Finance Board Mulls Student Resource Officer

Spending $15,000 in police overtime to have a police officer informally counsel youths at Darien High School is a one-year "experiment" that the Board of Selectmen support and the Board of Finance is now considering.

The money would come from $29,000 in youth grant funding that the town was paying to Youth Options, a Stamford-based organization that got the money in previous years for youth counseling. Town Administrative Officer Karl Kilduff told the Board of Selectmen recently that the organization hadn't been very responsive to town requests to find out how it was spending the money, and it didn't seem to be doing any counseling in Darien.

So the Board of Selectmen instead decided to spend $12,000 in an increased grant to the Depot youth center and $15,000 for a "Student Resource Officer" at the high school.

The idea for an SRO has been discussed for well over a year. Back in December 2010, Darien Police Chief Duane Lovello told the Board of Education that a SRO would be a police officer who would serve as a liaison and confidant to students on issues related to law enforcement, drugs and alcohol.

Finance Board member Joe Duwan said an SRO at Darien High would "get to know the students [and] be able to identify issues before they actually happen."

Duwan said Greenwich and New Canaan have each put SRO's in their high schools, and Lovello, Depot Program Director Janice Marzano, town Youth Director Alicia Sillars and the Board of Education all supported the idea of an SRO in Darien.

"I think it's worth a trial year," Finance Board Chair Liz Mao said. "See how it goes."

Board member Lorene Bora pointed out that the officer would not be in the schools "to do police work per se. He's not there to do discipline issues." In fact, if a discipline issue came up, the officer would call on school officials to take care of it, and if a crime was committed, the officer would have other police officers take care of investigations or arrests. Those kinds of actions might get in the way of the officer developing friendly relations with students, she said.

Bora said that rather than spending money on both an SRO and a proposed new school psychologist and on other employees already doing counseling or social work or both in the high school, town education officials should look into whether or not the school itself is causing unnecessary stress to students.

"I would like to hear more discussion [from the Board of Education] about root causes," Bora said. She said she wondered how much of the stress on Darien High students was coming from their homes and how much the school itself was placing on them.

For instance, she said, the school could allow some students to arrive at school later in the day if their schedules permitted it, and the amount of time spent in sports practice might be shortened. "Sometimes there are some vey simple things that could be done to relieve pressure on kids," she said.

Board Vice Chairman Martha Banks said she was skeptical about the amount of proposed new spending on counseling. "Are we going to load the schools up with people who are going to deal with everything?" she said.

"It seems we've already crossed that bridge at some level," Mao replied.

No vote was taken. The board is next scheduled to meet on April 3, and after that with the Board of Education on April 5.