
On Wednesday, 15 January 2025, our Club will welcome school resource officer and Del Benson’s son-in-law, Officer Dane Stratton who will speak on his duties and experiences working in our local schools.
According to the Fort Collins Police Service (FCPS), the School Resource Officer (SRO) program is a problem-solving approach to reducing crime by assigning specially trained officers to each of the traditional junior and high schools in the Poudre School District (PSD) to establish an ongoing rapport with students, staff and parents. FCPS works collaboratively with PSD to provide a safe learning environment for all students and staff.
The SRO program began in 1995 and is the result of a partnership between FCPS and the PSD. It has three basic goals: 1-to provide a safe learning environment and help reduce school violence; 2-to improve school/law enforcement collaboration, and 3-to improve perceptions and relations between students, staff, and law enforcement officials. The SRO program includes 1 Sergeant, 2 Corporals, and 11 SROs distributed among 38 schools serving approximately 25,000 students throughout PSD, the 9th largest school district in Colorado.
SROs fulfill three roles as a part of their job: Teaching, Informal Counseling, and Law Enforcement. They teach, counsel, and enforce around issues related to internet safety, drug/alcohol awareness, Safe2Tell, restorative justice, welfare checks, child abuse, response to school violence training, assessing student threat/risk behavior, providing victim assistance/referrals, and conducting facility assessments/safety recommendations. Having an officer on-site also allows for rapid response in the event of an active shooter or other violent event.
SROs help coordinate wrap-around services such as SAVA/DHS, CAYAK/Summitstone, Center for Family Outreach, Juvenile Recovery Court, Mediation, Deferments, and Juvenile Justice System. The juvenile justice system aims to provide justice-involved youth with resources and services that support a healthy future.
SROs receive all standard police training required at FCPS with additional training in 13 special areas. Besides working with individual students, SROs are committed to the community policing concepts regarding their schools and surrounding neighborhoods.
Dane will discuss the article published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in July entitled, “The thin blue line in schools: New evidence on school-based policing across the U.S.” In it, outcomes measured in the 2017–18 U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) include measures of disciplinary incidents disaggregated by student subgroups. Around 41 percent of high schools, 38 percent of middle schools and 17 percent of elementary schools have a school resource officer (SRO) stationed on-site at least part-time. The data show that having an SRO present in schools reduces fights and threats by about 30 percent and increases detection of firearms by about 150 percent. At the same time, schools with SROs saw between a 35 and 80 percent increase in out-of-school suspensions, and a 25 to 90 percent increase in expulsions. Referrals to police and school-based arrests were up between 10 and 50 percent compared to campuses without SROs. These increases were especially higher among students with disabilities, who were suspended, expelled or arrested at nearly three times the rate of students without disabilities. Among Black youth, out-of-school suspensions increase by 1.9 times more, expulsions by 3.3 times more, and arrests by 2.5 times more compared to their white peers upon introduction of an SRO.
“The findings from this national study … demonstrate that stationing police officers in schools comes with a serious set of tradeoffs,” Lucy Sorensen, a University at Albany Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy associate professor and lead author on the study, said in a statement. “We recommend that school districts weigh these tradeoffs carefully in determining the size and scope of their SRO programs and consider alternative school violence prevention approaches that support, rather than police, students.”
Officer Dane Stratton earned a BA in 2008 from CSU. He is the recipient of this club’s Service Above Self Award. Ask Dane about how he successfully returned a man’s wedding ring in 2018 using investigative techniques after it had been lost for more than a year, or ask Dane about the fumble he recovered in the 2008 New Mexico Bowl preserving a drive that secured a CSU victory.