By Tamara Ward
Special to the AFRO
Some Marylanders argue police presence in schools contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline; others believe law enforcement enhances school security. And then there is a middle-ground segment of the population who believes school resource officers, or SROs, can bring benefits to students–when trained and used correctly.
Evolution of SROs
Michael Rudinski, the former School Safety Program coordinator for the Maryland Center for School Safety (MCSS), has witnessed firsthand the evolution of SROs in the state, and takes pride in helping shape training and best practices that seek to develop a more harmonious relationship between SROs and the school populations they serve.
But long before joining MCSS, Rudinski took a job as an SRO in Hyattsville in the 1990s and spent the remainder of his career at Hyattsville City Police Department as an SRO. His experiences at Northwestern High School influence the work he does today.
Joan Cox, a retired Juvenile Services probation officer, worked with Rudinski at Northwestern during her 10-year stint in the now defunct DJS program Spotlight on Schools (SOS), where school-based probation officers would supervise students already in the pipeline and on probation, with the goal of making sure they attended classes and ultimately graduated.
“I went there in the fall of 1999. And I remember that very clearly because it was earlier in the year that the Columbine school shooting happened” in Colorado, said Cox, who retired in 2010 after a 30-year career with DJS.
Immediately, Cox was paired with Rudinski by the school’s principal to work at the high school, which had 2,500 students.
“I wasn’t really sure what that meant to me at the time because in 20-something years I worked for the department I didn’t have a partner. I didn’t need a partner. What am I going to do with you? You’re a cop,” Cox recalled saying to Rudinski, noting she would not have chosen a police officer as a partner.
In hindsight, Cox said it was the best thing that ever happened to her at Northwestern.
“In any program for kids… any school resource officer or any school-based probation officer, they’re only going to be as good as what they put into their jobs,” she said.
Cox said police officers would apply for SRO jobs but did not have the appropriate school resource training.
“He or she became a school-based police officer with the mentality of a street cop. And the mentality of a street cop doesn’t necessarily make it a successful placement in a high school,” Cox said.
She said every time Rudinski would make arrests in the school or in the community, “my caseload would go up. And I remember looking at him one morning and I said, like, did it ever occur to you that you do not have to arrest every kid you interact with?”
Cox said he looked at her like she had five heads and responded, “I am a cop and that’s what I do.”
Her response: “But that’s not what you have to do.”
Cox said she explained to Rudinski that most of the kids in the school were great kids who made “really stupid decisions” and that “many of us” have made stupid decisions and were never
arrested. She pleaded with him to “back off” the arrests and instead focus on building relationships with the students.
“I’m not kidding you–from that day on Mike became a different police officer. And he was mostly a social worker, in the best possible way,” Cox said.
She said afterwards, Rudinski could command students and gain control of a situation, whether it be a riot, kids fighting or some other adverse event within the school.
Cox said, “He could go into cop mode and in a heartbeat. And when it was all over, he would walk over to these kids and say, man, do you want to just go for a walk and talk about it?”
Rudinski’s newly adopted approach was contrary to a typical SRO or police officer who would instead arrest the students involved, charge them with assault and then take them to the police station, ultimately introducing them into the school-to-prison pipeline, Cox said.
“He would talk out what happened between them. It was just amazing before my eyes watching it happen,” she said.
Mary Blair was also a school-based probation officer working alongside SROs.
“We worked in collaboration. We stopped a lot of things that were getting ready to go down that no one ever knew about on the news or heard about in the building. We worked very well together, closely together. The kids got to know us. And you know, a lot of them really respected us,” Blair said, explaining her experiences.
Blair said she witnessed positive interactions between SROs and students in the schools she worked in: Duval High School, Eleanor Roosevelt High School and temporarily at Northwestern High School where she worked alongside Rudinski.
“He was awesome,” Blair said, adding that students respected Rudinski and would go to his office and hang out, and their relationship with him was more like friendship. “He engaged the kids.”
Actually, Blair said, in all the cases she is aware of, the SROs were well-regarded by administration and students.
“There wasn’t a negative one that I saw that I thought, ‘This is out of line’ or anything. I never saw that,” Blair said.
During her 11 years in the SOS program, Blair said school discipline incidents involving disruption or disrespect were appropriately handled by teachers, administrators and school counselors, and SROs were called in only if necessary.
But Blair believes there is a great need to address the kids who have already been in trouble, and believes SROs “can foil stuff before it happens just because they’re a police officer. Because kids will continue to do it to a counselor. Those people aren’t as important or don’t stand out as much of that authority figure as the police officer.”
Years later, Blair looks to Rudinski as the model for SROs. “He was always fair and kind to the youth, yet still had the boundaries needed in his job.”
Rudinski started training SROs in 2005, and applied what he learned from Cox, the former Juvenile Services probation officer.
“The same way that I’m now training SROs, I got to that because I was educated by Joan,” Rudinski said.
“What we call restorative approaches today Joan taught me a long time ago, with different types of techniques to use in interviewing young people; working with young people to make them understand what they did rather than just understand actions and reward; to see all who were affected by what they did…. Joan taught me that well,” the now 37-year law enforcement veteran said.
During his five-year tenure at MCSS, Rudinski was responsible for operating a 40-hour training program for SROs that focused on core topics, including de-escalation, cultural bias and cultural fluency. He said the training “touched base” on restorative approaches and behavioral threat assessments.
“After outcry from the officers and schools, we’ve expanded the program,” Rudinski said of the now 70-hour comprehensive program that contains a combination of video, Zoom and in-person training.
The expanded program now includes six hours of restorative approaches, three hours of behavioral threat assessments, four hours of trauma and informed care and four hours of disability diversity awareness.
Rudinski said many people think SROs are trained in active threats but the training does not touch on that.
“We try to teach them the things they will need to work with young people inside of schools for eight hours a day,” Rudinski said.
He acknowledges the concerns that SROs do not understand the development of youth or recognize that youth do not understand their actions have consequences, and that law enforcement is specifically trained to address and correct discipline and oftentimes that may lead to arrest.
With that in mind, he explained the vast majority of the training topics are taught by the specialists from school systems who work with youth every day – school personnel, school psychologists and school psychiatrists. Course offerings to SROs also include topics on youth behavior, youth discipline and child development. There is even a course on normative adolescent behavior.
“It specifically addresses child development. It specifically addresses child norms, how teens are to push envelopes, what they do, what the physiology surrounding that is, and how that type of behavior is not arrestable offenses,” Rudinski said.
He said they also teach youth development discipline and behavior as a topic, which examines development of youth from the womb through teenage years. It’s a comprehensive 70-hour program.
Today, a mix of SROs and school security employees, the latter of whom are employed by a public school system, are both responsible for ensuring school safety in Maryland schools and receive the same 70 hours of training.
“I’m hoping to measure the impact of the training this year when the arrest results come out,” Rudinski said, referring to the Maryland State Department of Education arrest report for school year 2022-2023, which was since published. Rudiski would be proud of the recent decline in school-based arrests from 2,187 to 1,568, down by 28 percent, representing the lowest school-based arrest numbers in documented history for a non-COVID school year.
In October 2023, Rudinski left his post at MCSS to become the Safety and Security Program manager within the Office of Safety and Security in Howard County Public Schools, where he still works with students. His post at MCSS remains vacant as of March.
Defining SROs
School safety has long been a legislative priority in the state. In 2013, Maryland General Assembly House Bill 453 authorized bolstering the MCSS with the goal of establishing best practices, professional development and training, and to facilitate coordination among local school districts.
In the aftermath of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the Great Mills High School shooting in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, legislators rallied to ensure the safety of students in Maryland public schools through the passage and signing into law of the bipartisan Maryland Safe to Learn Act of 2018, or STLA, introduced by Sen. Katherine Klausemeier (D-Baltimore).
STLA provided the first formal definition of a “school resource officer” in the state:
A School Resource Officer is a sworn law enforcement officer as defined under § 3–101(E) of the Public Safety Article who has been assigned to a school in accordance with a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the local law enforcement agency and the local school system.
“What we had prior to that was police officers that may or may not have been trained inside of public schools, and they were put there as a result of the violence that was seen in schools across the nation,” said Rudinski, the former School Safety Program coordinator for the state.
STLA also calls for standardized training and certification for SROs. Additionally, it mandates equitable training for school security employees and the establishment of a School Safety subcabinet to develop building threat assessment policies. It also requires local law enforcement agencies supplying SROs to local school districts to execute Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) defining roles and responsibilities.
While STLA does not mandate an SRO be placed in every school, it does require school systems to work with local law enforcement agencies to determine the SRO needs of each school or a plan for adequate law enforcement coverage. The information then needs to be reported to MCSS every year.
Not an unfunded mandate, the act includes $10 million in annual appropriations for SROs and/or adequate law enforcement coverage in the state’s public school districts.
Since STLA’s passage, there have been dozens of legislative bills introduced to redefine, remove or reduce the role of SROs in schools.
One bill, House Bill 496 Counselors Not Cops Act, sought to defund SROs and instead re-allocate that funding to mental health services and restorative justice programs. It was introduced in 2021 by Del. Jheanelle Wilkins, a Democrat representing the 20th District of Maryland.
But SROs are trained to work with school guidance counselors, Rudinski argues.
“So we’ve heard a lot of outcry that you shouldn’t have police, you should have guidance counselors. It should be …counselors and cops and nurses,” Rudinski said. “And this is a village. These are children. This is our most important asset that we have in this world. We need to put the resources in place to assist them.”
Tamara Ward is a Pew Youth Justice Fellow. Click the links below for Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.
The post From homeroom to handcuffs: Part 3 – The evolution of a school resource officer and his influence on state policy appeared first on AFRO American Newspapers.
