Q&A: Training and the Right Personality are Essential for SROs
School safety and security efforts are as multifaceted and complex as the students, staff, and families that make up a school community.
Some schools rely on school resource officers (SROs) for security. SROs are sworn law-enforcement officers with the ability to conduct an arrest in school environments. While the presence of law enforcement may help convey a sense of safety to some, not everyone is soothed by a police presence. These officers must not only have the right personality for the job, but they must also be willing to both support a learning environment for K-12 students and become part of the school’s community.
For the past 14 years, Mo Canady has been the executive director for the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO). The organization of roughly 10,000 members trains school-based police officers and other school safety personnel about implementing and running an SRO program. Prior to his current position, Canady was a police officer in Alabama with a background in forensic science and school security.
The conversation below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Security Management (SM). When it comes to creating guidance and policies, what are the areas that you focus on to try to improve school safety?
Mo Canady. Our biggest focus, of course, is going to be on school resource officers, school-based police officers.
First of all, what careful selection looks like for those officers—this is the most unique assignment in law enforcement. It’s really not for most officers as it takes a very unique approach. So, these officers need to be veterans. They need to be officers who have spent some time working with youth—maybe in a volunteer capacity like boys’ or girls’ clubs, youth sports, coaching—with a sincere interest in working in an appropriate way with adolescents. They need to be officers of high moral character with good public relations skills, and they need to be able to interact and connect in a very diverse environment in a school. So, careful selection of officers is a big push of ours. We put out a lot of recommendations and best practices around that.
And then specific training. We’re very focused on training. It’s probably the core of what we do as an association. We have training offerings that are targeted mostly towards school resource officers, but we also have a lot to offer for those who are part of a school safety team. And then we certainly do have a lot to say about these officers being properly equipped to do their job in this environment.
SM. How have threats or risks to school safety evolved in recent years?
Canady. You kind of saw everything change on the day of the Columbine school shooting. That was when we really began to get a glimpse of what the active assailant phenomenon was looking like. It was a huge, horrible moment, but when you look back to that seminal moment, it changed how we do school-based policing.
Active assailant threats have since remained consistent, and you can certainly see that some agencies and districts have gotten a lot better at it than others have. I look at places like St. Mary’s County, Maryland; Dixon, Illinois; and Arapahoe, Colorado, where SROs heard gunfire and responded and went to stop it. And then you could name the other ones that have been more problematic because it’s where a lot of carnage unfortunately occurred. But there certainly have been some successes.
I think that also we have to recognize the impact of social media on school safety and security. The number of threats that come through social media or other forms of technology has increased. And in many instances, it has increased the perceived threat, which can be, in some ways, as devastating as an incident that really happens. So, it’s one of those things that we have to be aware of from that standpoint.
I think that we recognize that mental health has had a significant impact all the way around, and adolescent mental health. Certainly, not that every child who has mental health issues is going to be a threat to the school. But when you have the level of mental health issues that have come about just since the pandemic, that becomes problematic. And the thing is that we want students to be safe from different kinds of threats, but we also want students who are struggling with mental health issues to have the care that they need and be safe, as well.
One of the things that comes to mind was from a class I taught on how important culture and climate are in a school environment. If you don’t have a culture and climate that’s about school safety, that’s about the safety of the students and the teachers that are there, you’re in trouble. So, it is important that we get a handle on that.
SM. In your role, what do you see as the primary pain points when it comes to school safety today?
Canady. That is a heavy question. I think staying in our primary lane, it’s the lack of understanding of some school districts and within certain communities about who SROs are and what we’re supposed to be doing.
I think that sometimes there are certain groups or communities that have this idea that SROs are only coming into a school to arrest students. The truth of the matter is it’s the complete opposite from that. The goal of an SRO is not to see how many students you can arrest—it’s to build relationships within that community. And when law enforcement has a good relationship with any community, that only increases safety for all of us. Because one of the things that comes about from good relationships is good conversation, good discussion that leads to valuable intelligence. When we have valuable intelligence, we have the opportunity to stop an act of violence before it ever occurs.
There is something called the Averted School Violence Database, and that is housed by our friends over at Safe and Sound Schools. This is a database that holds a number of stories of acts of school violence that were likely interrupted by relationships through good conversation, good exchange of information, and leading to good intelligence.
The goal of an SRO is not to see how many students you can arrest—it’s to build relationships within that community.
SM. Which policies or practices do you think have helped improve safety without generating fear or disruption to students and staff?
Canady. I think there are a number of things that have probably helped in that regard. The ones that I think are most effective are the ones that are almost unseen or become kind of seamless.
I think that one of the things I saw in a lot of elementary schools after the Sandy Hook incident occurred was a lot of elementary schools installed a double vestibule entrance. I’m always thinking about how we increase the level of school safety without making it feel like to students that they’re going to school in a prison environment. That double vestibule idea I think works really well if you have the right technology and it’s built the right way. I think that visitor entry management systems have been helpful in a lot of ways—people are now used to them in terms of having regular visitors, parents, and volunteers that are in the system and a little more easily identifiable to come into the building.
Again, what you don’t want to create is an unnecessary hassle, but at the same time you want to create a situation where you can account for everyone that’s in the building and that you can do everything possible to keep people out of the building who don’t belong there.
SM. We’ve talked about the measures that do work. What about the ones that you think might be ineffective, outdated, or overly hyped?
Canady. After the Columbine massacre, as there is with just about any major crisis in our country and our society, the pendulum swung way far to the other direction, and it resulted in some unintended consequences. One of those unintended consequences became zero tolerance. An example I saw play out within one school year involved two different instances of students who brought knives to school, and this was when zero tolerance was the deal. Through the investigation, it was clear that one student brought a dangerous knife to school with intent to do physical harm. Thankfully, that was interrupted. That student was punished and sent to an alternative school for a while.
During the same school year, a kid had been on a hiking trip over the weekend and completely forgot about leaving a Swiss Army knife in his backpack. Now, look, you have to learn a lesson—clean your backpack out, right? But that student received the very same punishment as the student who brought the knife with intent to do harm. That was zero tolerance at its worst.
Thankfully, over a period of roughly 25 years, zero tolerance began to kind of fall apart a little bit and we began to go back to trusting school administrators to deal with each case on an individual basis and look at the totality of the circumstances of that case, as opposed to just this cookie cutter approach.
For this series on K-12 security and operations, Security Management spoke with stakeholders and professionals that are invested in making schools safer and vying to create a learning environment where students and educators can focus on learning. Read more perspectives from the series here.
Sara Mosqueda is associate editor for Security Management. Connect with her on LinkedIn or send her an email at [email protected].
