While school safety has been at the forefront of national conversations in recent weeks, Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools’ Board of Education is set to hold a discussion about school safety on Thursday that is years in the making.
At the board’s upcoming meeting, officials will hear updates from a long-standing task force auditing and studying the district’s safety measures and School Resource Officer program.
Deon Temne, the chair of the CHCCS school board, spoke with 97.9 The Hill about the anticipation of the discussion.
“I know most have touted this as a SRO vote, SRO no-go or go,” he said, “but it’s really all about school safety in totality.”
School board members will hear an extensive report from the School Safety Task Force — a group started in the summer of 2020 with the goal of examining the role of School Resource Officers in the wake of the district’s formal partnership expiring and amid the national conversation about community policing.
But as that group met over the course of a year and talked with school communities, it reported a lack of direction and need for a broader scale. In 2021, the 50-member task force reorganized into sections examining strategies for safer schools, mental health and trauma-informed approaches, community engagement and more priorities.
Temne, who is listed as a member of the task force, said this holistic approach aimed to be more beneficial to informing the district on how to approach public safety and protecting those in school.
“We as a board…that’s really our first priority, in my opinion,” said Temne. “As a board, I can speak for everyone and say it’s theirs as well. Education is definitely important, but if we can’t return your little ones home, we haven’t done our jobs at providing a safe environment. And not just the students: for staff, administration…all of the above.”
After the reorganization of the School Safety Task Force, the district conducted several surveys of its community to gather more data to inform discussions on school safety updates. Three different surveys were sent to middle and high school students, staff and caregivers, with more than 61 percent of enrolled students participating. Their responses led the task force to conclude students and staff generally feel safe in their schools, while parents’ responses score slightly lower.
Photo via Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.
Temne said while people may focus more on the infrastructure or personnel side of school safety, the mental health of school communities qualifies under safety too. The surveys revealed students and staff believe there’s been an increase in fights and conflicts since the return to in-person learning — something Temne said reflects mental wellbeing and that district officials are working to monitor.
“We want to go back to what we felt was the norm pre-pandemic,” the school board chair said. “But I would challenge us to say we had problems then as well and the pandemic just showed us we have to do a lot to work around [mental health.] And that’s a really large part of the school safety caveat. It’s not just the physical safety of the buildings: it is about the mental health, it is about what people are feeling right now.”
The roles of School Resource Officers were also part of the school surveys. CHCCS student and staff respondents returned “overwhelming” answers of belief that SROs contribute to school safety, according to the task force. Those same groups also returned an 85 percent or higher reporting of favorable views of SROs’ treatment of others, regardless of race or ethnicity.
These results came after the district reinstated the SRO program on an interim basis and required officers to begin collecting data on their interactions — something not done in the last four years.
The future of the SRO program for CHCCS, however, is still on the line Thursday night. The task force is presenting five options to the school board either moving forward with the current model of how officers are used in middle schools and high schools, or adding in more safety monitors or behavioral health professionals to accept some of the duties.
Photo via Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools.
Based on the district community’s responses, the CHCCS administration is suggesting either maintaining the current model or introducing behavioral health professionals to assist in student discipline and interventions.
Temne acknowledged while the School Resource Officer portion of the discussion will likely garner the most attention, he said his aim is to consider additional school safety enhancements too.
“My hope,” he said, “would be that [will] be more of the focus: how do we actually secure schools? I think the school resource officer is much more visible, so you have a potential to say, ‘Hey, we’re protected.’ But we can’t just put all that weight on our law enforcement individuals to do everything and I think that is the kind of false sense we give ourselves. And then we have a larger issue in society regarding law enforcement and interacting with certain communities.
“So,” Temne said, “it’s going to be an interesting conversation and I’m looking forward to the perspective coming from the other school board members.”
The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education meeting is set to begin around 7 p.m. on Thursday.
Photo via the Town of Chapel Hill.
Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our biweekly newsletter.
Comments on Chapelboro are moderated according to our Community Guidelines