‘A better direction’: Minnesota starts mandatory training for police in schools
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The 22 police officers who gathered recently for training sessions at St. Michael-Albertville High School had decades of policing experience among them but still wanted help navigating a different kind of mission — working with teens in schools.
One officer currently in a school wanted some guidance on deciding whether to step in on a student conflict or leave it to school officials. Her contract called for dustups not involving weapons or a physical injury to be handled by the school, “but I get called for those all the time,” she said.
“If they’re calling you, it’s not always because … they want you to do something about it,” training leader Jenny Boswell responded. “There’s a difference between calling you because we want you to lay down the law, versus, ‘We just want you to be aware of what’s going on so you can serve in that deterrence factor and have that situational awareness of how to keep kiddos safe.’”
Minnesota lawmakers last year ordered school resource officers to upgrade their training, a decision rooted in the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. The mid-March training session at St. Michael-Albertville — the first of its kind in the state — offered a glimpse of life in schools that’s real but rarely discussed.
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Officers asked questions and talked through topics from what to do if a school staffer shows up drunk at work, how to assess situations when students are damaging school property and what to do about students who bring illegal substances to school.
Boswell’s colleague, SRO instructor Megan Olstad reminded the officers they’re part of a larger team and need to be circumspect about how and when they intervene.
“It’s OK to take a pause, right?” Olstad said. “Sometimes things are urgent and you can’t, but in some of these investigations, if you’re in a safe and secure spot, you can pause, talk as a team.”
‘Different than patrol work’
The state has long offered school resource officers voluntary preparation through the Minnesota School Safety Center, a program of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. Last year’s law made four days of training a requirement.
Advocates backed the move as a solid compromise following a difficult stretch. In the wake of Floyd’s killing, lawmakers passed a law forbidding police in schools from using prone restraints on students. That led to some police departments pulling back their school officers amid worries about potential liability.
Faced with that retreat, legislative leaders worked in a bipartisan way to clarify that officers could use prone restraint in situations where students pose a risk to themselves or others. In return, they made training mandatory.
The bill signed by Gov. Tim Walz also set aside funding for officer training and required the Minnesota Board of Peace Officer Standards and Training to develop a model policy defining the relationship between law enforcement and schools.
It was a middle ground experts say was important to find for a job that comes with demands that are different from policing the streets.
“It’s different than patrol work,” said Boswell, the Minnesota School Safety Center’s resource coordinator. “It takes a special skill set.”
School officers, she said, need to be “experts in all of the different areas in which schools experience emergencies, everything from a lost child to a utility hazard to, you know, things that happen in the community that might spread into the school.”
At the St. Michael training, Boswell spent four days running officers through various parts of the job: infrastructure scans of the building while students were on spring break; checking doors, thinking through safety scenarios and assessing security technology. They sat for legal briefings to understand the juvenile legal system.
They also learned de-escalation techniques and talked through how mental health and trauma symptoms might show up in student behaviors — training elements that are now required by law, outlined in a model policy developed late last year and fleshed out by the Peace Officers Training Board.
‘A better direction’
The middle ground reached by lawmakers has won praise nationally and locally.
“Minnesota is going in a better direction now that it's allowed itself to have an overhaul,” said Rudy Perez, a senior advisor to the National Association of School Resource Officers. “There were some training aspects that needed to be updated.”
Police, he said, initially didn’t feel like they had a voice in the discussion and worried lawmakers didn’t have a clear sense of what school resources officers encounter, especially when it comes to using prone restraint.
“It’s very difficult sometimes to grab a hold of somebody and try to hold on to them,” said Perez, who’s based in Minnesota. “Sometimes kids get heated, and sometimes you have to go to the ground and hold somebody there for a little bit. But there’s rules and regulations — calm them down and quickly put them in a recovery position. Once you see it, then people kind of comprehend what use of force is and why we would use that kind of force at times.”
Perez helped shape the POST Board’s model of school resource officer training objectives last year. They include requirements that contracts outline duties such as “fostering a positive school climate” and “facilitating the establishment of positive relationships with students.” They also require officers to use de-escalation strategies
Khulia Pringle, a member of the group Solutions not Suspensions, also attended the five meetings during which Perez and others developed Minnesota’s new model policy.
She agrees that having required training is important for officers in schools, but she said she’s concerned negotiators didn’t do enough to include the voices of student and community advocates.
“The process itself, to me, was performative. It didn’t include community voice,” Pringle said. “I don’t feel like the center of the conversation was around children. It was all about, you know, we need to make sure that our cops don’t get sued.”
Because the training guidelines weren’t developed until January, Pringle said she’s not able to comment on them.
“I don’t feel like I was allowed to thoroughly vet what the training was. I had no knowledge of what the training was,” Pringle said. “It prohibited me from making sound recommendations when it comes to children who are disproportionately affected by police interactions in schools, because I had no knowledge of the training.”
For Pringle, proper training for school resource officers is deeply personal. One of her former students was thrown to the ground in 2017 by a school resource officer at St. Paul Central High School.
“That extremely affected him,” Pringle said. “There was nothing that he did that day that deserved for him to be slammed on the concrete and arrested and treated like a criminal.”
The St. Paul Public School board voted to remove officers from district schools in 2020.
‘All about relationships’
In the most recent Minnesota statewide student survey, the vast majority of students agreed or strongly agreed it was “a good idea” to have a school resource officer at their school.
A majority of eighth grade girls, however, said they would “would not feel comfortable” going to the school’s police officer if they had problems or needed help.
At St. Michael-Albertville High School, principal John Reeves said having a police presence is something his community expects but that it’s only one component of what makes his school safe.
“Organizations are really good at checking boxes in saying that we have, you know, ‘A, B and C that make us a safe school.’ Ultimately, it has to be woven into the fabric of what you do,” Reeves said.
For him, that means holding weekly and biweekly meetings with school resource officers and other staff to discuss scenarios, talk about what’s happening in hallways and make sure everyone’s working as a team to keep kids safe.
For Sgt. Austin Henry, who’s stationed at St. Michael-Albertville High School, keeping the schools he’s assigned to safe is about maintaining good connections to kids.
“When students come into this building, do they feel like they can interact with adults in this building who they feel safe with? Do they feel that they can interact with our SRO, do they feel like they have relationships with one another?” Henry said. “It’s all about relationships.”