CNN
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When a student committed a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School this week, no school resource officer was on site. And when six people were killed at another private Christian school in Nashville last year, not a single one was killed either.
Although school resource officers are not the only way to keep a school safe, and best practices for keeping students safe on campus are similar across schools in the United States, experts told CNN that it can be difficult for some private schools to cover their security costs.
“It is rare for a private school to be able to accommodate a school resource officer, and there are a variety of reasons for this. This is something the private school would have to fund itself,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, a nonprofit group of school safety experts.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 5 million students attended more than 29,000 private schools in the 2021-2022 school year.
Private schools operate outside local jurisdictions and largely receive no public money other than the tax money that some states have provided to allow some students to attend private schools, a trend that has been increasing in recent years.
Abundant Life Christian School — the small private school in Madison, Wisconsin, where two people were killed and six others were injured Monday — has several security measures in place and has received training and a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Corrections' Office of School Security, said Barbara Wiers, head of primary school and school relations at the school.
“We don’t have metal detectors, but we do have a number of safety protocols in place,” Wiers said in a press conference earlier this week.
“Students are aware that there are cameras in the building and we regularly monitor them in the offices so we know what is happening in the hallways,” Wiers added.
Like Abundant Life Christian School, there are no public schools in Madison that have school resource officers. In 2020, the Madison school board voted to remove them from its schools who were city police officers, said Stephanie Fyer, a spokeswoman for the Madison Metropolitan Police Department.
The move came after social justice groups and students spent years advocating for police-free schools, citing the possibility of criminalizing students of color. Madison joined cities such as Minneapolis and Portland, cutting or reducing ties with local law enforcement the presence of officers in schools following the murder of George Floyd.
But other places in the U.S. have instead pushed for more school resource officers at public and private schools, mostly after high-profile school shootings.
Last year's deadly shooting that killed three children and three adults at Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, renewed debate about how best to protect students and led to the approval of state funding in Millions of dollars in both public and private schools in Tennessee.
Those funds included $140 million to hire a “full-time armed” school resource officer at every public school in the state, $14 million for private schools to improve security, and a pilot grant for public, private and parochial schools to purchase mobile panic alert systems.
In a report released this month, the Tennessee Department of Education said all nonpublic school funds were allocated to 346 institutions in the state. The four main categories describing how the funds are used are “access control, surveillance, window film and communications equipment,” the report said.
Months after the Nashville shooting, police in Collegedale — about 150 miles southeast — hired the department's first school resource officer and assigned him to a private K-12 Christian school.
“Since I announced the creation of this position, I have received countless calls from agencies across the state wanting to know how they could follow our lead in creating a school resource officer position for their private schools,” said Jack Sapp, police chief of Collegedale, in an interview statement.
In New York City, lawmakers are discussing a proposal that would allow small private schools to be reimbursed by the city for the cost of security services.
“It doesn’t matter what type of school their children attend, public or private, every parent in New York City deserves to know that their children are safe at school. This is non-negotiable. My bill will make this possible,” Councilman Justin Brannan, the bill’s sponsor, wrote in a post in X.
Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said private schools employ off-duty police officers, unlike public schools where the officers' primary duty is the school.
“If you will, an officer who works at night can go to a private school during the day because that would be a misstep–“You have no duty,” Canady said.
In addition to funding issues, private schools may also be affected by the ongoing nationwide law enforcement recruiting crisis.
“Many agencies already do not have the number of officers they need to adequately protect the community, and now a private school is going to compete,” Canady said.
Guy Grace, chair of the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools, suggested that private school leaders focus on measures that cost no money but are extremely effective in keeping students safe.
“It's about giving staff and students the appropriate training on how to deal with such situations, simple things like locking doors, what to do if there is an attack on our facility, what to do, “If there’s a tornado or bad weather emergency,” Grace said.
Even if schools invest in costly security measures such as technology or security staff, the lack of basic processes could result in schools becoming “losers,” Grace said.
