DENVER — The Denver school board will meet Thursday to discuss potential changes to its policy barring armed police in the city’s schools, including a proposal that would allow school resource officers on campuses and another plan that would not.
Denver Public Schools’ Board of Education is considering a different approach to school resource officers, or SROs, in response to growing gun violence among teens and the recent shooting of two administrators inside East High School.
The board temporarily suspended its 2020 policy prohibiting SROs following the East shooting, but now will consider whether to make permanent changes as Superintendent Alex Marrero works on a new district-wide safety plan.
One plan, proposed by board member Scott Baldermann, would allow Marrero to decide when to station police officers inside schools. While the decision would be left to the superintendent, the proposal also sets guidelines on how SROs should operate in schools. For example, they wouldn’t be allowed to discipline students or to store guns on campus.
The proposal would also require DPS to find external funding for SROs, such as from the city or state.
A separate plan, proposed by board members Auon’tai Anderson, Michelle Quattlebaum and Scott Esserman, would not staff district-run or charter schools with armed police. Instead, it would have DPS work with the Denver Police Department to use community resource officers, who would be assigned to regions across the district rather than inside a school.
That proposed policy would limit law enforcement involvement on DPS campuses to when they are needed to protect the physical safety of students and staff; when there is criminal conduct by someone outside of the school community; and when required by law, according to the draft.
Two of the directors — Anderson and Esserman — proposing that policy are expected to discuss their plan at news conference Wednesday afternoon.
Both policy changes that will be considered by the board would place limitations on what police could do within schools and would require the district to routinely monitor how often students are ticketed or arrested. The policy put forward by Anderson, Quattlebaum and Esserman would also prohibit community resource officers from searching students without probable cause.
The board voted in 2020 to remove SROs from Denver’s public schools following the protests over the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Members have said that having police in schools harms students of color and fuels the school-to-prison pipeline.
But DPS has faced scrutiny from parents and community members about its response to safety following the March 22 shooting at East, in which a student shot and injured two administrators.
A day after the shooting, the board suspended its policy barring police to temporarily allow officers to be stationed in school buildings through the end of the academic year. The policy is set to resume on June 30, unless the board acts.
The board’s review of the policy comes as Marrero is working on a new safety plan for the district. So far, he has proposed reinstating SROs in both of his drafts.
Initially, he proposed having individual schools decide whether they wanted police in their buildings. But last week, he changed his recommendation slightly to say that the school board should set a district-wide policy on whether to allow SROs in comprehensive high schools and schools with sixth- to 12th-graders.
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