PENDLETON — A bill introduced in the Oregon Legislature is seeking to end police contracts with schools, but the Pendleton School Board is taking action to preserve its relationship with the local police department.

The board unanimously voted on Monday, Feb. 8, to send a letter to the Legislature supporting its school resource officer program after hearing a presentation from Police Chief Chuck Byram and Lance Zaugg, the officer assigned to the district. School board chair Debbie McBee said the district and police department have avoided the controversies that have plagued other districts.

“We really have a strong police department with no major tension,” she said.

Zaugg told the board that he prefers a collaborative approach with students, parents and staff. In addition to acting as a law enforcement officer and first responder, Zaugg said he also provides other services like student mentorship and administrative assistance. The position was first established in 1986 as the “youth services officer,” with Zaugg serving as the school resource officer since 2016.

In the wake of the George Floyd protests over summer 2020, student groups in the Portland metro area and Salem pushed their districts to drop school resource officer programs, arguing that police interactions disproportionately impacted students of color and led to incarceration. In June 2020, Portland Public Schools announced it was withdrawing police officers from its high schools.

“Black students represent 31% of school-related arrests nationwide, according to the American Civil Liberties Union,” the Salem Statesman-Journal reported. “They also are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers. And students who are suspended or expelled, according to the ACLU, are nearly three times more likely to be in contact with the juvenile justice system the following year.”

But in a follow-up report, Byram said concerns over the discriminatory impact of school resource officers isn’t reflective of the work done by Zaugg.

Byram wrote that during Zaugg’s tenure, he has responded to more than 1,000 calls for service, and only about 1 in 10 resulted in an enforcement action, and in 2018 and 2019, none resulted in a student lodged in juvenile detention.

Across those two years, more than 70% of the students who received citations were white, which is a higher share than the school population. The proportion of Latino students cited was slightly lower than their school population, while American Indian citations were roughly in line with their share of the student body. Of the citations connected to American Indian students, four were given to the same student in the same school year for marijuana-related offenses.

Six percent of Zaugg’s citations went to Black students in a district where less than 1% of students identify as Black.

“One could make the argument that the number for Black students is disproportionate, but when you look at the actual citations issued (4), that is too small a sample size to be statistically significant,” Byram wrote. “However, one could also make that argument for white students as well.”

Senate Bill 238, the legislation that would effectively ban school contracts with law enforcement, has been referred to the Senate Education Committee.