A single officer would be assigned to Lincoln Middle School by Park Ridge police if Park Ridge-Niles School District 64 moves forward with a pilot school resource officer program, officials said.
That agreement would appear to remove the biggest obstacle that stalled the pilot program, first approved by the school board in August, that would assign an officer to Lincoln and Emerson middle schools for four hours a day, two days per week.
Park Ridge Police Chief Frank Kaminski told the board in February he planned to use a rotation of four officers to fill the school resource officer role. At the time, the department had seven vacant police officer positions, which Kaminski said made it impossible for him to designate one specific officer to serve as Lincoln Middle School’s primary school resource officer.
However, Kaminski said Tuesday that he expects the empty positions to have been filled by the time the program would start at the beginning of the 2018-19 school year in August, if the intergovernmental agreement is formally approved by the board as well as the city of Park Ridge and the village of Niles.
“I should be in really good shape by the end of the summer,” Kaminski said, adding that he never opposed the request for a single officer, but he had to cope with now-resolved “logistical concerns.”
In March, four board members said they would support an agreement that permitted no more than two officers to serve as the school resource officer at Lincoln Middle School.
The Niles Police Department has agreed to assign a single officer to serve as the school resource officer at Emerson Middle School. If the officer is absent on a day he or she was set to patrol Lincoln or Emerson, another officer would not fill in, according to the revised draft agreement with the city of Park Ridge.
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A report from the Lisle-based law firm of Ekl, Williams and Provenzale urged the board to assign no more than one school resource officer to each school, saying it would make it impossible to build trust and rapport among students, a key goal of the program as outlined by District 64 administrators.
The revised agreements between the school board and Park Ridge and Niles call for an advisory committee of five individuals to participate in the interviews and provide the superintendent and chief of police with input about the candidates for the school resource officer positions.
Still under discussion is a final mission statement for the school resource officers.
A discussion of a draft of the statement and the agreements with Park Ridge and Niles set for Monday was postponed after board members Rick Biagi and Fred Sanchez objected.
Biagi and Sanchez said they would not participate in the discussion because the documents had not been posted online to allow members of the public to review them, as had been ordered by the board.
“I’m not suggesting anyone did anything nefarious, but it is not fair to the public,” Biagi said.
The mission statement and draft agreements, which were posted online at http://www.d64.org/about/sro on Tuesday morning, calls for the officers to serve as role models and “educational resources” for students while promoting community policing and ensuring a “safe and secure learning environment.”
“We believe these relationships will help enable us to solve as well as prevent problems within our schools and larger communities,” according to the mission statement.
The revised agreement also limits the school resource officer’s ability to discipline a student in the district’s special education program to address concerns voiced by parents of disabled students that their children’s rights could be violated. It now requires the school’s principal to consult with the student’s case manager or the district’s director of special education before asking the officer to participate in the discipline of a special education student.
“Further, absent exigent circumstances, the [school resource officer] shall not knowingly participate in the discipline of a special education student without the express consent of the principal,” according to the draft agreement.
The board is scheduled to discuss the issue again at its next meeting, scheduled for 7 p.m. May 21 at Emerson Middle School, 8101N. Cumberland Ave.
Heather Cherone is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.