Put on hold during the pandemic, a program that regularly stationed police officers at local high schools is being resurrected by the Santa Maria Police Department.
Between 1997 and 2021, the department deployed up to five officers a year to act as school resource officers for the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District. These officers were posted on the high school campuses within the district on a daily basis.
The Police Department halted the program in December 2021 due to the pandemic and a staffing crisis, but pitched its potential return—effective once the 2023-24 school year starts—for city officials to consider during the Santa Maria City Council’s Aug. 1 meeting.
“This is a tough one for me,” said Councilmember Gloria Soto, who requested to pull the item from the consent calendar for further discussion and a separate vote.
While Soto acknowledged that the program’s revival was requested by the school district’s board, she questioned whether students at the high schools involved would benefit from daily police presence.
“I’m very much appreciative of our officers and everything that they’re doing in our community. … We need to have great relationships with community members, and I can see this as being that,” Soto said. “But I also do have concerns about the school-to-prison pipeline.”
Santa Maria Police Chief Marc Schneider approached the podium during the Aug. 1 meeting to answer questions about the program. Soto asked Schneider if the Police Department would consider deploying its school resource officers with attire that would differentiate them from regular cops.
“Something that I’ve heard feedback on from students who are part of the Joint Union High School District is whether or not it would be possible for law enforcement officers who are on campus to be wearing civilian clothing rather than be in full uniform—to make themselves more approachable and not seem as intimidating to students,” Soto said.
Schneider said that he “reached out to the school district recently to ask them if they had a preference on how they would like the officers to be dressed.”
“The response they gave was they prefer them to be in a uniform,” Schneider said.
According to Schneider, one of the reasons the school district is vouching for school resource officers to wear regular uniforms is to deter individuals not enrolled at the high schools “who may be coming onto campus to cause issues or create some sort of incident” from entering the premises.
Schneider also sees having uniformed officers on local high school campuses as a benefit because if a school resource officer has a positive impact on students, that could in turn build a “bridge” between students and regular officers outside of school hours.
“When the students are away from campus, they’ll look at that uniformed officer who’s on patrol and come to that same conclusion that they may be equally as approachable as an SRO [school resource officer],” Schneider said.
Mayor Alice Patino asked if any council members would like to discuss the program further before motioning to approve an agreement between the Police Department and the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District to reestablish the deployment of school resource officers. Soto was the only council member to comment before the item was approved by the City Council 4-1, with her dissenting.
“The last thing I want to do is perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline or make our students feel like they are being watched or that they’re being seen as criminals,” Soto said.
This article appears in Aug 10-20, 2023.