In St. Paul schools, in-house liaisons take over for police, contract security
When the St. Paul school board voted to eliminate school resource officers in June 2020, the district’s high school principals unanimously opposed the idea.
A Minneapolis police officer had murdered George Floyd just one month prior, setting off dramatic protests at the same time a global pandemic was taking hold.
“Simply walking away and excluding important members of our community will do harm to our students and neighborhoods, and will saddle our teachers and staff with even more responsibility beyond their already daunting task of educating our city’s young people in very difficult times,” the principals wrote in a joint letter.
The board’s 5-1 vote forced the district’s administration to draw up a new security plan that today relies almost exclusively on people hired and trained by the district itself.
Support liaisons replace police officers
Gone are the seven uniformed police officers who were posted at district high schools. Nearly gone are private security officers working for the district under contract; there are just three now, down from 37 in 2019-2020.
In their place are 38 school support liaisons and 10 community support liaisons who are instructed to build relationships with students and head off problems before the fuse is lit.
At around $4 million, the district’s security and emergency management budget is about the same as it was when police officers and private security guards were in the schools. But now, that budget pays for a few more people – 65, compared to 60 – and the district alone decides who works where and how they are trained.
Superintendent Joe Gothard said the board’s vote forced the district to speed up its plans for training a new in-house security force.
“We’ve made some really outstanding progress,” he said.
No longer ‘us against them’
Humboldt High School Principal Valerie Littles-Bulter was working in Minneapolis in 2020 when both the Minneapolis and St. Paul school boards broke ties with their respective police departments. She was uneasy about taking officers out of schools at the time.
“In the midst of it, the timing of everything, yeah, to be honest, there were some concerns,” she said. “The world was topsy-turvy, and so everybody’s looking for security.”
Littles-Butler said a downside of the liaison structure in St. Paul is that in situations that call for a police response, officers won’t be quite as readily available.
But overall, she said, the liaisons work well. Humboldt has two of them, and where police department training sometimes left her school without an officer for a day or two, the district always ensures security coverage.
“They have a great pulse on this building as far as who’s here, who works here, who goes to the school. They don’t just sit in the office; they move around,” Littles-Butler said.
And although the district and police department took pains to make school resource officers less intimidating – they wore softer uniforms, were instructed to let minor crimes slide, and some worked as athletics coaches after school – there was an inherent “us against them” dynamic that is not present with the liaisons, Littles-Butler said.
She also likes that many of the liaisons live in St. Paul and look like the students. Just over half of the 38 school support liaisons are Black, and another quarter are Asian, Latino or American Indian.
In a video played for the school board Tuesday, school support liaison and Harding graduate Kehinde Olafeso said he and his colleagues focus on building relationships with students in hopes of intervening before problems threaten school safety.
“We want to show our students a lot of love. At the same time, we want to hold them accountable,” he said.
Then-Police Chief Todd Axtell said in 2020 that he was disappointed with the vote but promised the department would continue to support the schools. A police spokesman on Wednesday said he had no information to share on how the decision has played out.
Safety grant
Like schools across the country, St. Paul struggled with student behavior last school year, which was the first full year of in-person instruction since schools closed for the coronavirus pandemic.
It recently was awarded a three-year, $994,000 STOP School Violence grant from the U.S. Department of Justice that will pay for the creation of a new safety tool.
The district, along with St. Paul-based The Violence Project, “will identify trends and root causes of increased prevalence and seriousness of violent incidents in SPPS schools during the 2021-22 school year” according to an award summary, and “develop a customized school safety tool based off of the R-Model, a violence prevention protocol that reimagines traditional behavioral ‘threat assessment’ as multidisciplinary crisis response teams to respond to and support students in crisis.”
Laurie Olson, the district’s director of security and emergency management, said the new tool will emphasize school connections and supports rather than exclusionary practices like suspension and expulsion, except in serious cases.
The most important word in the R-Model, she said, is “revisit,” which refers to some of the restorative practices the district has implemented in many schools in recent years as it’s tried to reduce suspensions, especially for Black students.
“We need to continually circle back with the student to find out if we’re making the advances,” Olson said.
