Brittany Voie Commentary: Law Enforcement in Schools Is a Touchy and Nuanced Subject

A headline shared on The Chronicle Facebook page caught my eye this week. It was a similar headline to what we’ve seen happening across the nation in the wake of protests against police brutality: Public school districts ending their contracts with law enforcement for school security. In Seattle, Minneapolis, and other places, school boards and district officials are choosing to remove school resource officers from their properties.

Many people saw these moves by schools as knee-jerk reactions to protests for the sake of optics. But the topic of law enforcement in schools is a longer, more nuanced conversation — one I’ve been following both since studying juvenile justice while completing my criminal justice program at Centralia College and since working directly with the Washington State Parent Teacher Association (WSPTA) as a delegate on behalf of Chehalis School District PTA 4.6.5.

Last October, I attended my first WSPTA event and had the opportunity to review many of the platforms that the state PTA advocates for at the legislative level. One thing that immediately stood out to me? That State PTA’s “Gun Violence Prevention” platform was not inclusive of Chehalis School District’s current security plan.

You see, since 2015, Chehalis School District hasn’t utilized local law enforcement for security — they employ their own. Fellow columnist Brian Mittge wrote a column detailing the update back in 2015. CSD privately employs Todd Thornburg, “retired from the Washington State Patrol after a 26 1/2-year career” (according to Mittge’s coverage), to handle and coordinate campus security. Thornburg’s pretty cool if you haven’t met him.

Washington State law does formally provide for this option, but WSPTA platforms advocated for only active-duty law enforcement to be armed in schools — not privately employed individuals like ours in Chehalis.

You see, from a criminal justice standpoint, there’s a lot of reasons that schools have been seeking to reduce reliance on law enforcement in schools. The data on law enforcement interactions in public school settings is not comforting. In many cases, law enforcement interactions in schools disproportionately affect students of color and/or lower socio-economic status, introducing them to the criminal system before their student counterparts.

On another hand, there are several benefits to having privately-employed school security in our buildings. A school security officer doesn’t need a search warrant to search school property — a locker or otherwise — it keeps interactions with law enforcement limited and, therefore, helps keep kids out of the juvenile system where we can. Keeping anyone out of a criminal system is always good for taxpayers.

Ultimately, I was able to partner with Bellevue Special Needs PTA to formulate an amendment to WSPTA’s Gun Violence Prevention platform. I was formally notified just a couple of weeks ago that our proposed amendment was accepted at the recent virtual convention event.

WSPTA platforms are now inclusive of privately-employed armed security solutions for school districts, provided those individuals meet or exceed and prescribed training standards to work in school settings as outlined in state law.

While this is something that falls under the questionably named #DefundThePolice hashtag and might seem new, it’s something that’s been examined for years leading up to recent events. Not having law enforcement in schools doesn’t mean no armed security. It just means that security plan might look different.

While I agree that #DefundThePolice is an off-putting hashtag — it stops the conversation before it even begins in many cases — there are worthy pieces of the platform worth examining and considering for yourself.

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Brittany Voie is a columnist for The Chronicle. She lives south of Chehalis with her husband and two young sons. She welcomes correspondence from the community at voiedevelopment@comcast.net.