By Kaya Leitner ’19

In light of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida and the Feb. 27 Shelter in Place at Staples High School due to a student’s violent threat, the Westport Board of Education voted 5-2 on March 26 to approve the hiring of an armed School Resource Officer (SRO).

According to WestportNow, the proposal was initially made by Palmer in the fall. She pointed out that Westport was one of the only schools in its district resource group to not have an armed school resource officer, which pushed her to strongly urge the implementation of one.

While the primary focus of discussion about SROs has been centralized around school security, principal James D’Amico highlighted other potential benefits to the community an SRO might bring,

“From my perspective, the maybe even bigger benefit to having SROs at Staples other than the security piece is really the connections with the community,” D’Amico said. “Westport is like any other town. There are a lot of things happening outside of school like drug abuse, alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, and I think there are probably a lot of students who would like to talk with a police officer if it were more comfortable.”

Additionally, the issue of improving the process for reporting sexual abuse cases has been a topic of conversation at Staples, and D’Amico anticipates the presence of an SRO will encourage a more comfortable dialogue between students and the police force.

“We always direct students with things that happen off campus to the police, but that’s a hard thing to ask a teenager to go to the police and report something their uncomfortable about,” D’Amico said. “If you have someone in the building who is trusted you can talk to them at school in a more comfortable environment.”

However, despite high hopes of Palmer and D’Amico, student critics and dissenting board members expressed fears and discomfort with any increase in the presence of guns inside a school. Lydia Donovan ’19 spoke at the Board of Ed meeting and expressed her frustration.

“The school board didn’t listen to me at all,” Donovan said. “[…] An armed guard is not the answer. More guns is never the answer.”

Board of Ed dissenter, Vik Muktavaram, echoed the feelings of many students upon expressing his hesitations to WestportNow.

“The question for me is what are we giving up?” Mukthavaram said. “Philosophically I’m opposed to having guns in school on an ongoing basis. […] What I fundamentally believe is that we don’t join the arms race ourselves.”

Photo used under the Creative Commons License