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School Resource Officer Information TV ILq POLICE" �r►awo ko�*hwe apou��y' • What is a school resource officer? A school resource officer, by federal definition, is a career law enforcement officer with sworn authority, who is deployed by an employing police department or agency in a community -oriented policing assignment to work in collaboration with one or more schools. What are appropriate roles of school resource officers? The goals of well-founded SRO programs include providing safe learning environments in our nation's schools, providing valuable resources to school staff members, fostering positive relationships with youth, developing strategies to resolve problems affecting youth and protecting all students, so they can reach their fullest potentials. NASRO considers it a best practice to use a "triad concept" to define the three main roles of school resource officers: o educator (i.e. guest lecturer), o informal counselor/mentor, and o law enforcement officer. How many school resource officers are there in the United States? Nobody knows how many SROs there are in the U.S., because SROs are not required to register with any national database, nor are police departments required to report how many of their officers work as SROs, nor are school systems required to report how many SROs they use. A 2007 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) found that there were more than 17,000 SROs deployed in public schools nationwide, but the DOJ has not repeated that survey since. The National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO) estimates that between 14,000 and 20,000 SROs are in service nationwide, based on DOJ data and the number of SROs that NASRO has trained. A similar, but slightly different question is, "How many schools use SROs?" The most recent available data on that comes from a 2015 report by the National Center for Education Statistics (a part of the U.S. Department of Education). It surveyed public schools in the spring of 2014. The Center reported that 30 percent of U.S. public schools who participated in the survey indicated that they had at least one full-time or part- time school resource officer during the 2013-2014 academic year. There were approximately 98,500 public schools in the U.S. that year, which means that approximately 29,550 schools had at least one school resource officer. Many SROs serve more than one school and some schools have more than one officer. One therefore cannot reliably extrapolate the number of SROs from the percentage of schools in the 2014 survey. How do I become a school resource officer? The first step in becoming a school resource officer is to become a sworn, career law enforcement officer. Typically, one becomes a law enforcement officer by applying to a law enforcement agency for employment and then completing the training that agency requires of its recruits. NASRO recommends that law enforcement officers receive a certain amount of street experience and complete specialized SRO training before being assigned to SRO positions. Not all law