AVON, Ind. — A new police department has been launched in Hendricks County.
Four police officers were sworn in to the Avon School Police Department on Monday and will be working under Chief Chase Lyday.
“We are starting a police department at the same time that other schools and other communities are cutting ties with them. We need to talk about that, we need to have conversations about that,” said Avon Community School Corporation Superintendent Scott Wyndham. “We can certainly have conversations with our students and our families. We’re building a police department from the ground floor, so if we’re doing that, let’s do it the right way."
Wyndham said the new police department has been in the works for about a year.
“We need support from people who are specially-trained in handling legal situations that we as teachers and principals aren’t trained to handle,” said Wyndham.
Wyndham saiduniformed officers are not new to Avon Community Schools.
“We had 12 to 15 officers that would rotate through our schools on a given basis,” Wyndham said. He said it’s this rotation that made it difficult for the officers to build relationships with the students and staff.
“From an administrator or teacher perspective, they didn’t know which officer was going to be in the building from day to day and it changed regularly,” Wyndham said.
That’s why the school began brainstorming a way to create a deeper relationship and came up with the model of having a police department specifically for Avon schools.
Lyday says his officers are trained specifically to work in a school setting and he refers to them as school resource officers (SROs).
The National Association of School Resource Officers says an SRO is federally defined as a “career law enforcement officer with sworn authority who is deployed by an employing police department or agency in a community-oriented police assignment to work in collaboration with one or more schools.”
Chief Lyday said his SROs have three primary purposes: “to mentor kids, to educate them and to ultimately keep them safe as law enforcement officers.”
He said SROs do not hand out discipline.
He said the department’s “desire is to keep kids out of the criminal justice system and not inappropriately criminalize them for minor offenses that sends them down a path of criminal justice dealings for the rest of their life.”
“School resource officers protect students from being unfairly criminalized, from being inappropriately dealt with or physically dealt with because they (the officers) have a proper context of how to work with kids,” Lyday said.
Nationally, according to federal data, minorities are more likely to be arrested at school in comparison to their white peers. It’s a trend that mirrors federal data on disparities on disciplinary action as well.
A series of reports produced by ACLU and UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies, Civil Rights Project found that while black students make up 15 percent of the national student body, they account for 45 percent of all days lost due to suspension.
ACLU said “this discipline gap contributes to the achievement gap.”
ACLU also said “schools reported over a million ‘serious offenses’ in the 2015-2016 school year” and that “over 96 percent of these concerned fights, physical attacks, or threats without weapons.”
Three percent of the million offenses involved a weapon and less than three percent of all public schools reported any incident of physical attack or fight with a weapon.
Lyday said it’s important for his department to be culturally sensitive and aware.
“Our officers will receive special training related to school-based policing and how we can be as culturally competent and as culturally responsive as possible so that our kids feel comfortable and safe coming to us regardless of what they look like,” Chief Lyday said.
Lyday said dialogue is instrumental in building bridges.
“We want to hear our students and how they want to be served, how they need to be served,” he said.
Earlier this week, the chief and superintendent said they held a discussion with some parents and students.
“We were able to host a conversation with some of our black students and black families and we were able to just listen to their concerns,” Lyday said. “And so we took those concerns and made an action plan of how we can address those concerns it’s certainly on the forefront of what we’re doing because we want to be as culturally responsive as possible in our district and in our police department."
Lyday said the top three priorities on the agenda list are to build relationships with students so that they can have a relaxed learning environment, protect them from outside threats and address social media issues.
“The world is a dangerous place that’s part of the reason why we have school resource officers in schools,” Lyday said. “And so our police officers, our schools resource officers are police officers who prepared to respond to anything that happens, but there’s always the chance of an outside threat coming into our school buildings. And so our officers stand ready to protect our kids regardless of what threat comes in the doors."
When it comes to social media “part of the relationship that our school officers have is to reduce bullying because of the comfortably to report, because of our ear to the ground hearing about those bullying instances. And so, bullying happens on social media. It will forever as long as social media is around be an issue we deal with in schools,” Chief Lyday said.
“Most of the time, bullying doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction” of the Avon School Police Department, Wyndham said. “Most of the time bullying will fall under the responsibility of our school principals, our assistant principals, our deans that are handling that from a discipline standpoint.”
“There may be times where that rises to a level where it involves a criminal concern that’s when our school resource officers (Avon School Police Department) would be getting involved. The vast majority of bullying incidences would never get to our school resource officers,” Wyndham said.
Through the help of a grant, ACSC was able to hire the schools four social workers last year. The social workers have a mental health coordinator who oversees them.
“As we have developed our social work program, now we’re coming along and building our school resource officer program. And so those two staff and their leaders are working together to figure out how do we build those two programs so that there is support and alignment between those two,” Wyndham said.
Lyday said the sign of a successful year for his department would be “students referring to police officers and the profession of policing by the names of the SROs in their building.”
The school says they’re open to hearing from students and parents so that the new police department can better serve the community