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Massena school board appears to favor in-school cop, debate centers around who should employ the person

Posted 12/13/18

By ANDY GARDNER MASSENA -- Board of Education members appear to have made up their minds on whether the district should have an armed police officer with arrest power, and the debate on Thursday …

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Massena school board appears to favor in-school cop, debate centers around who should employ the person

Posted

By ANDY GARDNER

MASSENA -- Board of Education members appear to have made up their minds on whether the district should have an armed police officer with arrest power, and the debate on Thursday centered on if the cop should be hired or contracted.

The district is in the process of exploring how to add the law enforcement position with federal funding, which officials refer to as a "school resource officer."

Superintendent Pat Brady said hiring a retired officer, who would have to be one of the top three finishers on the Civil Service test, would cost around $30,000. Contracting with the Massena Police Department to use a full-time uniformed officer could cost $100,000 or more in salary and benefits.

"These retired officers ... worked 20 years in the system and they're well trained. There is a requirement they continue to be trained ... in firearms, and law enforcement," he said.

Of the seven school board trustees present on Thursday, five of them expressed clear support for whether the district should hire a retired officer or contract with the village to use a current full-time uniformed officer.

Trustees Jason Premo and Amber Baines said they were okay with the retired cop.

Board Vice President Paul Haggett and trustees Robert LeBlanc and Loren Fountaine said they prefer a full-time officer. Board President Pat Bronchetti said he thinks it is a matter of personality and not to whom they answer. Trustee David LeClair did not offer a strong opinion in either direction. Trustees Marc Goodfellow and Kevin Peretta were not present.

Leblanc was concerned with the idea of how the police officer's firearm would be handled.

"The devil's in the details. Where will the firearm be? Who will maintain it?" he said. "If we hire someone who is incompetent, we're going to regret it."

"Someone with 20 years experience, I don't think they'd be incompetent," Premo said.

"It comes down to the individual, regardless," Bronchetti said. "If it's an active guy that doesn't communicate well, it comes down to the right person."

Although no one from the public spoke during the meeting, a parent of a Massena Central student sent a letter to the board and press voicing his discontent with the idea.

"This is a horrible plan, and one that falls in to the conservative mentality that a 'good guy with a gun' is the only one who can prevent a bad guy with a gun doing damage, basically reiterating the idea that the way to solve the gun problem is with more guns," Jeffrey Wilson wrote in a lengthy letter. "It is also upsetting that an unscientific poll would be used by Pat Brady to back his claims up of how the students feel. [Pat Brady] has stated that students don’t feel safe in schools and he is not surprised. The question this leads to is this: Why do students not feel safe? Is it the constant non-stop bullying, or the lack of resources available to the student, or the lack of mental health treatment for both student or parent, or the possible drug use in the community? Is it the bias that students may feel from administration and teachers of the school district, which isn’t discussed and shrugged off as an afterthought? The fact is that the students are dealing with more problems openly and have less resources to help cope and deal with it."

Brady said the officer would have the power to make arrests, but the job description shown at the meeting says the officer is not to act as a disciplinarian.

"The only time they would be making an arrest would be if it was a significant safety issue to our students and staff. Other times we would call in the police department. That's been a very strong focus for us," he said. "We want to avoid that at all costs."

The district has had an armed officer in school in the past. Patrick Serguson, who is now a town justice, patrolled the district in the mid-2000s when he was a village police officer. Brady said he feels the program was successful.

"It had nothing to do with discipline. It was about having someone to bounce ideas off of, someone the students could go to for resources," Jefferson Elementary principal Duane Richards said.

Both he and Oliver said they are "excited" about the prospect of the program returning.

"It is about relationships, it is about providing educational programs," Brady said.

The superintendent believes the officer would have the power to detain a student and hold them for village officers to come and issue the actual criminal charges. There are generally multiple factors that can be taken into account when the question comes before a court of whether detainment has crossed the threshold into an arrest.

Brady said he sees the difference at "brought to a holding cell and to a judge to have it adjudicated, I guess I see that as more of an arrest."

Officials said they couldn't give an answer as to whether the officer would have unilateral power to decide whether a student who may have committed a crime in school could be arrested, or if administration would make the decision that a student should be charged, and then either ask the officer to either detain or arrest the student.

"You're talking about a hypothetical," Brady said.

Oliver presented results of a survey where the district asked students, staff and community members about the idea of putting an armed officer in school. A document posted on the district website says of the roughly 1,100 respondents, 93 percent of the respondents are in favor of the idea, including 90 percent of student respondents and 96 percent of staff. When asked if they feel the officer should be armed, 85 percent said they agree, Oliver said.

They did not use a scientific sampling method. According to the National Science Foundation, this can bias results, meaning that the answers the district got may not be an accurate indication of how people feel, and only measure sentiment among those likely to self-select as respondents to the survey.

"When conducting a survey, how a researcher selects participants is just as important as how many participate. Scientific surveys can include every member of the group to be studied, but this approach is usually impractical and/or expensive. Instead, researchers often draw conclusions about a target group using information gathered from a small representative sample of that group," the NSF writes at https://bit.ly/203o3Ls. "Representative samples must be selected carefully and without bias. For example, samples made up of self-selected responders, such as people who participate in a survey or poll by calling an 800 number, are almost certainly biased samples. In a scientific survey, researchers choose samples through some random process that is usually mentioned in the survey background materials."