Wallingford CT shifts from school police to armed security officers
Wallingford CT July 7th, 2023 The town’s transition from school resource officers to armed security officers took another step forward when the Town Council unanimously approved the job description for the new positions that will place experienced officers in schools this fall.
“Security is of the utmost importance. I have been in contact with the superintendent to try to enhance the security of the schools,” Police Chief John Ventura said. He worked with school officials to determine their needs and how best the police department can meet those needs while maintaining its responsibilities to the town as a whole.
There’s a difference between a school resource officer, an armed security officer and an armed security guard, Ventura said. SROs are members of the police department who are assigned at least on a part time basis to the town’s schools but are subject to the needs of the police department and if they’re needed, they can be pulled from the school at a moment’s notice. But ASOs are trained police officers who are retired or have at least five years of experience. They are not members of the Wallingford Police Department and do not belong to its union.
“It’s not an armed security guard. This is a very specific position in which you can only apply if you are retired from a police agency in good standing and your certification is still current. You would maintain that certification once you are hired by the town of Wallingford,” Ventura said. “We would give you training classes, you would be certified under our firearms instructors and provided with our equipment and you would be under our supervision.”
Currently there are two school resource officers covering the schools, with officers from the department’s Community Impact Unit providing cover as needed, Ventura has said previously. The two officers rotate among the town’s middle and high schools.
Ventura included funding for the four armed security officer positions in his proposed 2023-24 budget.
Other districts use ASOs and tailor them to their district’s needs, Ventura said.
“The specific program that we did not only gives our schools the utmost security and technical abilities of the people that we hire, but it also allows us to model it in a way that it can best suit everyone involved,” Ventura said. “I feel this is a better model, a more professional model and it adds to our abilities to what we want, which is to add more security for our students.”
While it is aimed at retired officers, it also is open to officers who have at least five years’ experience — those who may have gone into the field and then decided it’s not for them, Ventura said, which has happened more in recent years. “I would have said five or 10 years ago absolutely not, but the experience of some of the newer officers who are getting hired and going through the process of being full-time sworn police officers, for some they just don’t like the profession,” Ventura said. “This is an alternative to give them something to do and use their skills, maybe not in a way they originally thought. Because we are seeing people go through the police academy and go through probation, get their certification to a post and then are resigning. This would allow them to use those efforts in a situation where they might feel more comfortable.”
Councilor Vincent Testa, who teaches at Lyman Hall HIgh School, said he is uncomfortable with having armed officers in the schools but recognizes the need.
“The times we have today, there are threats and we need to be prepared for that. But in my gut, it bothers me to have armed personnel in the schools but I know and believe it’s necessary,” Testa said. “I feel that properly done, there’s a feeling of security and safety knowing that there is a trained police officer in the building but you would have to have far more trained police officers working full time for the schools. This seems to me to be the middle ground to have someone who is a trained police officer as opposed to an armed security guard.”
The ASO job description does not include arresting or disciplining students, Ventura said. The responsibility to discipline students will remain with the school staff, he said. But they also will be able to assist in things like traffic control, he said.
“They are state certified in traffic control. They can get the buses and the parents moving where we couldn’t do that before,” Ventura said. “The ASO will not arrest anyone in the school . They are not going to arrest anyone on school property and they are not responsible for disciplining students, they are not enforcing school rules. That is for the school administration to do.
“We don’t want this individual to be seen as an authoritative figure,” he said, but rather as someone there to assure safety in the school. By not being seen by students as a threat, it allows the officer to become immersed in student’s day-to-day activities, such as the retired New Britain SWAT commander who works as an ASO at his son’s school, Ventura said.
“He plays football with them during lunch breaks. They love him. He’s not someone that they see as an adversary,” Ventura said. “They welcome the fact that he’s there because they know that he’s there ultimately for their safety.”
It’s not feasible to maintain a SRO program because there’s not enough police officers to devote any of them solely to the schools, Ventura said, so his department and the school district looked for an alternative that would provide a presence in the schools.
“What’s going on around us, unfortunately we live in an unsafe environment that we’re accustomed to. There are threats to our students, there are threats to our schools,” he said. “They are soft targets that we really need to concentrate on providing security for, but unfortunately for the police department, we are stretched so thin that I can’t devote people to the schools on a daily basis. I have three or four key individuals that will go around to some of the schools and deal with some of the issues, but on a daily basis, if they have training or if someone is sick, no one is there.
“This is an opportunity to have someone there with one primary purpose – to provide security to the school and we don’t have to worry about coverage for that,” he said. “Unfortunately, (threats to schools are) a real thing that we deal with.”
