According to an article in the Pagosa Springs SUN, the Archuleta School District has scheduled meetings of certain stakeholders to discuss the Mill Levy Override that was approved by local voters in 2018. A similar community meeting will be held on June 5, via Zoom.
That measure allowed ASD to collect up to $1.7 million per year in property tax, over and above the school district’s normal property tax collections. The district is currently collecting about $1.5 million annually, used mainly for “safety and security” at the district’s various schools, including PPOS, and to help fund salary increases that have put ASD teachers among the best paid in Colorado.
The Mill Levy Override is set to expire in 2025. It typically takes months, or years, to put together a successful tax increase measure in Pagosa Springs…
From last week’s SUN article by reporter Randi Pierce:
On May 10, a group of Archuleta School District (ASD) staff, school board members and community members met with consultant Lynea Hansen to discuss potential future funding for the district…
Hansen began the session by introducing herself and explaining that she “has never lost” an election before asking the attendees to introduce themselves.
“We wanted to bring this group together to start talking about what opportunities for future funding for the district there are,” she said. “And so some of the ways that we want to start having that conversation is to actually talk about sort of what the current situation is both in terms of property taxes in your county and your area, and then also in terms of the current mill levy funding, where it’s at, what it’s funding, and how it’s going to be used.”
At that meeting, Superintendent Rick Holt reportedly told the attendees that, “if the MLO funding goes away, the district would no longer have the funding to pay for school resource officers, and the salaries of certified staff would decrease by $5,500, which he noted has ‘a lot of obvious implications,’ including that it would be difficult to stay fully staffed…”
To keep salaries where they are and maintain a livable wage, he explained, the district could cut staff and increase class sizes.
“All not pleasant stuff,” he said.
ASD’s public charter school, Pagosa Peak Open School (PPOS), has also used the additional MLO funding for salary increases. PPOS does not, however, maintain a ‘salary schedule’ that automatically guarantees salary increases based on college credits or years to experience. Teacher salaries at PPOS are slightly lower than those at the conventional ASD schools.
Unlike some other ASD schools, PPOS does not maintain police officers — commonly known as ‘school resource officers’ or SROs — in its building… focusing instead on a staff- and student-led system known as Restorative Justice.
Spending money on police officers in the schools is a controversial choice in some communities. The Denver School District removed all 17 of their SROs in 2020, citing a desire to spend limited funds on other forms of violence prevention.
“Security doesn’t just mean weapons, it means buzzers on doors, cameras in parking lots. It means regular check-ins with students,” said Jennifer Bacon, vice-president of the Denver School Board. The Board voted 7-0 to take the $720,000 spent annually on school resource officers and redirect the funds towards more nurses, counselors and school psychologists. “We’ve put all the money into law enforcement, where we want to do some more preventative work,” said Bacon.
But following the school shooting of two school administrators at East High School on March 22, the Board voted to restore the SROs.
Not all in the community embraced that decision.
‘School Resource Officers’ first emerged in the 1950s, shortly after school integration, often in direct response to youth-led civil rights efforts, according to Princeton University’s Journal of Public and International Affairs.
But following the tragic Columbine High School shootings in 1999, federal money became available to fund police officers into school buildings. In 2018, about 58% of public schools had police on campus, compared with about 1% in 1975.
From a March 2023 article by reporter Tatiana Flowers in the Colorado Sun:
Opponents of increased policing in schools often stress that a school resource officer is a police officer first, and are therefore allowed to legally use force and arrest young people and disproportionately place kids in the criminal justice system, according to a review of studies about the use of school resource officers.
In some public schools with SROs, Black students are arrested at a much higher rate than other ethnic groups. According to Dr. Laura McArthur, a licensed clinical psychologist speaking to the Denver School Board at their May 15 meeting:
“Despite the largely well-intentioned use of SROs to ensure school safety, safety cannot exist amidst a system of policing that criminalizes youth of color. Instead, the use of SROs in school reproduces unjust racialized patterns of discipline and state violence that already exists outside of our schools. By putting SROs back in schools, the research is clear. We will be putting more Black and brown youth into the school-to-prison pipeline…”
The report cited by Ms. Flowers in her Colorado Sun article suggests that, while some studies indicate SROs are able to reduce student crime, a greater number of studies indicate there’s no impact on student crime rates, and that in some cases, a school police presence is associated with increased student misconduct.
The National Association of School Resource Officers advocates training for all school resource officers, including education in de-escalation techniques and other tactics to avoid arrest “unless school safety is being threatened.” I have no idea what type of training the SROs in our Pagosa public schools are receiving.
School resource officers are also costly, and funding them may, in some cases, result in evidence-based school crime reduction programs being dropped, due to financial constraints.
It would be interesting to know how ASD is evaluating the possible benefits — and possible harms — from having police in the school buildings.