Push for SRO continues

A loose coalition of people who want a school resource officer (SRO) based in Westlock will continue their push at a town hall meeting next week.

The group is being led by the Pembina Hills school division and hopes the gathering will result in more awareness of the issue and a solution to the funding shortfall that's stopping the employment of an SRO now. The event runs at Westlock Legion on April 30 and 7 p.m.

'We have two goals. One is awareness and the other is funding," said Pembina Hills chair Kim Webster.

'Until people know about programs like this, they don't understand and can't buy into the value of it.

'The second piece is funding. We need funding partners. But the point isn't to keep banging the exact same drum. Maybe we can find some other funding partners."

SROs are police officers that are tasked to work in schools full time. The west side of the school division has one, based in Barrhead, but there is no such position in Westlock and surrounding areas.

Anecdotally, the Barrhead area SRO has been good for the schools in the area and relationships between local kids and police.

The school-based police officers undertake drug and alcohol education and harm minimization, relationship building and minor law enforcement tasks.

'She [the former Barrhead SRO] had build up the relationship with the students and if there was going to be a fight somewhere, at a certain time, often students will know about it," Webster said.

'Because that relationship had been built up then someone is more likely to go to the SRO, who they know, and say ‘I don't know if you knew about this but I heard this is going to happen,'" Webster said.

But while there is a lot of qualitative evidence for the difference SROs make, there's not a lot of quantitative support.

A majority of the quantitative research undertaken in the area suggests that SROs spend a large part of their time dealing with petty offences that would have previously been managed internally by the schools themselves.

A 2011 report by the Policy Justice Institute in the U.S. found that SROs spend just under 50 per cent of their time dealing with crime-related issues.

It also found that SRO involvement with those crimes exposes young people to the criminal justice system in cases where they wouldn't have been before.

Alberta doesn't keep long-term crime statistics relating to youth offences, but Sgt. Bob Dodds of the Barrhead RCMP Detachment thinks that if they were, it would show a slight upward trend in reported youth crime in the Barrhead area.

However, Sgt. Dodds also believes that's not because youth crime is up, but because the involvement of police in matters of youth crime is better reported as the SRO is involved in issues that wouldn't have been previously known to police.

'I would venture a guess that if you look just at the crime statics they may have actually gone up slightly," he said.

'The reason for that is before there is an SRO in the school, if there's a pushing match between two students it's dealt with internally and the police aren't involved.

'Where if there happens to be a school resource officer there it can become a police matter, whether it proceeds to charges or not, it doesn't matter, there would still be that statistic developed."

Dodds also thinks that's a good thing as the nature of youth crime is changing, especially in the area of bullying and harassment and social media.

'Some of these things that used to be a minor school-yard incident can escalate into a bigger problem," he said.

Whether SROs do or don't make a difference is a moot point for the people of Westlock in some ways, as currently there is a funding shortfall.

An SRO costs about $150,000 yearly and currently the school board and municipal partners have achieved about 75 per cent of that cost.

Both the Village of Clyde and Westlock County have committed to fund an SRO, but the Town of Westlock has stood firm on not backing the role.

Mayor Ralph Leriger says that's for a number of reasons although he's supportive of SROs in general.

'The program seems to have merits in some of the communities where they do it," he said. 'But it's funded in a variety of ways.

'At the end of the day there's only one taxpayer. Whether the town can participate or doesn't participate, it'll cost the citizens of Westlock exactly the same thing.

'I feel very strongly that if that's the position of the school division and it's something they really want to do then they should go ahead and do it. Then at least the taxpayer who's paying for it will know, ‘I'm paying this because that's their priority.'

'I'd like very much them very much to spend their budget and allow us to spend ours."