At the end of the year, the contract that puts Akron police officers inside the city’s public schools will expire, leaving school officials to decide how they will manage the relationship that makes police a regular part of the school day.
The partnership between police and Akron Public Schools has drawn more attention following an Oct. 16 incident in which an Akron police officer punched a high school student three times in the head after the student evaded metal detectors on his way into Firestone Community Learning Center. The officer was removed from duty as a school resource officer and will not return to Akron Public Schools.
The use-of-force incident highlighted the push and pull between keeping schools safe and overpolicing, which some students and teachers contend happens when police officers are a constant presence in public schools.
Given the mounting threats that students and employees face at school, having officers present is a no-brainer for some. Others believe that having school resource officers, or SROs, in buildings causes more harm than good.
Employees at Akron Public Schools said the school environment can be challenging to control — but not all think police officers are the answer.
Chuck Rusinek, an East CLC social studies teacher who retired at the end of the 2023-2024 school year, supports having SROs in schools. He recalled walking into the boys’ bathroom in the spring of 2022 to see students standing on sinks and toilets. When he tried to get them back to class, he said, students cussed him out.
“There’s a lot of stuff that goes on that people don’t see, don’t realize, don’t want to know,” said Rusinek, a 25-year veteran of APS who spent 17 years at East CLC. He added that students “yelling, screaming, cussing” happened “all the time.”
Akron superintendent: ‘We need our police’
The issue of police in schools came to the forefront after SRO Zachary McCormick repeatedly hit a 16-year-old student in the head after the student tried to push past officers near the school’s entrance. The student evaded the metal detectors, then set them off when he was told to go back through them, according to an incident report. He was directed to go back through them three more times and eventually tried to go around the SRO, McCormick wrote in the report.
The student, whom Signal Akron is not identifying because he is a minor, told a reporter he was trying to bring his phone into the building. Students are not allowed to have access to their phones in school.
Editor’s note: Signal Akron made multiple requests to interview Akron Public Schools’ director of public safety, Alan Jones, as well as Superintendent Michael Robinson, for this story — neither official was made available. Signal Akron also made multiple requests through November for an interview with Akron Police Chief Brian Harding, who was also not made available. APD did make two SROs, Orlando Romine and Stephanie Colabianchi, available to speak about their roles in the schools.
McCormick wrote in the incident report that the student’s efforts to avoid going through the metal detectors made him “fearful” that the student could “escape into the school with whatever weapons he may have been hiding on his person.” He threw three punches toward the side of the student’s head to “gain physical control” of the student, he wrote. He then handcuffed him and charged him with criminal trespass, obstruction of official business and resisting arrest. The charges were later dropped.
Although it’s up to the school board to approve any new contract to keep police in schools, Akron Public Schools’ Superintendent Michael Robinson said this fall there are no plans to remove officers from the district.
“Let me just be very clear: We need our police,” Robinson said at his State of the System address Oct. 30 at the Akron Press Club.
The six-month, $600,000 contract between APS and the Akron Police Department, effective July 1, allows for 14 SROs to be employed across the district. The City of Akron is paid $55.82 per hour for each SRO deployed in the schools. For overtime hours, the rate is $78.09 — the SROs remain city employees of the Akron Police Department. The city bills the district monthly for the hours of services rendered.
The contract allows for officers in six of Akron’s nine high schools — Buchtel, East, Ellet, Firestone, Garfield and North CLCs — and all of its middle schools. SROs can also be requested for extracurricular activities at the schools listed in the contract.
The agreement specifies that SROs aren’t meant to enforce school discipline or punish student misbehavior.
“The purpose of the SRO’s involvement in school-based incidents is to build relationships with all stakeholders in the school community to provide safety and support,” the contract states.
Teachers like Rusinek think Akron schools could be improved if more officers were present. Rusinek said he’s seen officers break up fights or potential fights, but he’s also had to do so himself, particularly when officers aren’t circulating as much as he thinks they should.
The students “don’t respect the teachers enough,” Rusinek said. “What are you going to do when a kid tells you to eff off? At least if the officers were moving around, there would be a lot less issues with violence.”
But others question whether police provide safety and support or instead escalate potential conflicts.
Some officers come to school “strapped up” with a gun and a Taser, said one Akron high school teacher who has family members who served as SROs and who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal. The teacher called their demeanor “cosplay for military dudes” and said officers often don’t want to engage with students.
“It might be hard to walk into a hostile mob,” the teacher said, but some officers’ refusal to intercede in situations where fights are happening makes it harder for teachers, who sometimes have to hold students apart on their own.
“There are times you need them when they don’t step in,” the teacher said. “They have every weapon available, all the training, and they’re not the ones who shut down a scenario.”
One employee who has worked at both Garfield and Innes CLCs, the high school and middle school in the Garfield cluster, said there are times having an officer in the building would feel appropriate — like if there were an active shooter — but they believe that, more often, it’s the officers who are introducing weapons into buildings.
“As a whole, the kids don’t trust them, they don’t have a good rapport for kids, they tend to escalate a situation,” the employee said. Signal Akron is granting them anonymity because they feared reprisal for speaking to the media. “The consequences are much more dire” when law enforcement is involved, they said. Then, teenage mistakes can “get snowballed into ‘Now you’re a criminal.’”
“It’s a power struggle a lot of times and the kids lose,” the employee said. “It sucks to watch kids get in trouble at school. That’s their experience at school. I don’t feel like the solution is having random police officers who don’t know the kids well in the schools — or even any police officers.”
Pepper spray frequently used against students
SROs “add another layer of chaos” when they use weapons like pepper spray to respond to incidents, the Garfield cluster employee said.
The employee said they had been “pepper sprayed so many times at work, and I think [to myself], ‘I work in a middle school.’”
“It’s very dramatic; they bring in ambulances; kids have asthma,” the employee said. “It’s a whole big ordeal when it happens.”
Samantha Wenzel would have appreciated more of a focus on de-escalation than on use-of-force tactics on the part of an SRO when her daughter was involved in a fight at Garfield CLC earlier this year.
The 14-year-old freshman was defending her older brother in a skirmish in the cafeteria, Wenzel said, and after the fight was broken up, the teenager charged back toward the other people who were involved in the altercation. The teen was pepper sprayed, and when Wenzel got to school to pick her up, she was in handcuffs.
“It was a little traumatic for the both of us,” she said. “To sit there watching her in pain and flopping like a fish … it obviously gives a fear of [SROs] more than anything. They’re supposed to be there to help you or save you. She should’ve been supported. Instead, they allowed her to be antagonized and then they attacked her.”
In addition to the physical effects of the fight, Wenzel said the officer told her her daughter would be charged with disorderly conduct. The experience, she said, makes her think resource officers aren’t necessary.
“It seems to me they cause even more issues,” she said. “When I’m not there, I want to know that my kid’s safe, and that makes me feel that she’s not.”
Paul Achberger, an Akron police officer and SRO at East CLC for the past 11 years, said, “Pepper spray is very effective when we have groups of kids fighting.”
He said he makes sure he yells warnings before using it, and often that’s enough to disperse a crowd of onlookers and break up fights.
Tradeoff between increased security and a more punitive environment
While research shows there are some benefits to having police officers inside public schools, Lucy Sorensen, an associate professor at the University of Albany whose focus is the intersection between education and public policy, said their presence can also create a more punitive environment for some students.
“It kind of tracks with research in policing in general, in that the Black community is policed more than other communities in the country,” she said. “The same kind of happens in the school environment.”
Department of Justice statistics show Black people accounted for just over 21% of all police engagements, despite making up about 13% of the U.S. population.
Even so, Sorenson’s research shows that having an SRO in school reduces incidents of reported fighting.
But it also shows SROs don’t do much to stop school shootings or “gun-related” incidents. When an SRO is present, she said, more guns are typically found on campus — likely the result of the presence of metal detectors and officers looking for weapons.
“Having an SRO on campus means they’re engaging in more detection activities,” Sorensen said.
She also said that after students are arrested once, including at school, the likelihood of future interactions with the criminal justice system increases. Early negative experiences between students and police can impact those students in the future — even when arrests are happening for minor reasons, Sorensen said.
While SROs in Akron schools are not supposed to help building administrators enforce school rules, they do arrest and charge students in some instances.
“You’re taking someone whose root training is in law enforcement and kind of patching on this other stuff on top of that,” Sorensen said. “That’s the real potential contradiction, is that police officers aren’t, at root, trained for this ‘whole child’ approach.”
Building relationships, creating a safe school environment
Good SROs treat students as people and avoid walking around on a “power trip,” said Jerome Moss, the executive director of the Guys and Gals Community Partnership.
The job is difficult, but Moss, a former football coach who runs a mentorship program twice a week at East CLC, said successful officers put in the effort to build effective relationships.
“They greet people, they talk, they make themselves look human,” he said. “They actually go to games, they’re actually a part of the school environment in a way that makes individuals cool with them.”
Some parents, like Chris Davis, are pleased with the work resource officers do in schools.
“I can’t imagine any of the ones I’ve ever met beating a kid,” Davis said. “I appreciate them being there. … I’m definitely comfortable with them there.”
Davis sends his sons to Akron Public Schools and is also a member of the Coventry Local School District Board of Education. Coventry doesn’t have resource officers but is considering adding them, he said, after an increase in threats in the district and nationwide. The district has shut schools down “several times,” he said, and it’s tempting to have someone at the schools who’s immediately available if something goes wrong.
That level of availability fits how Stephanie Colabianchi envisions her job as an SRO. In an interview set up by the Akron Police Department with Colabianchi and Orlando Romine, an SRO at Garfield CLC, Colabianchi said whenever she’s at a school, she walks the hallways and around the perimeter to make sure everyone is safe.
Colabianchi, who floats between schools and started work as an SRO at the beginning of the school year, said in addition to securing the buildings, her priority is to ensure she connects with students and teachers alike.
Building trust is also important to Romine, an SRO for three years. He said he’s been able to do so by paying attention to students’ interests, playing sports with them and being a mentor.
“I never really wanted to go the teaching route, but I definitely want to have some type of impact on children’s lives,” Romine said.
Colabianchi said the job is most rewarding when students are comfortable enough to approach her with any issues they’re having.
Achberger, the longtime East CLC SRO, said creating those relationships can take a while, given the strained perception many people in Akron have of police. But once he builds them, they persist.
“I still stay in contact with kids who graduated years ago,” Achberger said. “… I’m kind of a last call if they need to reach out to me.”
School safety teams de-escalate situations without getting students ‘riled up’
At East CLC last month, Achberger helped shepherd students through hallways between classes, saying hello to students he saw each day. He said the relationship with students is the reason he loves the job, but he still has to do police work while in the school and has made several arrests this year, including for assault.
He also works closely with administrators and APS safety team members, whom he called “basically the security in the school.”
While SROs got mixed reviews from teachers and students at Akron Public Schools, members of the school safety team were universally praised.
Sorensen, the professor, said because security guards don’t have arrest powers and don’t carry firearms, some think they are a good alternative to SROs. Their presence can feel less threatening to students.
When police have weapons on their hips and bullet-proof vests, that can be a kind of silent escalation, said Alma Kyrah-Deblasio, a North High School teacher — especially for the student population at North that she said is already distrustful of police. Instead, security guards excel at de-escalating situations without getting students “riled up.”
“They’re respectful,” Kyrah-Deblasio said of security team members. “They do not get wild and crazy. They’re very patient and understanding with the kids, and I think that goes a long way with them.”
The Akron high school teacher said security officers are often the ones who build relationships with kids, while SROs fixate on more trivial issues.
“There’s definitely more trust with the security team,” the teacher said.
Curt Hume, the security team lead at Ellet CLC, said his relationship with students is different from those of principals, teachers and SROs.
Troubled kids, Hume said, think those adults are out to get them in trouble. But for some reason, he said, they trust that safety officers are “trying to help them out of trouble instead of getting them in trouble.”
Hume said when he wants to connect with students, he draws on his own childhood anger issues following the death of his father, a teacher, when Hume was 11. His father’s peers at Perkins Middle School looked after him, steering him in the right direction. He’s on a first-name basis with students — they call him Curt — and between his own history and his efforts to be approachable, he said students at Ellet are more likely to listen to him than to other authority figures.
“I’m doing it for these kids,” Hume said. “I can relate with them.”
Justin Dimengo, the athletic director at Ellet CLC, said students are always going to act up. “But because Curt has that relationship with them, that repertoire … they’re more likely to stop,” he said.
A senior at Firestone CLC, whom Signal Akron is choosing not to identify to keep him from being associated with the punching incident at his school, said he understood why the district might want officers present if someone had a weapon or if there was a shooting at the school. But in most cases, he said, he thought school safety officers could fill the role.
“If they’re there, why do we have police officers at our school as well?” he asked. “It’s a little bit of overkill.”
Training, patience are paramount for SROs
Other Firestone CLC students, interviewed after the punching incident at Firestone, said there were times when they appreciated having the officers in school and times where their presence made students uncomfortable.
One junior said he’d like to see officers be more proactive instead of only responding to incidents after the fact. Another junior said the officers are “necessary sometimes, but of course you don’t know when sometimes will be.” Signal Akron is not identifying the students to keep them from being associated with the incident.
“Come into the school at least with a smile,” another student said. “We already in our minds view you as a threat.”
Bonita Winston is a parent to four Firestone CLC students; she said two of them saw the October punching incident and were angry about it.
Winston said she thinks the officer’s actions were wrong, but she remains steadfast in her view that SROs belong in Akron Public Schools — even though she is friends with the mother of the student who was hit and understands her pain.
“Sadly, it’s needed. Every profession has a bad seed,” she said. “I’m sad that it happened and I’m sorry, but I am one of those people who thinks that we need officers.”
Winston said most students don’t like SROs because they’re always “checking them about their phones,” which aren’t permitted at school. She thinks the police department and the school district need to do a better job training officers who work in schools to have patience in the wake of frustrating situations.
Children and teenagers don’t like authority, she said, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need it. Kids today are “out of control,” she said, and resource officers are necessary.
“Sometimes they may save a child,” she said. “It’s not just about my child.”
Gary Estwick contributed to the reporting in this article.