Pillar 1: Safety and Security

The purpose of school policing is to maintain a safe learning environment. This includes the following:

• Maintaining safety and security
• Deterring crime
• Being visible and ready to respond
• Responding to criminal activity
• Mitigating threats

It also means being a role model, a mentor, helping students when they need it and being involved in the school community. We believe the best way to support safety and security is to have on-site officers in the schools, whether it’s through a district-specific police department like ours, or by having on-site school resource officers who are assigned by the local police department.

There are a few reasons on-site officers are preferred. Although all police officers learn health and safety codes, traffic codes, etc., if they don’t work regularly in a school they may learn very little about juvenile law or may not have the training on how to handle some of the situations that often come up in schools. They may also miss valuable opportunities to provide intervention that diverts students from the juvenile justice system. Having on-site officers who are visible and have daily interactions with students will result in better outcomes for your schools, students, and community.

Pillar 2: Behavioral Health

A well-rounded approach to school safety must also include supporting student wellbeing. One of the things that makes our policing model so unique and effective, is that we have a Director of Behavioral Health Services and a team of 10 social workers on our staff. This has been transformative. Instead of asking a police officer to be the expert on issues of mental health and welfare, we can lean on one of our in-house experts. The social workers don’t tell police how to police and vice versa, but they do work as partners and offer each other support. Other ways we support behavioral health include having a therapy dog named Piper on our staff which can be very effective to help students in high crisis. We also emphasize training on crisis intervention and response and provide mental health support to our officers through a new peer support team in which we’ve trained some of our staff to help our officers get the mental health support they need if they’re involved in an incident.

Pillar 3: Equity

When we say equity, we mean being able to identify the individual needs of each student and finding ways to support them. For example, if a student needs more behavioral health support, or if they need to discuss something going on at home, or if they’re concerned about their future, we want to make sure we understand their issues and can find ways to help. Having on-site officers helps with this because our officers get to know the students well. We also keep track of how many students we divert from the criminal justice system and what those demographics are. We have targeted professional development around equity for our officers. All new police department employees are required to take an equity class. We also work in partnership with the Round Rock ISD’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and its Chief Equity Officer. Our department has hosted open discussions with the community about current events.

Pillar 4: Student Advocacy

We make sure every officer is an advocate for our students. Our goal is to keep them out of the criminal justice system and give them opportunities to succeed. For example, having vaping devices is a felony in Texas for those under age 21 and an arrest for vaping can stay with them through life. We had a case study where a man had multiple arrests as a student and then later in life couldn’t get a job because of that record. He said “I wonder what I could have become if someone had intervened.” We have an amazing opportunity to advocate for our kids. If they are vaping because they’re addicted, or because they’re self-medicating to cope with things happening at home, let’s figure out how to help them. We try to advocate for them so it doesn’t haunt them for the rest of their lives.