Abstract
Abstract
School Resource Officers (SROs) are municipal police officers on patrol within schools
and take orders and governance from their chiefs of police. Since SROs are not trained
educators, they receive support from school principals to help build relationships with
students while they patrol their schools. Recent research shows the importance of SROs’
roles as mentors and emphasizes the importance of building relationships with students.
The importance of relationships between SROs and students is the motivation for this
research. This study is an instrumental case study that seeks to answer the research
question: how do principals support SROs in building positive relationships with students
in public high schools in Western Pennsylvania? The researcher interviewed nine high
school principals, nine SROs, and completed a document review from nine public high
schools in Western Pennsylvania. The interviews and document reviews were completed
during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings from this qualitative research show principals
can support SROs by increasing their access to students during the school day, ongoing
communication between principals and SROs, building principals’ trust in their SROs,
principals remove SROs from the school discipline process, and principals’ promotion of
SROs’ strengths. Findings to help SROs build positive relationships with students include
utilization of the memorandum of understanding between the school and police
department, regular meeting between principals and SROs, and school input into the
selection of SROs.
Keywords: school resource officers, school discipline, communication, classrooms,
trust, public schools