It's rarely a good idea to try to spring a change on the public unannounced, especially in matters involving the safety of their children at school. Baltimore officials should have learned that lesson last month when they had to walk back a plan to allow officers of the city's School Police Force, which is separate from the Baltimore City Police Department, to carry their weapons inside school buildings. The proposal was made part of the district's agenda in Annapolis with no prior public discussion or input, and when parents and students caught wind of it, the ensuing uproar forced the board to back down.
Now, though, the system is headed just as rapidly in the other direction with just as little chance for meaningful public input. On balance, we think the new plan for how to deploy school police is probably an improvement. But we can't understand why the system thinks it needs to be implemented less than two weeks after it was announced and without the benefit of the kind of public input that was obviously lacking in the guns-in-schools plan.
Under the new proposal, the force will focus on protecting students on school grounds and in the surrounding neighborhoods, where officers can routinely carry their weapons, rather than on providing disciplinary backup for principals and teachers in the hallways and classrooms. That makes sense because most officers would never have occasion to draw their guns inside a school building anyway, and generally the fewer guns there are around the safer everyone in school is.
As a result of the change, which comes after lawmakers rejected a measure last month that would have allowed city school police to carry weapons inside school buildings, about 70 city schools will lose the school police officers permanently assigned to them. Instead those officers will guard clusters of neighborhood schools in roving bicycle and foot patrols that allow them to quickly converge on potential trouble spots. Under the plan, police will remain in just seven high schools, where they will mostly be involved in pursuing students who are chronically truant and keeping an eye out for criminal behavior in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Some teachers and administrators have objected to the plan on the grounds it could leave educators to deal with situations that police are better equipped to handle. But instances in which a police officer — and in particular, an armed police officer — is truly required to maintain order in school are relatively rare. Rarer still are cases like Columbine- or Newtown-type mass shootings that are often invoked by those who advocate armed police in schools.
The trouble with having police in schools is the tendency for their presence to criminalize bad behavior that should really be the purview of principals, teachers and support staff. (It's notable that while the city schools were debating the issue of police, Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance was announcing that he would ensure that every county high school and 43 middle schools have social workers.) If principals and teachers feel they can't handle the demands of maintaining discipline, the school system needs to offer them additional training and support until they can. Calling in the police to sort things out should always be the remedy of last resort.
But regardless of its merits, this plan amounts to a much bigger change in the way the district ensures its students' safety than the proposal for police to carry guns in school. It's not something that should have been sprung on parents and staff with the vague promise of town hall meetings to come. It should be delayed at least until the start of the next school year so that all involved parties have a chance to weigh in.