[Reminder] July 23 (TODAY): Katherine Kwok

Presenter: Katherine Kwok, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Title: All SROs are not created equal: Heterogeneity in school policing

Abstract: The expansion of police presence in U.S. schools over the past two decades raises questions about the trade-off between student safety and exposure to the criminal justice system. In this paper, we study how schools’ implementation of their school policing program influences the program’s impact on in-school discipline and student academics. Using a difference-in-differences design that leverages a federal grant for hiring School Resource Officers (SROs), we find that schools that received funding to hire an SRO had a 32% decrease in the number of students referred to law enforcement. We also identify the presence and extent of treatment effect heterogeneity in SRO hiring by bounding the variance of the treatment effect distribution and discover meaningful differences across schools in how SRO hiring impacts the number of students suspended or referred to law enforcement. To explain the detected treatment effect heterogeneity, we use school characteristics such as student demographics and also differences in how schools implement their SRO program, measured by extracting themes from text responses in which grant applicants describe problems facing their school. We find that schools whose SRO programs focus on building community have decreased disciplinary action and fewer students who are chronically absent than schools that focus on the SRO’s fulfillment of traditional law enforcement duties.