Amy Rock (00:56): Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me for this episode of the Campus Safety Voices podcast. I'm Amy Rock, Campus Safety's executive editor, and here with me today is Byron McCray, director of school safety and chief emergency management officer at Brentwood Union Free School District in New York, and also a 2024 Campus Safety Director of the Year finalists.
And looking over your nomination materials, Byron, you and your team have had a lot of accomplishments over the years, but one you said you're particularly proud of is the addition of student and community relations officers [SACRO] to your school safety team. So I just wanted to ask to start, give just a general overview of the makeup of your school safety team and then we'll kind of jump into how those officers play a role within that team.
Byron McCray (01:41): So currently we have our traditional school safety officers that are assigned to the buildings and we have at least one or two school safety officers in each building. Of course, in the largest schools we have more than one. The high schools we have actually eight to 10. We are broken down into senior staff, which is equivalent to a sergeant, supervisors equivalent to a lieutenant, and team lead equivalent to a captain. So that's the makeup of our leadership roles. And we also have a deputy director who's right under me who's responsible for assisting me in running the department.
We do have several components like our bike patrol unit. We have bike patrol unit when weather permits. We patrol the unit on bikes as well. This helps with the elementary school kids because they love seeing the bikes, the middle school students, and we're able to fit in areas that we normally can't fit. And then we have our professional development team. This team is responsible for training our staff and keeping them updated on the trends and whatever's going on in society.
And then of course, recently I introduced this pilot project about a year and a half ago called SACRO, which is student community relations officers, and this is where they do non-traditional school safety work.
Amy Rock (03:00): And now when they were added, did you find kind of a gap in the team that these officers were able to fill?
Byron McCray (03:08): Yes. I found there was a huge gap because as I mentioned earlier in school safety, and this is around the world school safety, there was limited interaction with the students. But you have to remember, our school safety team, they're responsible for seeing them when they arrive, when they leave, and during the course of the day when they're patrolling the district. So I found that a lot of our school safety team wasn't trained to deal with a crisis if our student was going through a crisis. So I had to create a team that are able to deal with different types of issues that our students are facing.
Amy Rock (03:42): Can you kind of just offer a general overview of what the SACROs do and what their day-to-day role is like?
Byron McCray (03:48): Well, their day-to-day role is patrolling the districts and responding to different situations, and I'll give you the type of situations we have them responding to. 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. Also, they're retired and active law enforcement officers. If we do happen to have an active shooter situation or a threat to the district, they will respond in full gear ready to take out the threat. Also, they deal with crisis off hours, meaning evenings and weekends when schools close. If a student is researching something on the devices that we give them, because since COVID, everyone is required to have a device, if they're researching bombs, if they're researching guns, if they're researching how to kill themselves, what we do is we respond to their home and we try to find out what's going on and get an answer to the question and see if they need some type of support system.
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. This team also is responsible for training our students. We have senior students who have no intentions on going to college, and that's the population that we're concerned with because if you have no intentions on going to school or no intentions on doing much outside of school, no training academies or anything, what we want to do is prepare them for the job market. So what we do is we train them, we get them their security license, we get them their notary public , we get them their health aid certification, so they're employable. So we prepare our seniors for the job market instead of going into the traditional areas where 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.
Amy Rock (05:55): Right. It's great that they do off hours interactions because it shows students that they care about you beyond when you're on school property -- you care about them just as a person, they’re not just a number inside your school building from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM or whatever.
Byron McCray (06:14): And developing a rapport with these students actually helps with school safety because now we have an ally in the building. So when other students are against school safety and law enforcement, “No, they're cool. They're not the regular type of school safety officers. They care about us.” It definitely helps create a positive climate within the school district.
And a few other things that they're responsible for -- creating programs for after school, keep the kids off the street. We have boxing programs, we have self-defense programs, we have programs that they can come after school and we can instruct them and help instill some type of discipline. We have our youth police academy that we hold during the summer when there's no school to keep them busy with the Youth Police Academy. We train them in what police officers do and how to deal with the situation if you are encountered with the law enforcement officer and what you should do and shouldn't do. So these are the things that we're doing for our students to make sure that they're successful in the future.
Amy Rock (07:17): Yeah, that's huge. Do you get a lot of kids that turn out for those?
Byron McCray (07:21): The boxing fitness program, yes. Huge numbers. Self-defense, huge numbers. Sports, huge numbers. But the youth academy, initially the numbers weren't that great. Kids didn't want to learn about law enforcement. The numbers were really. 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 and the experiences of going to the jails, going to the court building, speaking to judges, visiting the precincts, the police headquarters, the sheriff department, the district attorney's office, the whole process. They learned everything. They were amazed and they filtered it through the district. Now, I don't know if we're going to be able to handle the amount.
Amy Rock (08:10): I was going to say, that's a lot of logistics that you need 25 to 15,000, you're probably like, oh crap.
Byron McCray (08:17): Right, right.
Amy Rock (08:19): That's amazing though. I mean, everyone comes from different backgrounds and different experiences with law enforcement. So to give them kind of that inside look into the everyday life of an officer just gives that much of a different perspective and hopefully makes relationships between law enforcement and these children who are going to grow into adults in your town and city, just have a kind of an open relationship with law enforcement. That's great.
Byron McCray (08:47): And one thing that we do during this academy is we let them experience them actually doing a car stop. We let them experience someone who's difficult, them being the officer and the staff like myself being the difficult person so they can understand why police officers do what they do and how they handle certain encounters. It's all about embracing the community. Even the faith-based organizations, a lot of people feel that the church can fix it. So we use them as an arm. We have SACRO go out, speak to the faith-based organizations and get them involved because a lot of our students need support and they do go to the churches and having the pastor or the deacon or the priest or the Imam or whoever involved, it helps.
Amy Rock (09:38): And that kind of brings me to my next question about local businesses and community partnership. One thing that stood out to me that you said is that the SACROs work closely with local businesses. Can you tell me a little bit about that partnership and how it's been helpful?
Byron McCray (09:54): Well, I know across the United States, people are talking about the school to prison pipeline and having law enforcement around students. Why I had SACRO go out to the local businesses is because we needed their support. Our kids tend to cut school. I cut school when I was younger, but we'd go hang out at Wendy’s, McDonald’s, these local fast food restaurants or we'd just go in a parking lot where we have all of these businesses and hang out there in that parking lot for the day. Now we've communicated with these businesses and they call the school, they call SACRO and let them know, “Listen, we have kids hanging out in our restaurant. We have kids hanging out in our parking lot. We have kids hanging out in front of our business,” and we go pick them up and bring them to school or get them to some type of safe area.
And we try to find out what's going on. Why are you not in school? Are you being bullied? Are you being threatened? And these businesses play a crucial part because they're taking their time and communicating this to us. It can actually help us fix an issue. So that's why we embrace them and deal with the businesses. And basically they’re brought into the process. They want to assist us, they want to help us. I'm going to give you an example. One of our students was shoplifting there, stole a lot of items. Instead of him calling the police the normal, traditional 9-1-1, he gave us a picture of the student. We brought the student in, spoke to the parent. They returned all the merchandise, and now we have the student going to supportive services. And we avoided this kid getting a scar on his record.
These are the things that we're trying to do to not have our kids wind up in the criminal justice system. And the businesses are actually supporting it because they don't call the police because they don't want the kid to get arrested because they know that this kid is young and what could possibly happen if he resists. It's a team effort. If you have everyone involved in the team and that child or youth sees that we're communicating with each other, they're going to walk the straight line. They're going to say, “Well, how the heck did the owner get in touch with the school? And how did the school get in touch with my parent and how did my parent know that?” And without any law enforcement type penalty. So it plays a part. And now we have this person going to a shoplift program to show them the impact that it has on the owner of the business and how that business, if people continue, that behavior can wind up closing and we won't have that type of business in the neighborhood.
One thing that I train my school safety officers, and this is everyone including SACRO, when we encounter a student, whether it's in the hallway cutting class, whether it's on the street cutting school, we want to get to the bottom of why they're cutting, not just get back to class, not just “You belong in the classroom. Why are you in the hallway?” It could be that the classes are too difficult, they're embarrassed because if the teacher picks them to answer a question, they may answer it incorrectly and they get teased. They may just need additional tutoring, they may need some type of supportive services. Maybe they're being bullied by someone in the room. So these are the things [officers] don't traditionally do. The first thing we say is, “You don't belong in the hallway. You need to go to class,” instead of talking to them. So that's what I encourage all of my officers to do when we encounter our youth.
It takes a lot of training. And the good part is my SACRO unit, they're willing to take the trainings. They learn fundamental crisis intervention, crisis prevention intervention (CPI), mediation skills. We need them to learn all of these different things because I want them prepared. I don't want them going out there and not prepared on how to deal with any type of situation they encounter. And yes, we do visit the homes. We go talk to the parents. I had one student come to me and say, “Listen, my mother doesn't want me to go to college. She wants me to go to a trade school. I want to go to college. So can you come talk to her?” We go to the house and we try to figure out what's her angle, and she's saying she can't afford it.
So what we did was we got her scholarships. We went out and tried to get scholarships to help her. I understand it's a big hit for some parents and then taking the loans, it's even more of a hit when they graduate because now they're required to pay it back if he's not employed. And the first two years, I'm hearing that the parents have to co-sign now. So if their credit is not good, it doesn't help the student. So we've taken school safety and law enforcement and campus safety to a different level because we feel with this supportive services, we can create a safe environment. And it's amazing how our students come bring information to us to stop things from happening in our school district, all because they like us.
