SCSD community debate recent security increase’s impact on students

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Though they usually aren’t in his classroom, Joe Bennett, a Syracuse City School District teacher and candidate for the Onondaga County legislature, said he’s seen the way sentries and Student Resource Officers have policed students and observed the guards around the building.

“It seems like they’re usually not engaging as much unless somebody calls them but I think once you call them you risk criminalization,” Bennett said. “It’s better to call a social worker or somebody who can try to understand the issue instead of instantly criminalizing our students.”

In its 2022-23 District Safety Plan, SCSD proposed an increase in sentries in schools. Following a period of public comment that ended in late August, the district added 40 sentries.

Sentries are responsible for “all facets of safety and security” within a school building, according to the plan’s emergency management component. Sentries are not police officers but uniformed security guards that the District Department of Public Safety employs, the plan writes. Sentries also screen students and their bags using a metal detector.

Precious Walker, a parent of a fifth grader in the district and the moderator of a Facebook group for SCSD parents, said she and other parents are trying to figure out how the plan is going to help.

Walker added that no effort can stop everything, and pointed to transportation to school as an area where added security could be more useful.

“If you add more (sentries), well, can we add more bus aides? To like, kind of stop it at that layer?” Walker said.

Marsha Weissman, the author of “Prelude to Prison: Student Perspectives on School Suspension” and a parent in the district, said though the district has made improvements in recent years, using resources to increase police presence isn’t moving in the right direction.

Though the district gets some say who gets placed in schools as a sentry, she said, sentries ultimately report to the police and are not school employees.

“What’s disappointing is that the scarce resources are being directed to personnel that still help play a more law enforcement type role, even if they’re not official police, rather than getting mental health counselors and social workers,” Weissman said.

In her research, Weissman – who is also an adjunct sociology professor in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University – said increasing law enforcement measures and policing in schools is connected with higher rates of suspension in students. In SCSD and nationally, she said, suspensions for subjective behaviors are more common than suspensions for violent crimes.

“Kids get suspended for things like being disruptive in class, … pushing and shoving. You don’t want those things to happen, but the response doesn’t have to be law enforcement intervention and or school suspension,” she said.

Weissman continued that kids who get suspended are much more likely to drop out of school, which makes them statistically more likely to end up in the criminal justice system later in life.

SCSD 2022-23 Safety Plan by The Daily Orange on Scribd

Alice Liu | Asst. Digital Editor

During an SCSD ‘Community Conversation’ on Aug. 31, a series of events providing a platform for community input, SCSD Interim Superintendent Anthony Davis said sentries are intended to ensure students’ safety, not to monitor them, in response to concerns that students will be overpoliced.

Even when figures like sentries or police are “well-behaved” or don’t overpolice students with respect to trivial matters, Weissman said, their presence introduces another side of the issue for students.

Weissman said she found that most students didn’t view the sentries in their schools as helping figures after conducting interviews about students’ experience with schools becoming more like prisons for her book.

“While there certainly were some kids who reported having developed a good relationship with the law enforcement folks in their school, for the most part, they did not,” she said. “Kids aren’t stupid, and they know the role and function of police.”

Walker said the way students perceive sentries in their schools as well as some of their insecurity starts with the entire community’s relationship with police.

“The community is going to have to trust them first, before you put them in the schools because if mama and daddy are afraid or don’t like them, that’s definitely gonna trickle down to that child,” Walker said.

Weissman also said students’ impressions of sentries resembling officers in their schools stem from a larger community’s dynamics. For students from communities that have experienced police abuse, she said, seeing “better-behaved” sentries that look like police at school isn’t enough to reconstruct their perceptions.

Kids who grew up in cities and overpoliced communities, Walker said, also have more emotional and mental health needs. Resources for counseling and therapy need to balance the increased police presence, she added.

Walker said though the district is trying to keep students as safe as possible while deescalating trauma, it has its hands tied.

Bennett, who is a member of The Syracuse Police Abolition and Radical Revisioning Coalition, said despite a few new hires, the district needs a lot more social workers and people who understand trauma. Bennett said if they’re not already, the sentries need to be trained on trauma.

According to the emergency management plan, sentries are trained to respond to physical altercations with approved de-escalation and physical restraint tactics, trained in CPR and the use of AEDs and have completed FEMA Emergency Management Institute training.

The district, Bennett said, promotes dealing with issues in a “restorative” way in its code of conduct. To Bennett, SCSD’s approach is counterintuitive.

“Restorative to me means you’re trying to discover root causes of issues and trying to repair harm,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a chance to repair harm and discover and solve root causes if you’re just bringing in a sentry or bringing in a … student resource officer.”

SCSD’s code of conduct refers to restorative justice as an intervention that “addresses specific issues and behaviors which warrant the assignment of a consequence.”

Despite some specific emotional needs, Walker said, students in urban districts like SCSD are no different from kids in suburbs, but the district’s issues are often amplified compared to suburban schools.

Weissman also said that, contrary to the district’s negative portrayal, its students are accomplished and doing essential work within the community.

Walker said students need to be part of the conversation when it comes to implementing measures that ultimately affect them as much as security increases.

“They’re the ones who are going to be most affected by it. Get their opinion. It’s not like they’re oblivious … they are a lot brighter and smarter than we give them credit for. So even if it’s a second grader, they maybe can’t put it in words like a middle schooler. But they can (do it) on their level,” Walker said. “They can explain how this makes them feel.”