Belfast Police Chief Jeff Trafton walked into the city’s high school recently to address a schoolwide assembly. The student reaction? A standing ovation.

That may not be a typical response from teens seeing a man in blue. Belfast Area High School students had just endured a spate of bomb threats and a fire in a bathroom, for which police eventually arrested two teens. Further investigation revealed that one of the teens had five guns, one of which was reportedly in his locker at school. No wonder students were happy to see the police chief.

A federal program that paid for police officers to work in schools – usually high schools – has faded away, as have many other programs, because of the federal budget deficit. The school cop program was a component of the Clinton administration’s COPS Fast initiative, which aimed to add 100,000 more officers nationwide. Grants were provided to towns and schools to hire school resource officers. The officer would sometimes teach a class, sometimes patrol the building and grounds. The grants covered two or three years of the cost of putting the officer in the school, with the understanding that the town or school would hire the officer for permanent duty after that. When the funding dried up, many cities and towns dropped the officers.

By most accounts, though, school resource officers were a welcome addition to schools. Students and school staff felt more secure, especially in the wake of the school shootings that made news in the late 1990s. And teens learned to see law enforcement officers as people, charged with the often challenging job of upholding the law.

But it hasn’t all been placid. School boards and police chiefs wrestled with supervision – was the school principal the school cop’s boss, or was the police chief? And what sort of Big Brother atmosphere did the officer’s presence create? Would students turn in their drug-using parents? Is this a good or a bad thing?

John Rogers, director of the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, supports the concept of school resource officers. A rule of thumb is that a municipality should have 1.9 police officers for every 1,000 residents, he said. Some Maine high schools, including staff, approach 1,000, so an officer on duty is not a luxury. Rob Schwartz of the Maine Chiefs of Police Association also supports the concept, but understands that small towns may not be able to afford devoting one officer to the school.

In a climate that has government looking for a maximum return on investment of public money, hiring school resource officers in some high schools could avoid costs in diverting teens from illegal behavior.