Private schools, like in Wisconsin shooting, are responsible for their security. Here’s how they try to protect students

By Nicole Chavez, CNN

(CNN) — When a student carried out a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School this week, there was no school resource officer on site. And when six people were killed last year at another private Christian school in Nashville, there wasn’t one either.

While school resource officers are not the only way to secure a school, and best practices to keep students safe on campus are similar among all schools in the United States, experts told CNN it can be challenging for some private schools to cover their security costs.

“Rarely do we see a circumstance where a private school is able to house a school resource officer and that’s for a variety of reasons. It’s something the private school would have to self-fund,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, a nonprofit group of school-based security professionals.

Nearly 5 million students attended more than 29,000 private schools in the 2021-2022 school year, according to data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Private schools function outside the local jurisdiction and for the most part, they don’t receive public funds outside the taxpayer dollars that some states have made available to help some students attend private schools – a trend that has grown in recent years.

Abundant Life Christian School – the small, private school in Madison, Wisconsin, where two people were killed Monday and six others were injured – has several security measures in place, and has received training and a grant from the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s Office of School Safety, said Barbara Wiers, the school’s director of elementary & school relations.

“We do not have metal detectors, but we do have a number of security protocols in place,” Wiers said in a news briefing earlier this week.

“The students are aware that there are cameras in the building, and we do monitor those regularly in the offices so that we know what is happening in the hallways,” Wiers added.

Like at Abundant Life Christian School, no public schools in Madison have school resource officers. In 2020, the Madison School Board voted to remove them from its schools, who were city police officers, said Stephanie Fyer, a Madison Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman.

The move came after social justice groups and students advocated for years to have police free schools, citing the potential for the criminalization of students of color. Madison joined cities like Minneapolis and Portland, which severed ties with local law enforcement or reduced the presence of officers in schools in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

But other places across the US have instead pushed for more school resource officers at both public and private schools, usually after high-profile school shootings.

Last year, the deadly shooting that took the lives of three children and three adults at The Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, renewed the debate over how to best protect students and led to the approval of millions in state funds to support both Tennessee public and private schools.

Those funds included $140 million to employ one “full-time, armed” school resource officer at every public school in the state, $14 million to private schools to enhance security, and a pilot grant for public charter, private and church-related schools to purchase mobile panic alert systems.

In a report released this month, the Tennessee Department of Education said all funds to non-public schools were allocated to 346 institutions in the state. The top four categories describing how the funds are being utilized are “access control, surveillance, window film, and communications equipment,” the report said.

Months after the Nashville shooting, police in Collegedale – located about 150 miles southeast – hired the department’s first school resource officer and assigned them to a K-12 Christian private school.

“Since announcing the creation of this position I’ve received countless phone calls from agencies across the state wanting to know how they could follow our example in creating a school resource officer position for their private schools,” Collegedale Police Chief Jack Sapp said in a statement.

In New York City, lawmakers have been discussing a proposal that would allow small private schools to be reimbursed by the city for the cost of security guard services.

“It doesn’t matter what type of school their kids attend, public or private, every New York City parent deserves the peace of mind that comes with knowing their children are safe while in school. That’s non-negotiable. My bill will make this happen,” Councilmember Justin Brannan, the bill’s sponsor, wrote in a post in X.

Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said private schools employ off-duty law enforcement officers contrary to public schools, where the officers’ main job assignment is the school.

“If you will, an officer who works at night may go and work at a private school during the day because it would be an off–duty assignment,” Canady said.

In addition to the funding challenges, private schools may also be impacted by the ongoing nationwide recruiting crisis for law enforcement.

“A lot of agencies are already short in terms of having the number of officers they need to properly protect the community and now a private school is going to be competing against that,” Canady said.

Guy Grace, chairman of Partner Alliance for Safer Schools, suggested private school officials focus on measures that won’t cost money but are highly effective in making students safe.

“It’s giving the appropriate training to the staff and the students on how to deal with those situations, simple things like how to lock doors, what to do if there is an attack on our facility, what to do if there’s a tornado or a weather emergency,” Grace said.

Even if schools invest in costly security measures, like technology or security guards, Grace said not having basic processes in place could make them “lose out.”

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