School Resource Officers in Financial Crisis: Which Programs Get Cut and Why

Abstract

In recent years, K–12 education programs throughout the United States have been impacted by budget reductions, particularly in areas that are outside of traditional academic programs. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one of the areas receiving the greatest reductions may be school safety programs. In this article, we use data from school resource officers (SROs) in Kentucky to examine the types of SRO activities that are impacted by budget reductions and the school- and county-level factors associated with those budget reductions. The findings presented here suggest that SRO training and equipment are most impacted by budget cuts; SROs are more likely to serve more than one school in times of budget reductions as well. Results from multivariate logistic regression models suggest a web of economic factors that impact which SRO programs receive budget reductions, including a county's poverty rate, median household income, and population change. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• School resource officer
• education budget
• budget reductions
• school safety

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to thank the Kentucky Center for School Safety for providing data for this study. All opinions offered herein are those of the authors alone and do not represent those of any other agency, including the Kentucky Center for School Safety.

Notes

1. To obtain the data for this study, we first sent a demographic information sheet to all SROs listed in the KCSS database in late 2008. On that sheet, respondents were asked if they were still serving as an SRO and, if they were not, to identify the SROs who had replaced them. We also consulted with the law enforcement representative for KCSS to identify all SROs of which she and the officers of the Kentucky Association for School Resource Officers (KASRO) were aware. We also sent demographic information sheets to those districts as well. When we were aware that an SRO was in a district, and that SRO did not return a demographic information sheet after two follow-ups, we called and obtained their demographic information by phone.

After creating an updated SRO database from the demographic data obtained through the process identified above, we then sent warning postcards to all SROs, advising them that a questionnaire would be forthcoming collecting data about their perceptions of school safety and other issues. This postcard was followed by a copy of the questionnaire 1 week later. Two weeks afterwards, we mailed a second copy of the questionnaire to the same address, then followed that up with a third mailing a month afterwards. Through this method, we were able to obtain the response rate described here.