Rick Kaufman, executive director of community relations and emergency management coordinator for Bloomington schools, spoke before a readiness exercise at Valley View Middle School. (Carlos Gonzalez, Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Starting this fall, a Bloomington police officer will be assigned to the city's three middle schools, adding to the two officers who work in the suburb's two high schools.

The move comes as Twin Cities school districts puzzle over the role police should have in schools struggling with behavior issues, drug use and sometimes violence among students. At the same time — three years after the murder of George Floyd — district decision-makers still grapple with whether law enforcement should be on their campuses.

Rick Kaufman, director of emergency management for Bloomington schools, said student behavior problems led to a recommendation from the school board to station police in the middle schools, with students in sixth through eighth grades.

"We've seen an increase in violence; we've seen an increase in student behavior that has graduated to more violent acts," he said, especially since coming back from distance learning during the COVID pandemic.

Bloomington's school liaison officers, as the district calls them, were drawn from the ranks of detectives — more experienced than some districts' school resource officers, Kaufman said.

Like the two officers who work at Jefferson and Kennedy high schools, the middle school liaison officer is meant to act as a mentor and educate students on the dangers of drugs, alcohol and vaping. Only if students pose a threat to themselves or others is an officer meant to intervene with force. Officers are not supposed to make arrests or write tickets to enforce school discipline.

School liaison officers in Bloomington don't wear full uniforms, but polo shirts and khaki pants — though they are armed. Bloomington Deputy Chief Kimberly Clauson said the recent switch to plainclothes was meant to make liaison officers more approachable.

The new middle school liaison officer will spend time at each of the three middle schools — Oak Grove, Olson Memorial and Valley View — throughout the week, Kaufman said, though they could be called away to an emergency.

"What we've seen is that when we have a school liaison officer in the schools they have that ability to create relationships," Kaufman said.

He said police are valuable to schools because they can work with families. Some families, he said, might take a warning about a child's behavior more seriously if it comes from a police officer, rather than the school principal.

"It really works here because a lot of these police officers are members of our community," and have or have had children or other relatives in Bloomington schools, Kaufman said. "They just connect very well with our students our staff and community members."

Minneapolis, St. Paul and Hopkins fully eliminated school resource officers three years ago. In St. Paul, civilian school support liaisons help staff with safety and security. Though many Minnesota school districts have police stationed in high schools, it's less common for police to patrol middle schools.

The Anoka-Hennepin district has resource officers in all six of its middle schools, said district spokesman Jim Skelly. He said police have been in district middle schools for at least a decade, and some of the larger schools — Anoka-Hennepin's six middle schools range in size from 900 students to 2,000 — have two officers.

Robbinsdale Area Schools is mulling the addition of a school resource officer to Sandburg Middle School and the Highview Alternative Program in Golden Valley. The suggestion came after two middle school boys were charged with bringing a gun to school and posing with it in the bathroom for a social media video.

Golden Valley's City Council will consider the proposal to add an officer at Sandburg at a meeting later this month, after the Police Employment, Accountability and Community Engagement Commission expressed some wariness. Some commissioners suggested unarmed community service officers or civilian security guards might be better suited to the school.

There were calls in Bloomington for cutting police from schools following Floyd's murder. But according to Kaufman, Bloomington students, staff and school families said in a series of community forums that they wanted officers in schools, as long as their roles are clearly defined.

"It just works very well for us," Clauson said. "It works to have another resource."