Beyond the Badge: What My Research Revealed: SRO Training, Social-Emotional Competence & School Safety

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For the past three episodes, I've asked you to think differently about school safety. We've talked about relationships, adult emotional regulation, de-escalation, and we've talked about what can happen before conflict becomes a crisis. But today I'm not just speaking to you as an educator, I'm speaking to you as a researcher. Years ago, I had a question. Instead of simply forming an opinion about it, I decided to study it. Well, life chose for me to study it, my life and my decision, because this was a part of my dissertation. And so my dissertation was entitled The Impact of School Resource Officers Trained in Social Emotional Competencies on School Incidents of Violence. So today I'm taking that research off the shelf and we're going to talk about what I discovered. Welcome back to the Road to an Effective Classroom Environment. I am your host, Delta LaShante, known as that Classy Sassy Consultant. This is episode four of Beyond the Badge: Rethinking School Safety Through Social Emotional Competence. This episode is definitely personal to me because when you're completing your dissertation, you spend years living with answering the problem that you're researching. You read over others' research, you question assumptions, you go through and examine data, you revise it, you defend your methodology, and eventually you contribute something of your own to the conversation. But many times good research ends up sitting in databases. Educators who could benefit from it may never read it. Administrators making decisions may never encounter it. Law enforcement professionals working in schools may never hear about it. That's one reason why I'm doing this series. I want to bring this conversation to the forefront and to the table. I don't want the research simply to live in a dissertation. So the research that I did centered around SRO, SROs, socialemotional competencies, and incidents of violence in schools. But underneath that academic title, there was a very human question. We put adults in positions of tremendous authority in schools. We expect them to respond when students are angry, when students fight, when they threaten one another, they become unpredictable, when safety may be at risk. So I began thinking beyond simply having an officer present. I wanted to explore the competencies that officers bring into those interactions. Because presence and preparation are not the same thing. That led me towards social emotional competence. What happens when an officer responsible for safety also has competencies related to self-awareness, emotional regulation, social awareness, relationships, communication, and decision making? Could these competencies matter when conflict occurs? Could they matter before conflict occurs? And could training adults differently potentially influence what happens in schools? Those were the kinds of questions underneath my research. There's a difference between believing something and demonstrating it through research. And I couldn't begin with, I think social emotional training works, so I'm going to prove it. That's not research. The research process begins and requires you to ask a question and then allow the evidence to answer it, even if the answer isn't what you expected. And so in my study, there were four research questions that I asked. And for the basis of this series, I'm going to focus on the one question that ties in the most with what we're talking about. Because there were some other components that that I talked about within my research, uh, such as critical race theory, and also I looked at the school-to-prison pipeline. So I'm going to focus on my second research question from my study, which was regarding how can professional training in social emotional learning better prepare SRO organizations in effectively connecting with their students and building a relationship of trust that can extend beyond adulthood. So that's that's one of the questions that I asked in my study. In layman's term, I was looking at what relationship, if any, exists between SRO training and social emotional competencies and the incidence of violence in schools. But the exact wording matters. And in presenting my research, I want to honor exactly what I study. So this wasn't about whether SROs are good or bad. That was not the focus. I am actually someone, I am a leader, an educator who believes in having SROs in the schools. And the role that SROs play within the school may look differently in my mind based on how SROs may be used in many school settings. But I feel that their presence is needed, and it can be in such a manner where it is complementing the leadership in the building and also supportive of the students. So that may be another, a whole nother conversation that we can have on another another episode about what that would look like if I were choosing my SRO and working closely with an SRO, what would that look like? But just getting back to our discussion now, I just wanted to make sure that my audience understands that my research was not about whether SROs are good or bad, because using those terminologies, that is not, those are not research terms. And that is not something that was looked at. And as I said, I'm I wasn't looking at whether or not law enforcement should be in schools or about getting rid of them, because again, that was not my research. Now there were in me looking at the different types of studies out there as I was pulling together my sources, because of course, when you're doing a dissertation, you have to cite um cite other studies. And so there were other studies that focused on that piece, and there are some that feel that law enforcement should not be in schools. But again, that's not what this study was about. I'll also have in, for those of you that are listening, I'll also have a link specifically to the research if you want to actually read the dissertation and look at the evidence and look at some of my findings and so forth. So just keep that in mind. So getting back, this this study wasn't about claiming social emotional competencies prevent every act of violence, because that is not the case. We know that there are still going to be incidents in which violence occurs, no matter what is going on. But this was more about focusing on a research question. Does the preparation of the adults responsible for safety matter? And if I were to branch off and continue this study and present it in another way, I would look at not just the SROs, but I would also look at the the teachers, the support staff, basically how educators and those who work in the educator setting how they impact incidents of school violence as well. So again, that's a whole nother topic. Even through the series, I have now come up with several more episodes that we can have, but that'll be for another time. Now, this is usually where the dissertations get very, very technical when you start talking about research design, the population, the sample size, variables, and data collection, statistical analysis, but we're not going to get into those types of details. Again, you can actually access the uh the dissertation on ProQuest, but I will have a link to it in the description of this episode. So, what I will do is just give you a rough summation of the research design, the population that I was looking at in the sample and so forth. So I was looking at schools in South Carolina, and keep in mind that this is 2021 when I defended. And so I began this research back in 2020, or the latter part, or 2017. I'm sorry, 2017. So going back and looking at when I began looking at this particular problem, I was looking at school leadership, SROs, and those individuals that were working in schools in South Carolina. And I was looking at incidents of school violence, and I had my determining factor in looking at like aggravated assaults, simple assaults, weapons being brought in school, fights, those types of incidents that were considered school violence, and looking at the data from different schools as well. But what I want you to understand is that I wasn't just asking people, do you think social emotional training is helpful? Because with research, you have to go a lot deeper. I wanted the evidence, and that's where that's the part where it allowed me to examine that relationship between training and actual school outcomes. And that's when I led into getting the results. So at the heart of this episode, this is where we are. This is the heart of what our discussion is about. After looking at all the literature and I'm and looking at all multiple, multiple uh literature pieces, hundreds of books, and hundreds, hundreds of books, magazine, professional literature reviews, blogs. After looking at all of that literature and looking at different methodology that others have used, gathering the information and analyzing it, I'll tell you what I found. So I did, and going back, what I did use was this was more of a qualitative study. It was a trans transcendental phenological study, qualitative study. And as I have said earlier in the in the episode, there you have to have data even if you're doing a qualitative study. So what I did find is that officers, SROs who are trained in those in looking at how the officers felt about their training, many of them felt like that prepared them to be in a school environment, and they felt that they were having an impact on the number of violent incidents happening in schools. They attributed their being able to receive information, students were more forthcoming and talking with them about situations prior to them happening, and that these are officers, SROs who knew the students, and they were able to talk to students when they were in agitated states because the students had seen them more than just the one time, one time in a day, but they were seeing them constantly throughout the day. Research requires us to distinguish between what the data actually demonstrates and what we believe the findings might mean. If the study found an association, I can't automatically call that a causation. If one of the variables was related to the to another, I can't simply say one caused the other. So that's important because research-based also means being honest about the what the research doesn't tell us. So one of the most interesting things that I found in my research, or what surprised me, is that SROs stated that mentoring students was a large percentage of their job. I I did not know that that was going to be a factor. And it was definitely something that surprised me, but it was also reassuring to hear that the off that the SROs felt that most of their time and what their time was spent doing was mentoring students that they came in contact with on a daily basis. So research shouldn't simply confirm everything that we already believe. Sometimes it will challenge us and it will, uh sometimes it'll complicate the conversation. In this instance, this actually helped the conversation because when you're mentoring, that's a part of building those relationships. But mentoring was not one of the things that stood out in my mind as I was developing the idea, developing the problem that I wanted to research. Sometimes the most valuable finding is the one that makes us ask a better question. And I have so many uh better questions that I could ask if I were redoing this study. So my research doesn't mean that social emotional training eliminates school violence. What it does, it does not mean that relationships replace security procedures. It doesn't mean that an SRO can de-escalate every student, and it doesn't mean that schools should ignore legitimate threats. Research has its boundaries, and so my study did have some limitations to it, and that's a part of the research is looking at where your limitations are. This was during the pandemic. COVID-19 was there was an onset, and the we had gone into the pandemic March of uh 2020 when schools were shut down. We were doing all of our learning was on a laptop. Students were learning from a laptop. Administrators were doing walkthroughs of classrooms via Zoom or via Teams or whatever online platform that that school district might have been using. Also, during um another limitation was that with you do having a qualitative study, it there were some limits with have doing qualitative versus the quantitative study. A quantitative study could have supported the questions more than I asked in the survey. And if I I would have been able to send out the surveys and have them to answer the questions and send those back in, whether it was by mail or email, a quantitative design could have supported the questions a lot more. Um I ended up asking the questions, as I said, through Zoom. And but that also gave me an opportunity to also read body language and looking at, you know, seeing eye contact, facial cues, and so forth. So there were some pluses to doing a qualitative, qualitative versus a quantitative, but I feel that there could have been better support of the questions that I had asked in my survey if I had more questions and if I were able to give it to more people. And then just overall, I felt like a data analysis and having more statistical data, which would go back to that support of quantitative design. Now, by no means was there were numbers, there was a lot of data, there was some hand coding that I had to do based on uh the information that I received. I recorded the conversations, and so I had a database that I would put the recordings in in order to find some of the common commonalities that were stated. And just going back, some of the common common uh terms that came up in the conversations were the words relationships. I heard that throughout my conversations with the SROs as well as school administrators because I interviewed not only SROs but school principals. Also, the word community, it stood out, and the word trust. Those were the top three words that came out in those uh conversations. And so when I look at the limitations that I had in the study, because that matters, limitations help us to help us to uh tell us how carefully we should interpret findings. So if you don't want to ever see in a dissertation or any research where the person says they got everything right and that there was nothing that they would change, there should always be something that's mentioned as far as what was a limitation in the study. So I want I want you to think about this question. What does the evidence reasonably allow us to conclude? That's how research should inform practice. Because after reading this work, after reading this information, and this is over a hundred pages, the dissertation itself was over a hundred pages, after reading all of that information, then the reader has to conclude, make a conclusion of their own. How do you use this to change your practice and what you do? So if you're an educator and you're reading this information, or if you're an SRO that read over this information, how would this impact how you work each day? So we're gonna leave the dissertation for a moment, and now we're gonna do a little bit of practical reality. So we're gonna walk into a principal's office, and here's the practical question that you want to ask yourself. What does any of this mean on a Monday morning? What does this mean on a Monday morning? It means when we discuss school safety, we should not only discuss the number of officers we have, where the cameras are, if the doors are locked, if we have an emergency response plan. Those things are very important, and we don't want to get away from those. But on a Monday morning, you want to also ask how are the adults responsible for safety trained? How are they trained? Can they recognize their own emotional responses? Can they communicate with adolescent adolescents under pressure? Can they de escalate when circumstances permit? Can they build relationships without compromising professionally? Boundaries can they recognize assumptions before assumptions influence decisions? And can they distinguish between a behavioral issue, an emotional crisis, and an immediate safety threat? So here's a question for you leaders. Do the administrator and the SRO understand each other's roles before the crisis occurs? That has been our theme before the crisis. Do those two individuals or those several individuals does an administrator and the SRO understand their roles before the crisis? Because training shouldn't begin when the radio call comes. And many times, no matter how much, and I will throw this caveat at caveat out as well. Many times we say we can't train for every incident that could happen in a school that could have a devastating impact on the lives in that building. There is no training that can keep you 100% safe. We know this. There is not one training that can keep you 100% safe. But what can help to decrease the chances of having a catastrophic incident to take place is how we treat people each and every day. How do we know how to handle ourselves in our place of business? How do we help students help themselves, help them to regulate their emotions, provide them the support that they need? That's important. So when I look back on this research, I don't just look at numbers, I look at leadership responsibility. And I looked at leadership responsibility even before getting the results of this dissertation. School safety is about systems and it's about preparation and it's about the people. We have to recognize that adults responding to young people bring their own competencies into every interaction. That's why this series is called Beyond the Badge. The badge matters, authority matters, training, and law enforcement matters. But an officer works inside a school, but when that officer works inside the school, that officer is operating in a community filled with developing young people. That requires us to think carefully about the complete set of competencies needed to work effectively in that environment. So here's a reflection question for you. And this is for the school leaders. If you were hiring an SRO for your school tomorrow, what competencies would you consider essential? Would you look at the years of law enforcement experience? Would you consider crisis response training? Absolutely, you should. But would you also ask, can this person build relationships with young people? Can this person regulate their own emotions when challenged? Can this person communicate with a student who is angry or frightened, embarrassed, overwhelmed? Can this person recognize when their own assumptions might be influencing an interaction? Can this person distinguish between a student who is being difficult and a student who may actually be in distress? Can this person exercise authority without feeling the need to constantly demonstrate authority? And can this person recognize when the safest response may be a slow situation, maybe to slow the situation down instead of speeding it up? These are not insignificant questions. When we place an adult in a position of authority around young people, we're not only selecting someone to respond to emergencies, we're selecting someone who will become a part of that school environment. If there is one thing I want school leaders to take away from this episode, is this don't reduce school safety to the presence of security. Security matters, emergency preparedness matters, policies and procedures matter, law enforcement expertise matter, but people matter as well. The competencies that people bring into emotionally charged situations matter. Think about what we've discussed throughout the series. Self-awareness matters because adults need to recognize their own emotional reaction. Self-management, self-management matters because adults have to remain regulated when students aren't. Social awareness matters because behavior doesn't occur in a vacuum. Relationship skills matter because trust built before an incident can influence what happens during an incident. Responsible decision making matters because adults may have only seconds to determine the most appropriate response. That's why social emotional competence should be viewed simply, should not be viewed simply as something we teach children. Social emotional competence is something we should expect from adults with authority. When I completed this research, it became a part of my doctoral journey. But today I see this topic through a totally different lens, or at least through another lens. I see hallways and classrooms and administrators responding to radios, teachers trying to manage difficult situations, students experiencing intense emotions, counselors trying to intervene, SROs being asked to make decisions in seconds. And that is why this research still matters to me because behind every data point is a real interaction. Behind every incident report is a story. Behind every number is a student, an educator, an officer, a family, or a school community. Research gives us the opportunity to step back from individual incidents and look for patterns. And then leadership can ask: now that we know something, what are we going to do with it? That's where research becomes practice. So before you leave this episode, I want you to take three questions back to your school or district. How are we selecting the adults who will be responsible for student safety? Not just credentials or experience, but competencies. Second question, how are we preparing them? Are we preparing, are we preparing them through training and to only respond to dangerous behavior? Or are we training them to recognize, communicate, connect, and de-escalate when appropriate? And then third question: How are we evaluating whether our approach is actually working? Are we examining incidents? Are we looking at patterns or escalations, de-escalations, relationships, perceptions, disparities, repeated behavior? But the saying that something works is different from examining whether it works. That's just the researcher and me talking. Ask the question, look at the evidence, then prove, improve the practice. This episode was different from the others today because I wanted to wanted you to meet another part of me. Not just the educator part of me, the administrator, or the advocate for positive school environments, but the researcher, the person who had a question important enough to send and to spend a doctoral dissertation trying to answer. Perhaps that's one of the greatest lessons research has taught me. Good research doesn't end the conversation. It gives us better questions for the next one. We've spent four episodes so far going beyond the badge. We've examined the role of the SRO, we've talked about social emotional competencies in adults, and we have explored de-escalation over-escalation. And then today we've examined what research can contribute to the conversation about school safety. Now, there's only one more place left for us to go, and that's practice. So in the fifth episode of Beyond the Badge, we're moving from the research and talking about what the research tell us. Talking about what should schools actually do about the research. So we're going to talk about SRO selection and training. We're going to look at partnerships between the administrator and the SRO, professional development, crisis response protocols, relationship building, restorative practices, data evaluation, and we're going to look at why school safety has to become a shared leadership responsibility. Research sitting on a shelf doesn't change a school. People applying what they learn can. So the question I want to leave with you until our next episode is Do adults responsible for safety have the competencies necessary to create it? That's where we're going next. I'm Dr. Lashante, and this has been The Road to an Effective Classroom Environment. Thank you for joining me for episode four of Beyond the Badge Rethinking School Safety Through Social Emotional Competence. Remember, connection before crisis. And until next time, keep building environments where students can learn, adults can lead, and everyone can feel safe.