An armed officer at every South Carolina public school? Not so fast | Opinion
It’s a point of pride for Gov. Henry McMaster that the number of South Carolina schools with school resource officers has nearly tripled since 2018 when he first made the issue a priority.
McMaster announced last week that the state now has funding available to put an SRO (as they’re called) in every public school in South Carolina. In our era of short attention spans and competing priorities, McMaster honoring a commitment that took years is a big accomplishment.
Yet what was widely missing from coverage of the announcement last week was a healthy dose of skepticism about the effectiveness of SROs, the acknowledgment that it can be hard to hire for the positions, and the sad and stunning fact that SROs sometimes prey on our children.
Ten years ago, South Carolina became a flashpoint for the issue of cops on campus when a Richland County sheriff’s deputy lifted a girl out of her desk, flipped her and the desk onto the floor and heaved her across the room. He was white. She was Black. The video went viral.
The deputy was fired but never faced charges. He had told the student if she didn’t stand up, he would remove her from the desk forcibly. Afterward, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said the incident made him want to “throw up,” and a U.S. Justice Department review spurred the county to offer intensive training for deputies on de-escalation and biases, among other things.
The big question then wasn’t just how on Earth could that act be allowed to happen. It was why would an officer with such a proclivity be put in a position to throw a student around like a rag doll. It was what sort of training and background checks are these officers even undergoing.
Those questions should’ve been put to rest by now with suitable answers. Sadly, they persist.
A simple internet search last week turned up 11 other cases since that unfortunate situation in 2015 when current and former SROs were on the wrong side of the law, accused of a range of unacceptable actions with students, from assault and excessive force to vape and alcohol purchases to inappropriate sexual relations, solicitation of minors and child sexual abuse.
There are 1,283 public schools in South Carolina, and more than 1,100 have SROs. It would be wrong to call misconduct a major problem. It would also be wrong to say it isn’t a problem at all.
A good guy with a gun?
These incidents happened across the state: in Aiken County, Marlboro County, Richland County (again), Lancaster County, Anderson County, Sumter County and Williamsburg County, in Spartanburg, Goose Creek, Rock Hill and North Augusta. Court records show six of the 11 cases since 2017 led to guilty pleas or convictions. Four are pending, one is being investigated.
They are troubling for all the obvious reasons criminal cases can be troubling, but they are especially troubling for two reasons: One, these are law enforcement officers breaking or being accused of breaking the law. Two, the targets are our most vulnerable population, our children.
In South Carolina and elsewhere, the calculation with SROs is that rewards outweigh risks. But studies — notably at Brown University and the National Institute of Justice, both done in 2021 — show that SROs reduce fights on campuses nationwide but don’t deter school shootings, and that they lead to higher disciplinary rates for students, especially Black and disabled students.
Wayne LaPierre, former longtime CEO of the National Rifle Association, once said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Yet studies don’t show that to be true at American schools, and a dozen anecdotes in the last decade in South Carolina show that the good guys aren’t always good. This isn’t one bad apple. It’s five in the past two years.
School resource officers date back to the 1950s when the city of Flint, Michigan, began using them to combat a perception of rising crime and rising juvenile delinquency rates. They became more popular nationally in the 1990s with an increase of school shootings and federal funding.
By the 2009-2010 school year, 43% of U.S. public schools had security staff on campus at least once a week. By the 2017-2018 school year, that figure eclipsed 60%, where it has stayed. The latest data from 2021-2022 shows three in four of those are sworn, armed officers of the law.
In South Carolina, SROs are required by state law to take a basic training course “as provided or recognized” by the National Association of School Resource Officers or the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy.
There are advanced courses that could be required as well. They should be in South Carolina.
The importance of safety
The reason for McMaster’s push for more SROs, of course, is enhanced school safety.
When McMaster first said in 2018 that he wanted a full-time SRO in every public school, the state had 406 statewide. Since then, state funding has steadily increased, and at McMaster’s request, oversight moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Public Safety
Last year, 1,106 schools had a full-time SRO, leaving only 177 schools without one. This year, at the governor’s request, lawmakers allocated $29.4 million to finish the job and put an SRO in every school. The state says there are just 119 jobs to fill with that money.
In a statement last week, McMaster said the “achievement makes South Carolina a national leader in school safety and provides us all peace of mind knowing our schools are protected.”
“When we saw the need to place a resource officer in every school, every senator supported it unanimously, and the House passed it as well,” Sen. Shane Martin, R-Spartanburg, said in the same statement. “Now, the funding is there, we just need the right officers to fill the roles.”
Tracy Grate is one of the right officers. An SRO at Palmetto High School in Williamston, he was named South Carolina’s SRO of the year in 2023. He calls being an SRO the “best kept secret in law enforcement” because the role is multifaceted — “we’re law enforcement first, educators second, and then a mentor or a counselor third” — and because “we interact with the community on a daily basis with people’s kids going to school every day, and so they see the other side.”
Yet with the school year underway, dozens of South Carolina SRO jobs are listed online, starting in the low- to mid- $50,000 range. Like any job in law enforcement, the position can be difficult. SROs are part patrol officer, part security officer, part community liaison and part deterrent.
“The challenge is finding enough SROs,” state Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver told a legislative subcommittee last week. “The No. 1 thing that we have to do in terms of that personnel side is to make sure that we actually have hired and found all of those SROs that we need.”
State Rep. Robert Williams, D-Darlington, told her the work extends beyond the SROs themselves.
“Being a combat veteran myself, I do understand the importance of safety,” he said. “However, I think that in any school, everyone is responsible for safety. Every teacher, every aide, every cook, every janitor, everyone. So we just can’t put the total responsibility of safety on the SRO.”
That’s well said.
We should expect every SRO to do the right thing, but school safety is a shared responsibility.
It should start with better background checks and training for the SROs our kids see every day.
Matthew T. Hall is McClatchy’s South Carolina opinion editor. Email him at mhall@thestate.com.