Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

School shootings notoriously attract national attention in the media and from policymakers (see Maguire, Weatherby, & Mathers, 2002) with 2018 being a record-breaking year with 97 shooting incidents and 56 casualties (Riedman & O’Neill, 2019). Following the shootings in Parkland, FL and Santa Fe, TX in 2018, both states quickly implemented several policy recommendations aimed at preventing future school shootings including funding for mental health services and adding school resource officers (SROs) to schools across their states (Abbott, 2018; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, 2018).

SROs are sworn members of law enforcement placed in K-12 educational settings (NASRO, n.d.). Considering the initial presence of SROs was intended to lessen school-based crime, the majority of SROs in the 1990s were placed in secondary schools with only one percent of elementary schools having a full time SRO on site (Heaviside, Rowand, Williams, & Farris, 1998). However, by 2016, over a third of elementary schools had an SRO (Musu-Gillette et al., 2018).

This study focuses on the response of two school districts to the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in their use of SROs. These two school districts are co-located within the same suburban county in the Southern US, and the county commissioner immediately appropriated funding to install an SRO in every elementary school in the county in the days following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. We utilize the advocacy coalition framework to explain SRO adoption in these school districts. This case study informs both why SROs have become a popular response to mass casualty school shootings and how law enforcement could be capitalizing on school shootings as policy windows to expand their influence and reach into elementary schools.

This study includes extensive case study data from both school districts including semi-structured interviews with school district leadership, the law enforcement agency leadership, parents, SROs, teachers, and school-level administrators. Overall, we draw on over 100 interviews and focus groups with nearly 200 participants. We found this advocacy coalition formed over time as all middle and high schools slowly added SROs. Personal relationships between the sheriff and school district leadership also assisted coalition formation. All members of the coalition shared deep core beliefs on the importance of school safety and the general virtuousness of law enforcement. The policy core beliefs that bound the coalition together include the belief that SROs will help to keep elementary school safe, in particular from a school shooting that many viewed as imminent. Other policy core beliefs included that SROs act as positive role models and helped to shape young students’ view of law enforcement by building relationships with students. SROs were seen as superior to security guards because of their arrest power although much of their role focused on school security. Our findings indicate a need for a broader conversation about law enforcement in schools, especially whether the goal of building support for law enforcement in schools is congruent with more commonly-held views of the purpose of public education.