National Association of Social Workers / Connecticut Chapter                        

             Cheryl Wilson, LCSW, MBA, President

 Stephen Wanczyk- Karp, LMSW, Executive Director

Testimony on Raised Bill 1095: An Act Concerning School Resource Officers

Education Committee

March 1, 2023

Submitted by: Stephen Wanczyk-Karp, LMSW

On behalf of the National Association of Social Workers, CT Chapter (NASW/CT) and the CT Alliance of School Social Workers (CASSW), we offer the following comments on bill 1095.

Lines 20- 23 calls for specifying provisions for school resource officers (SRO) duties, procedures related to restraint of a student, use of firearms and school-based arrests. We support this section of the bill as schools and students will benefit from greater clarity of these functions by the SRO.

Lines 23-26 starting at (ii) allows for schools to assign the duties of a SRO to school social workers, school counselors, psychologists, aides and other staff members who have appropriate training. NASW/CT and CASSW strongly oppose this language and urge that it be removed from the bill.

Allowing a school to assign SRO duties to a school social worker will violate the NASW Code of Ethics, Section 1.04 (a) that requires social workers to “provide services and represent themselves as competent only within the boundaries of their education, training, license, certification …”. School social workers are not trained in law enforcement, nor do they have the authority for school arrest that a school resource officer may perform. Assigning SRO duties to a school social worker leaves the school social worker open to allegations of violation of their code of ethics.

Beyond the issue of the Code of Ethics, issues of confidentiality and trust between the school social worker and the student, and the school social worker and the student’s family, would be compromised if the school social worker was to dually perform the duties of a school resource officer. The school social worker would no longer  be able to perform their duties as a school social worker if an assignment to act as an SRO is required by the school.

School social workers and school resource officers are not interchangeable professionals. We urge the Education Committee to remove the language that allows for schools to assign SRO duties to non-school resource officers.