Armed police w/i HS students "not afraid of anyone" now

FW:

Subject: School officialls to make huge mistake
From: Anonymous Sender
Date: 3/7/2004 2:04 AM Eastern Standard Time
Message-id: o.com

Posted on Fri, Feb. 27, 2004

VALLAS WANTS ARMED COPS IN HIGH SCHOOLS

By MENSAH M. DEAN



Two armed, uniformed city police officers should be stationed full time at
each neighborhood high school to make troublemaker students think twice
before acting up, school district CEO Paul Vallas said yesterday.

In an exclusive interview with the Daily News, Vallas said he is
discussing with city officials the hiring of the officers and additional
off-duty cops for part-time work. The school district would pick up the tab.

"This is not about schools being out of control. This is about being
proactive," he said.

"With all the weapons on the street today, we are exercising due
diligence," said Vallas, who had 600 school district police officers and
224 Chicago city police officers assigned to schools when he was CEO of
that city's schools.

"They never fired a shot. And in six years, I only got two complaints," he
said.

Vallas submitted a written proposal to Mayor Street and is awaiting a
response. Street's spokeswoman, Barbara Grant, yesterday said the request
is one of many school safety measures under consideration in the wake of
the shooting death of a 10-year-old boy outside a school earlier this month.

For his part, Vallas said he would like the city officers stationed inside
high schools - a practice not used here in decades but growing in
popularity across the country.

"The presence of uniformed police officers in the schools with the full
arrest powers of the Philadelphia Police Department, I just think it's a
deterrent," he said. "I just think students would think twice before
engaging in really disruptive behavior."

There are 31 neighborhood high schools that would get city police officers
if the city approves, said Vincent Thompson, a school district spokesman.

Currently, the school district has about 460 sworn, unarmed school
officers and 120 part-timers known as per diems.

Michael Lodise, president of the school police officers' union, said that
instead of hiring city police, Vallas should hire more school officers,
whose ranks numbered 518 just a few years ago.

Besides, Lodise said, his officers wear uniforms, too, and the students
don't flinch.

"Kids today are of a different breed," Lodise said. "They are not afraid
of anybody. We've got to get back to the basics: You come to school, you
do what you're supposed to do. If you commit a crime, you're out. That's
it. Not moved to another school. That's not expulsion, that's ridiculous."

Elementary schools are also in line for security upgrades. Within two
weeks, Vallas said, handheld metal detectors will be delivered to every
elementary school along with a new policy on when school personnel should
use the devices.

Currently, elementary schools have no detectors, middle school principals
can use handheld devices at their discretion and all high schools have
walk-through metal detectors.

When told of Vallas' cops-in-schools proposal, some, including the
executive director of one of the city's leading student groups, said the
plan was misguided and would demonize students while not solving the root
causes of school violence.

Others said putting cops in schools was long overdue.

"He is 100 percent on target for doing this," said Ken Trump, of the
Cleveland-based consulting firm, National School Safety and Security
Services. Trump said across the country this school year there have been
more than 100 high-profile crisis incidents such as riots and the taking
of hostages, 50 nonfatal shootings and 40 school-associated deaths - the
latter being more than the past two years combined.

Armed officers - city, county, state and those employed by school systems
- have been stationed in U.S. public schools since the late 1960s,
according to Kurt Lavarello, executive director of the National
Association of School Resource Officers, which trains officers to work in
schools.

But after the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado,
the number of school systems welcoming armed officers exploded, Lavarello
said. Today, more than 15,000 armed officers work in schools, from New
York City to Anchorage, Alaska.

"We see officers at most of our malls. We don't think of malls as police
states. There are armed guards at Disney World. That's not a police
state," said Lavarello, of Sarasota, Fla., who believes officers succeed
in schools when they are trained to work with teens and want to work with
teens.

"Our theory is you go into a school not only as a cop, but as a counselor,
teacher and cop," he said.

But Eric Braxton, executive director of the activist Philadelphia Student
Union, said those officers and their guns aren't likely to fix what ails
high schools, which are just too big, his group believes.

"We can keep putting Band-Aid solutions on school violence or we can look
at the root cause. The way that our schools are structured prompts
disrespect and violence," he said. "A lot of the students who are causing
the problems don't care what you do to them. Stacking up punishments won't
change things. Changing the culture will."

The Council of Great City Schools, a Washington lobby group for the
nation's largest school districts, is surveying its member districts about
security. Of the 37 responses as of yesterday, 29 districts said they
employ armed officers.