Each year, the city of Greensboro enters into a contract to provide police to the Guilford County School Board and to certain Guilford County schools. The board and the city first entered into the contract on July 1, 2001. 

During the July 11 city council meeting, council members approved the annual contract to provide 20 police officers from the Greensboro Police Department for the school year. Seventeen officers will be assigned by the city’s police chief to specific middle and high schools as what are known as school safety resource officers or SROs, while the remaining three will oversee the program and officers. 

The payment is split between the board and the city, 75 percent and 25 percent respectively. This year, the total contract amount to provide officers to Guilford County schools for the school year is $2.2 million and the city is being paid $1.6 million by the county. The overall cost of salaries and benefits for the 20 officers came out to $2.1 million. 

A $40,000 payment in addition to payroll is also listed in the document. According to GPD’s Public Information Manager Josie Cambareri, this is for additional training. “The state mandates a ton of training for our officers. But, we choose to do extra training above the state mandated standard,” Cambareri wrote to TCB.

The city provides all equipment and vehicles to the officers at its own expense.

Last year, the total contract for the 20 officers tallied up to $2.1 million. Guilford County Schools paid the city $1.6 million. The overall cost of salaries and benefits for the 20 officers came out to $2.1 million. The previous year, in FY 21-22, the total cost amounted to $2.1 million, and the city was paid $1.6 million. The overall cost of salaries and benefits for the 20 officers came out to $2 million.

Payment in addition to payroll is also $40,000 for both previous fiscal years.

Do school resource officers make schools safer?

In 2018, a white police officer working in Hanes Magnet Middle School in Winston-Salem arrested 14-year-old Rockwell Baldwin. The incident, which was caught on a student’s cell phone, showed officer Tyler McCormick attempting to cuff Baldwin’s hands behind her back as she tried to pull her hands away and then tumbled to the ground. The incident raised an alarm throughout the Black community in Winston-Salem, which resulted in a local judge allowing for the release of McCormick’s body-camera footage.

A 2020 New York Times article details episodes of violence by police in schools against the children they are tasked to protect. An officer assigned to a school in Vance County, NC lost his job after he repeatedly slammed an 11-year-old boy to the ground in 2019.

A 2023 Duke University study found that North Carolina has spent over $100 million on SRO salaries and training since 2016, and argues that SROs have little to no effect on school safety and can contribute to over-disciplining students. 

Research from the Urban Institute shows that schools with a majority of Black and Hispanic students are more likely to have officers on campus than those with a majority of white students.

An ACLU report revealed that 2015-2016 data from the US Department of Education shows how, overall, students with disabilities were nearly three times more likely to be arrested than students without disabilities, and that this risk is multiplied at schools with police. 

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