National Assessment of School Resource Officer Programs Final Project Report

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in placing sworn police officers in schools as SROs to improve school safety. However, when this project began in May 2000, little was known about SRO programs (appendix A identifies the principal published and selected unpublished discussions of SRO programs, and related data on school safety, that we examined). The purpose of the National Assessment was to identify what program “models” have been implemented, how programs have been implemented, and what the programs’ possible effects may be. To obtain this information, Abt Associates conducted a nationwide survey of established and relatively new SRO programs and collected implementation data by telephone and on site from 19 SRO programs.