By David Tyler
The Fayetteville-Manlius schools will have a police presence in each of the district’s six schools this year, following a vote of the Manlius Town Board Wednesday night to contract with F-M to provide the district with two additional peace officers.
The plan is a complement to the district’s existing School Information Resource Officer program, which has been in place since 2012. As opposed to SIROs, who are full-time police officers who work primarily in the schools but may have duties outside of the schools, the new officers will be titled Special Patrol Officers. They will be part-time employees who only work in the schools during the school day.
One of the new SPOs will be assigned to Mott Road Elementary School, which currently does not have a police presence. The other will be a floater that will help throughout the district, particularly at the high school.
Police Chief Mike Crowell said the department would hire retired police officers to fill the SPO positions.
“The true benefit is the relationship-building opportunities,” Crowell said, adding that the SPOs will not be involved in student discipline unless the safety of students or staff is at risk.
During the public hearing portion of the discussion, several residents chimed in via Zoom and Facebook to support the hiring of the new officers. The decision to hire the additional officers is the culmination of a lengthy discussion process by a task force established by the Fayetteville-Manlius school board that included teachers, parents and students.
Although she voted to approve the contract, the program was questioned by Councilor Katelyn Kriesel, who wondered why the Fayetteville-Manlius schools would increase police presence in the district at a time when other districts locally are following the national trend of reducing the number of police officers in schools.
“As a parent in the district … why do these people need to be police officers? Why do they need to have a gun?” Kriesel asked. “Why not direct this spending toward more guidance counselors or social workers or grandparents, if that’s what the kids want?”
Marissa Mims, the F-M school board president and a teacher in the Syracuse City School District, acknowledged that there is a lot of pressure on the city schools right now to reduce the police presence there, but that view is not shared by many of the teachers.
“Our focus here needs to be on what is best for F-M,” Mims said. “[The F-M SIROs] have all worked at not only helping our district with the security piece, but with the relationship piece as well.”
Mims said that a study of the existing SIROs at F-M show they have about 1,800 interactions with students each month, and typically one arrest per month is made for a crime committed in the schools.
She had high praise for the SIRO program and indicated that many students have developed positive relationships with the officers “that will last a lifetime.”
The contract is for one year and the program will be reviewed again beginning in May, 2021.
