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Wednesday, May 2, 2018

On Saturday, the Tennessee House and Senate passed the School Safety Act of 2018, officially House Bill 2129. The bill was passed through the American state’s congress, but still needs to be signed by Tennessee governor Bill Haslam.

The bill, sponsored by Representative Micah Van Huss of Jonesborough, would allow schools in the state to employ off-duty police officers, serving as armed security officers, commonly called school resource officers. The bill also requires any law enforcement agency that participates to submit a report to the state in three years. If signed, the bill would take effect immediately. Van Huss described it as “a very important bill, a bipartisan bill, regardless of where you are on the issues, to keep kids safe.”

The bill comes shortly after another Tennessee bill that would have allowed armed teachers failed to pass.

The School Safety Act of 2018 specifically prohibits officers from “addressing discipline issues that do not constitute crimes and do not impact the immediate safety of the students or staff,” which was cited as a problem in a 2017 white paper by the American Civil Liberties Union, which reported children being charged with crimes for such activities as throwing paper airplanes, wearing sagging pants, or kicking trash cans, and children as young as five have been handcuffed. It also reported that students of color are more likely to be handcuffed by police than white students.

There was a school resource officer present for the Parkland shooting in Florida this past February, but he never entered the building or confronted the shooter. Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Robert W. Runcie told the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “It’s really disturbing that we had a law enforcement individual there specifically for this reason, and he did not engage. He did not do his job. It’s one of the most unbelievable things I’ve ever heard.” The officer himself resigned.

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