When is it OK for police to be called to a school?
The Collingswood school system has been thrust into a national debate on what role police should play in keeping students safe in school.
The Collingswood school system has been thrust into a national debate on what role police should play in keeping students safe in school.
A policy that required the Camden County school district to call police for nearly every incident of student misbehavior raised new concerns about the appropriate involvement of police in school discipline.
Recently, students in Collingswood have been questioned by law enforcement for incidents such as roughhousing on the way to the cafeteria, allegedly making a racist comment at a third-grade class party, and a playground fight between two middle-school boys.
"I have to say it is pretty extreme and pretty rare that you see a school calling police on every single incident," Ken Trump, a national expert on school safety issues, said in an interview last week. "These are manageable issues with training and sound polices and some good common sense."
Around the country, there have been reports recently of students arrested or taken into custody for seemingly minor infractions. In Green County, Va., a 4-year-old who was throwing blocks and kicking at teachers was handcuffed by a school police officer and taken to a sheriff's department. In Kentucky, a sheriff's deputy was seen on camera handcuffing disabled children for not following directions.
In the past, such student misbehavior would have been handled by school personnel, said Trump, who previously worked in the Cleveland city school system as the supervisor for the youth gang unit. Instead today, he has seen what he described as an overcriminalization of disciplinarian matters, largely in response to high-profile shooting and violence incidents in schools.
"It's not a role of the police," Trump said. "They're getting involved in something outside their scope."
Experts say that school officials, with proper training, should know when a crime is suspected and should be brought immediately to the attention of police to protect the safety of students and staff.
However, schools "must ensure that student behavior that is in violation of school codes of conduct be addressed by school officials and not be imposed on police," according to the New Jersey School Boards Association.
Every public school district in the state must annually sign a memorandum of agreement with local enforcement agencies that spells out what can be done in a way that minimizes "unnecessary conflict, distraction, or intimidation" when police come onto school grounds.
In San Francisco, the school board signed an agreement with police in 2014 that allows school resource officers to intervene only in serious cases, involving weapons or bodily injury.
Collingswood school officials said they began contacting police more often in May at the direction of the Camden County Prosecutor's Office to improve compliance with school incident reporting requirements.
The policy was reversed last week after an uproar from parents. Officials from the county prosecutor's office will meet with school officials this week to discuss when police must be notified of student misbehavior.
Police were called to the schools in the 1,875-student district sometimes as often as five times a day, school officials estimate.
Neither Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean F. Dalton nor Burlington County Prosecutor Robert D. Bernardi has issued a similar directive for schools under their jurisdictions, spokesmen said.
A better approach to handle student misbehavior, says Julia Szarko, president of the Association of School Psychologists of Pennsylvania, should begin first with intervention by those who best know the student - a teacher, counselor, or principal, and their parents.
"If you are jumping all the way to [calling] the police, that gives you no other room for anything in between," Szarko said. "It seems like quite an overreaction."
Recent studies cited by the National Association of School Psychologists in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings said that students generally feel less safe in schools with a heavy armed police presence.
"Calling the police is going to scare the children," Szarko said. "That doesn't teach them what they should do to resolve conflict."
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