Dive Brief:

• Shelby County Schools, Tennessee's largest district, is hiring 30 security officers in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, for a total of 128 throughout its more than 150 campuses. For the first time, elementary schools in the district will have them. The placement of the officers will depend on the rate of incidents in a particular neighborhood and school, Chalkbeat reports.
• The addition of the officers, though, presents a sticky situation. The Tennessee Education Commissioner recently stated that school staff members are not obliged to release information on any student's immigration status. But outside contractors — as security officers who are employees of local law enforcement agencies would be — are not beholden to district policy.
• Recent incidents of racial bias and excess force by local officers against students also cast a pall over the impending hirings. Tennessee, meanwhile, is the only state that requires officers assigned to schools to go through special training, according to the article.

Dive Insight:

Implementing a school security policy is a double-edged sword. It has never been more imperative to take effective, swift measures to ensure student safety, but many strategies also have unintended side effects. 

Zero-tolerance discipline policies, which mete out serious consequences and often involving police referrals for petty offenses, feed the school-to-prison pipeline, a phenomenon by which (mostly minority) students are funneled into the criminal justice system. They can also feed profits back to privately run prisons, in which nearly 40% of such students in the U.S. wind up. Prison lobbyists thus heavily back legislation and candidates that support zero-tolerance policies. 

Experts note that school administrators can interrupt that pipeline by implementing alternatives to such discipline policies, taking a hard look at their district's problems and then pinpointing the underlying attitudes that perpetuate them. Listening to community members and involving them in advocating for new discipline policies are a way that administrators can reverse some of these trends. 

Installing security equipment, such as metal detectors and prominent cameras, throughout schools is another initiative intended to reduce violence in schools. That kind of hardware — and, for that matter, armed security guards — may be protecting students physically, but may not doing a lot to bolster their mental well-being. Students report feeling mistrusted, uneasy and just plain unmotivated to learn in an environment that replicates a Transportation Security Administration screening process.

Some schools are addressing those feelings that by relying on more inconspicuous equipment, as well as technology that works to protect the school community behind the scenes. Also proving effective are efforts to break down the "us vs. you" aura of police officers in schools by providing education on social-emotional learning techniques, so that officers can form a bond with the students they're protecting.