'They make a difference every single day': Somerset voters to weigh 3 new school resource officers

SOMERSET — Voters will have the option to approve adding one, two or three new school resource officers to the kindergarten-through-8th grade district at next month’s special Town Meeting.

“I would like to challenge any person in the community to get up on the town floor and say ‘no, we don’t want to protect our children,’” said Victor Machado, a member of the Somerset School Committee.

On Monday, the committee heard an update from Police Chief Todd Costa about the district’s safety and security taskforce. Most of the conversation centered on a proposal to increase the number of school resource officers, armed officers from the town’s police department stationed in school buildings.

In May, in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Costa told the Board of Selectmen he would like to ultimately have one police officer in each of the town’s five public school buildings. Currently, the town has one officer stationed at Somerset Berkley Regional High School and one who splits his time between Somerset Middle School and the three elementary schools.

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He told the school committee that, while he can’t guarantee complete safety, he felt confident that increasing the number of police officers in school buildings would make students safer.

“If you give me or any police officer a gun, a badge, the training that I need, your child, any child, is going to be safer. There’s no argument with that,” he said.

There is an ongoing debate over whether police officers in schools make schools safer, with several studies indicating that the presence of school resource officers does not prevent school shootings but at least one saying they may decrease other forms of violence in schools. Opponents say they contribute to the over-policing of already marginalized communities; some studies have shown that Black and disabled students are arrested by school police officers at disproportionately high rates.

Costa acknowledged that not everyone is sold on the need for police officers in schools.

“There’s a lot of research out there that goes both ways. I agree the best thing a parent can do is do their own research, don’t take my word for it,” he said.

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But in Somerset, with its relatively low crime rate, students are less likely to see the police as an intimidating force, Costa said.

“I think a lot of those things center around, unfortunately, intercity schools, big cities and big districts with high crime rates,” he said. “The ideal SRO is a protector, a mentor and a teacher.”

While Costa said he would ideally want an officer in every school, on Monday he brought a proposal that the district fund one additional officer. This would mean one officer assigned to the middle school full time, leaving one officer to divide their time between the elementary schools. He worried that funding three new positions would be unsustainable.

“The last thing I wanna do is hire three police officers and then lay them off a year from now,” he said.

Community members in the audience and committee members including Machado and committee chair Shauna Geary pushed back on starting with just one additional officer.

Local elementary school parent Connie Weida praised school police officers for attending library readings and trick-or-treating on their own time.

“They bring the kids stickers, stuffed animals. Those kids love them,” she said. “They make a difference every single day.”

She urged committee members to approve the installation of at least one more officer that night, with the potential for more later. Student safety is well worth the cost of an officer’s salary and healthcare, she said.

“If I go home one day and I don’t have kids in their bedrooms, tell me what it’s all worth,” she said.

Putting more officers in the schools would likely cost around $160,000 per officer, including things like training and equipment.

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Last year, after the Uvalde shooting, Costa temporarily stationed officers at each school through the end of that school year. Superintendent of Schools Jeffrey Schoonover told the committee on Monday that parents and educators found their presence comforting.

“I heard from teachers just about every day that they felt safer," he said.

After some discussion, Machado proposed adding three separate articles to next month’s special Town Meeting budget, which is set for Monday, Oct. 17. Each one will add a single new school resource officer to the district.

“Now you can say yes to one, you can say yes to the second one, you can say yes to the third one,” he said.

The committee voted unanimously to add the articles to the special Town Meeting warrant, and to add an article to allocate $50,000 to perform a risk assessment for the district.

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Audrey Cooney can be reached at acooney@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Somerset voters to decide on boosting police presence at K-8 schools