A year and a half ago, student community relations officers (SACROs) were added to Brentwood Union Free School District’s school safety team. These non-traditional school safety employees were added when Byron McCray, the district’s director of school safety and chief emergency management officer and a 2024 Campus Safety Director of the Year finalist, noticed limited interactions between students and the district’s traditional school safety officers.
“Our school safety team, they’re responsible for seeing students when they arrive, when they leave, and during the course of the day when they’re patrolling the district. However, I found that a lot of our school safety team wasn’t trained to deal with a crisis if a student was going through a crisis,” said McCray. “So I had to create a team that was able to deal with different types of issues that our students are facing.”
Their job roles change daily, requiring constant adaptation for each unique situation.
“If we have a student that says he’s scared to come to school, always being bullied, we’ll go to their home and we’ll talk to them, find out what the issue is, and help them resolve it and bring it back to administration and then we work as a team to figure out how we can fix the issue,” McCray described. “There are many a times when we respond and the student is going through a crisis and we have to call emergency medical technicians to come take them to the hospital or give the parents a referral.”
Student Activities Led by Community Relations Officers
While SACROs provide support during student crises, their main objective is to build trust with students through various campus activities, including boxing and self-defense programs (6:15).
“Developing a rapport with these students actually helps with school safety because now we have an ally in the building. When other students are against school safety and law enforcement, [they can say], ‘No, they’re cool. They’re not the regular type of school safety officers. They care about us,'” McCray said. “It definitely helps create a positive climate within the school district.”
The department also holds a youth police academy during the summer. Student participants are trained in what police officers do and how to approach an interaction with a police officer. Participants also get an up close and personal look at the inner workings of the judicial system.
“They [get to experience] going to the jails, going to the court buildings, speaking to judges, visiting the precincts, the police headquarters, the sheriff’s department, the district attorney’s office, the whole process,” said McCray. “Initially, the numbers weren’t great. Kids didn’t want to learn about law enforcement. This year, oh my goodness. Those initial 25 students that participated somehow filtered it to almost 15,000 students, letting them know how much fun it is.”
SACROs also prioritize helping students prepare for their future, particularly those who don’t plan to pursue higher education.
“What we want to do is prepare them for the job market. We get them their security license, we get them their notary public, we get them their health aid certification so they’re employable,” said McCray. “We prepare our seniors for the job market instead of going into the traditional areas when they’re not going to make much and then they wind up doing things to make quick money, and we don’t want that to happen and align them with the criminal justice system.”
During this discussion, McCray also shared:
- How SACROs partner with local faith-based organizations to provide additional support to students (9:09)
- How SACROs work with other area businesses to mitigate the school-to-prison pipeline (9:38)
- How he trains all school safety officers to approach student discipline and several accompanying anecdotes (12:36)
Watch the full interview here or listen to the podcast on the go on Apple or Spotify.