Since 2021, Rural Opportunity Institute (ROI) has held monthly policy listening sessions with members of the Edgecombe and Nash County communities in eastern North Carolina. These sessions are the backbone of a community-led policy creation process. Community members identified disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline1 as a priority issue. Then, they identified and developed an innovative approach to this issue: engaging School Resource Officers (SROs) with a trauma-informed training. The training was designed by ROI resilience trainers in partnership with the Edgecombe County Sheriff’s SRO coordinator and trainer. It aimed to better inform SROs about the traumas that students could be dealing with inside and outside of school, how these traumas could manifest in their behavior within school, and how SROs could approach these behaviors in more restorative, and less punitive, ways.

This report is a continuation of ROI’s partnership with the Edgecombe County Sheriff’s Office (ECSO). It details our joint efforts to create trauma-informed security in schools, evaluating both our work so far and prospects for the future.

This report is primarily based on ROI’s qualitative baseline assessment of the existing relationship between students and administrators in two Edgecombe County Public Schools and their SROs. This assessment was conducted in the summer of 2023 and consisted of 10 interviews with students, teachers and school administrators at a middle school and a high school that were open for summer sessions. The research focused on participants’ perceptions of SROs’ roles in their school, their personal experiences with SROs, and how they felt the role of an SRO could be improved in their communities. In total, 25 people were interviewed over three weeks…