BACKGROUND:
The Saline School District (SAS) and Pittsfield Township Department of Public Safety (DPS) have maintained a School Resource Officer (SRO) for the past nine years under an equal (50-50) cost-sharing agreement. This agreement was spurred, initially, by the normalization of school shootings across the country; a trend that – most unfortunately – has continued unabated over the past decade. In the current environment, the issue of continued gun violence at our public schools has, even more unfortunately, become conflated with a multitude of other issues such as increased incidence of police violence against minority populations, the opioid crises, immigration policy violations, mental health crises, and most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. All of these issues place our police and public safety personnel squarely in the center of them insofar as they are charged with ensuring the safety and security of all, irrespective of age, race, gender, and immigration status.
Even though, since 2010, Pittsfield Township has operated within the framework of community policing, i.e., police personnel work in close partnership with community members – residents, youth, public schools, county and state stakeholders, businesses – we have had to nurture and re-define those partnerships to meet the increasing myriad of issues, noted above, which we need to not just get involved in but address to meet our mandate of protecting and serving all the residents of Pittsfield Township.
To that end, our partnership with the SAS, has evolved and changed to address these changing demands from our community. What began as an agreement to prevent gun violence and physical aggression has evolved to triangulating with school staff and administration to also address mental health well-being and making the school available for a multitude of public events such as public forums on racial justice.
The proposed three-year agreement, will place a Pittsfield Township police officer on the main campus of Saline High School and Harvest Elementary School to perform the primary duties of a SRO while also partnering with school staff and administration to provide for the physical and mental well-being and safety of all students.
Over the years, Pittsfield Township’s SRO’s have worked hard at building positive and meaningful relationships with all the students and faculty in the high school, where they spend the majority of their time. The attached letters from Superintendent Scot Graden and Principal David Raft and memorandum from School Resource Officer Shawn Booth speak to those relationships and the positive aspects of maintaining the SRO position and presence in the high school and surrounding high school and elementary school campus where there still exists a need for community policing and positive role modeling and mentoring in today’s school environment. The upcoming resident survey, to be rolled out in late September/early October, will not only obtain community input on the larger issue of ensuring racial and social justice in the work of our public safety personnel but will also delve into specific issues such as asking for their input on how best to deploy our police personnel and the value they place on existing partnerships such as the one with SAS. As always, resident input will guide our decisions and policies. As such, and as noted in the report issued by Director Harshberger to the Board a few months ago, we will use the results of the survey to re-examine all our public safety work processes and products in order to make revisions and additions that reflect the needs and priorities of our community. To that end, if any changes are needed to the proposed agreement, attached herein, we will bring the same for Board consideration in the first quarter of next year.