t escalate them,” he said.
So what would it take to keep officers assigned to the schools? About $1.5 million, or less than the $2 million subsidy that the council voted Monday to give a Wheaton shopping mall to lure Costco to move there.
Council members saying they’re not willing to pay for the SRO program because the Board of Education hasn’t supported it by supplying money in its budget. “We as a council do not make decisions on behalf of the Board of Education,” Council President Valerie Ervin, a former school board member, said Tuesday during a council work session. The council will vote on its budget May 26.
Other members worried that MCPD would have to divert officers from plans to better police county trouble spots.
But Montgomery County Police Chief Thomas Manger noted that MCPD, not MCPS, has always been in charge of the program and would “manage our way through” scheduling officers where they were needed.
While MCPS values the program, it is “not in a position to pick up the cost,” spokesman Dana Tofig said. And if the council doesn’t fund the program, MCPS “would continue to work closely with the police on any serious incidents” and, “would hope to continue a relationship that built good will between the school community and our students.”
Council members also wondered whether the 181 MCPS security officers who deal with day-to-day security—at an annual cost of about $8 million—aren’t enough to ensure safety.
That’s a good point.
But, as Doran noted in a phone interview, an armed police officer provides a certain deterrent that school security personnel can’t because they don’t have the authority.
“A police officer can engage a student in ways that we can’t,” he said. “There is a level of seriousness that isn’t there as an educator.”
Council member Craig Rice, who urged the council to restore the funding, saw the bigger picture.
“This is not only about the prevention of incidents in our schools, but it’s also about stamping out crime in our community,” he said. “These are all the things our school security would never be able to do, not practically, not legally.”
