SCASD Board OKs New Contract for School Security Officers

State College Area School Board on Monday approved a new contract with a security services firm to continue providing hourly security officers for the two middle schools and the high school.

The board voted 6-0 in favor of the three-year contract with Standing Stone Consulting Inc. to provide up to 10 security officers at the high school and one each at Park Forest and Mount Nittany middle schools. Board member Laurel Zydney abstained and Amber Concepcion and Gretchen Brandt were absent.

Standing Stone Consulting has provided the security officers for the district for the past three years. Its most recent contract expired at the end of June.

Under the terms of the contract, the rate for each security officer will increase from $25 to $26.50 per hour for 2022-23. For subsequent years, the rate will increase by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners, not to exceed 3% annually, according to a memo from district Finance and Operations Officer Randy Brown.

The anticipated cost for this year is $430,000 if the schools are fully staffed for eight hours every day, Brown said.

“However, past practice shows that these positions are very hard to staff and even though we are [planning for] 10 at the high school every day, I’m not expecting 10 at the high school every day,” he said. “…There were times when we wanted eight at the high school and some days they were lucky to get five. We’re paying for hours used, not hours requested, so that can be a large variation in that amount.”

The contract allows for a change in number based on need, Brown added.

Board member Peter Buck initially said he was uncertain about voting for the contract on Monday night because he was unclear about the training the officers receive. That kicked off a half-hour discussion about their role in the schools.

The schools each have school resource officers, and the high school also has two “in-house” security professionals. The third-party officers are under the purview of building administration, but the school resource officers provide guidance and suggestions.

They are required to undergo state- and district-mandated trainings, including for issues such as de-escalation and anti-bias. An in-service training prior to the start of the school year is designed “to communicate responsibilities and approach with an emphasis on age appropriate expectations at the different school levels,” according to the memo.

“Quite honestly these folks are doing crowd control,” Brown said. “They are not to discipline, they are not to engage with individual students. That’s not their role.”

The security officers can step in when there’s an imminent danger to a student and can help de-escalate a heated situation, Interim Superintendent Curtis Johnson said, but otherwise mostly call for administrators or the school resource officer when there is behavior that needs to be addressed.

“The reason we come forward with this is because our administration — the high school administration specifically, but also the middle school — believes that they need additional eyes and ears,” Brown said. “…Right now we need some more eyes and ears and this is what we believe to be the most efficient cost-effective manner.”

The district has used outside security services since 2015, but the number of officers has increased since the construction and opening of the new high school. The new building provides more spaces for students to gather in greater density, often away from the classrooms, which are set back in pods.

“There are places where kids can gravitate where we have fewer resources to be able to observe the students, where in the old design of the school the classrooms were right where the kids would have been, so all a teacher needed to do was look out in the hall and look left or look right,” board member Dan Duffy said.

“Instead of having two cafeterias where we’d have 300 students in each of them we now have 600,” Johnson added. “So for crowd control and just seeing what’s going on and having eyes on kids, they’re deterrents just to have an adult. Outside we have a courtyard as well. There’s just a lot of nooks and crannies in the high school and we want to grant our students the freedom of going to various different places… There’s just a lot of places and it helps when we have adults in those areas to eliminate or alleviate any misbehaviors that might occur without an adult.”

Freeing up teachers from serving as monitors of those spaces also has benefits, board Vice President Amy Bader said.

“Not having to require teachers to be out patrolling halls during transitions gives them the opportunity to have conversations with students during those times, which we know is really key,” Bader said. “Those side conversations before and after class can be really critical interactions between students and teachers.”

The security officers also assist with traffic control before and after school and staff the entrances to escort visitors.

“It has a lot to do with our increased security measures that a lot of school districts are taking,” Johnson said. “For example, now that we have two entrances into the building, you need a security guard to check visitors in and also walk them to the area they’re supposed to be in, then bring them back so they’re not in the hallways with the kids… It’s just extra precautions. That in itself takes four security guards, two in the front and two in the back.”

Zydney suggested tabling the contract for further discussion, saying the district could look at other ways to meet the needs with different professionals, like additional social workers.

Brown said that administrators are regularly exploring different options, but that tabling the contract would mean not having security officers on hand when school starts in two weeks.

“Increasing the number of social workers, as an example, would not decrease this number [of security officers],” Brown said. “It may change behavior and it may change it to an extent that in a year or two we may be able to reduce, but there is still the fact this is a large building and we need to provide certain safety and security measures for students and visitors.”

Resident Tina Hennessey said she appreciated the board’s decision to move forward with the contract, but also encouraged members to take a comprehensive look at how school security is handled for the future.

“I think the strategic planning process is the place to have that discussion and it should be comprehensively about the SRO, the security force, the role of counselors in helping to manage some of this and what could our schools look like five years from now if our investment were different than the type of investment we’re talking about tonight,” Hennessey said.