A gruesome lunchroom melee at Collingswood High School last Wednesday has led to conversations about how to appropriately address student safety in the district. The school district currently uses school climate officers - employees with a background in security that assist in monitoring the halls, reporting vandalism and misbehavior, among other things - and has been in discussions with the borough over the past few years about how to best address student safety utilizing borough resources. Mayor Jim Maley said Tuesday, however, that the time for conversations is over.

Reached for comment, Maley said that he hasn’t heard from the public about the incident at the high school but when asked whether a partnership between the borough and the district has been considered, noted that negotiations with the district have been ongoing for the past few years while adding that action is necessary in the new year.

The fight in the cafeteria on December 21 led to aggravated assault charges for two students, both minors. One student was reportedly knocked unconscious and needed to be transported to the hospital by ambulance. At least one teacher who tried to break up the brawl was injured, as well, and students who filmed the episode face disciplinary action according to the school district’s code of conduct. Police chief Kevin Carey did not respond to email or voicemail messages from The Retrospect.

“The high school is still actively investigating the incident and students involved will be subject to further disciplinary action as outlined in the student handbook and code of conduct,” superintendent of schools Dr. Fredrick McDowell wrote in an email responding to questions Wednesday morning. “Collingswood High School faculty and staff will be working to update its practices and procedures when we return in January. The primary focus of their efforts will revolve around non-instructional time, student supervision, cultivating healthy relationships, and community building,” he wrote.

The district was recently awarded a $1.9 million federal grant to build a student wellness center in the new year. Collingswood will receive over $900,000 in 2023 and a second round of funding in 2024 to launch the program at the high school. If certain benchmarks are reached in targeting student needs, Collingswood will receive an additional three years of funding. The wellness center will focus on trauma-informed interventions and be fully staffed with social workers, counselors and academic interventionists.

As video of the incident circulated around social media, debates on community Facebook pages centered on how to ensure safety in schools inevitably leading to the topic of school resource officers (SROs.) Collingswood already has three school climate officers with law enforcement background but one key difference with SROs is that they are sworn officers with the ability to arrest and charge students under the law and also carry firearms.

Nathan Link, a Collingswood resident, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers Camden offered a few brief points on the topic of SROs in schools on Facebook and answered questions Wednesday in a phone call. “As a parent I totally understand and empathize with the emotion of wanting to keep kids safe from violence in school,” Link said about some of the comments on Facebook. “But the jump from keeping kids safe to placing fully sworn police officers in schools is a big one for me.”

“Formal contact with the criminal justice system can be really harmful and alarming for these kids,” Link explained, “especially if there isn’t a distinction made between a kid acting up because they’re a kid and whether they’re a criminal.” He added that SROs, if implemented correctly, can maintain order in schools to a degree.

But Link noted that research has shown that the presence of SROs in schools leads to increased student referrals to law enforcement that would ordinarily be handled by the school. “These incidents are now being handled by the criminal justice system which can really impact people’s lives,” he said.

Besides the pragmatic implications of engagement between students and SROs, Link added that the mere visibility can be triggering for some students. “Police in schools for a white kid might not be alarming,” Link added. “But for students of color it could be triggering based on the last news headline or life experiences.”

SROs became ubiquitous after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1998. Former Governor Christine Todd Whitman’s administration, in cooperation with the Attorney General and Commissioner of Education, adopted a guide for instituting SROs in New Jersey schools in 1998. After the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, then-governor Chris Christie commissioned the New Jersey School Security Task Force to analyze and provide school security recommendations. The report laid out a list of security factors that teachers and students find common today.

Over the past decade, schools have hardened security measures and cooperation with local law enforcement to limit access to schools, alert stakeholders to emergencies, monitor access to buildings, scan for weapons and practice a variety of emergency evacuation and shelter-inplace situations. But how to address threats from within the school population such as fights between students is less clear.

Fights in schools is nothing new and school administrators have used a variety of disciplinary measures to appropriately address instances of violence. However, academic research has emerged over the past decade laying out what’s been termed the school-to-prison pipeline and over-prosecution of students of color and students with disabilities for fights in schools.

An article in neaToday, a publication of the National Education Association from April 2022 cites an investigation published by the Center for Public Integrity underscoring that police officers in schools lead to harsher penalties for minor infractions. The CPI study drew from U.S. Department of Education statistics from all 50 states and found that school policing disproportionately affects black students and students with disabilities who are referred to law enforcement at nearly twice the rate of the overall student population.

The New Jersey School Boards Association published an explainer in recent years that sets out a variety of school security officer options. The explainer highlights the NJSBA School Security Task Force report from 2014 that states that the safest and best option for school security is an SRO, but does not distinguish what SRO actions are appropriate for different types of student conduct. The task force report was commissioned in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting and at the same time as the NJ School Security Task Force analyzed similar school security measures.

The NJSBA explainer adds more affordable options for school districts: school law enforcement officers. SLEOs as they are known, have been installed in many of The Retrospect area districts and provide different classes of certification, training and background. Class III SLEOs are most common and provide an affordable option that comes close to an SRO. These officers are retired police officers under the age of 65 and certified by the New Jersey State Police Academy. Classes I and II SLEOs do not possess full policing powers and cannot carry firearms.

While SROs might be effective against school shootings and can be expensive for school districts, given the level of training, research indicates that such officers have a negative impact on school climate and lead to negative outcomes when used to address student disturbances. An article published in December 2020 by the Journal of School Violence examined the effectiveness of SROs at curtailing social disturbances – bullying, racial tensions, fights, etc. While acknowledging that in theory, appropriately utilized SROs can show positive impacts on social disturbances, they concluded that “most SRO roles have no effect or even exacerbate social disturbances.”

“If SROs continue to be implemented,” the authors continued, “they should avoid engaging in purely law enforcement functions but rather participate in supplemental activities that will foster positive relationships with students.” The report also underscored that reactionary SROs – officers who only respond to disturbances rather than participate fully in the school community – result in purely negative outcomes on students and school climate.