Poster #9 - Does school resource officer training matter? Evidence on student discipline and law enforcement outcomes

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

The placement of School Resource Officers (SROs) has become a widespread approach to maintaining safety in American schools. However, this practice raises concerns about disproportionate responses to student misbehavior and increased student contact with the juvenile and criminal justice systems. A growing body of quasi-experimental research has examined the impact of SRO presence on student outcomes, consistently finding increases in exclusionary discipline and student arrests and referrals to law enforcement. Specialized training that prepares SROs to work with children and adolescents in a school setting has been proposed as a potential solution to these concerns. Currently, over half of states in the country have implemented legislation mandating specialized training for SROs. However, evidence of the effects of such mandates on student outcomes is lacking. This paper fills this gap by providing the first quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of SRO training mandates on student disciplinary and law enforcement outcomes, using Colorado and Texas as case studies.To explore the impact of training mandates on student outcomes, I use a triple difference estimation strategy for each state to exploit variation in schools across treatment status, time relative to the mandate, and presence of SROs. Data come from two waves of the Civil Rights Data Collection corresponding to the 2013-14 and 2017-18 school years. Student disciplinary outcomes include in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions, while student law enforcement outcomes include arrests and referrals to law enforcement. Colorado’s mandate required that at least one SRO per law enforcement agency complete the specialized training. Given this, I use the neighboring state of Oklahoma, which did not implement any training mandate during the period, as a comparison group. Texas mandated training for SROs serving school districts above a certain enrollment threshold, making districts below the threshold a good comparison group. Findings differ substantially across states. Results for Colorado show a statistically significant decrease in the use of in-school suspensions, typically reserved for minor misbehavior, along with significant increases in the use of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, with no significant effects on law enforcement outcomes. This pattern suggests a substitution effect whereby schools shifted away from formal law enforcement involvement toward an escalation of exclusionary discipline responses to student misbehavior. Results for Texas show a surprising increase in arrests and referrals to law enforcement, with no significant changes in the use of exclusionary discipline, suggesting that increases in law enforcement actions layered on top of existing disciplinary practices. Analyses disaggregating by student characteristics suggest that effects in both states persist across most student subgroups, including Black students, Hispanic students, White students, and students with disabilities. The different training content emphasized by each state is a possible explanation behind these differences. These findings contribute to the literature on school resource officers and highlight that training mandates can produce effects that diverge substantially from their stated goals, with important implications for how states design, implement, and evaluate SRO training requirements. This is critical as more states move towards mandating SRO training.

Author

• Montserrat Avila Acosta, Syracuse University
  Presenting Author