Abstract:
Growing numbers of districts employ school resource officers to patrol school
hallways, often with little or no training in working with youth (ALCU, 2009). As a
result, children are far more likely to be subject to school-based arrests—the majority of
which are for nonviolent offenses, such as disruptive behavior—than they were a
generation ago (ALCU, 2009). Measures of delinquency are vast, and this paper uses a
first arrest event as a proxy measure for delinquency in the age of reliance on School-
Resource Officers rather than teacher and administrators for disciplinary purposes. The
effects of first arrest on school performance, measured as GPA and graduation status are
examined in this paper.
