Police in and around Schools

The 2017 TDSB School Resource Officer survey, rebuilt as data

In autumn 2017 the Toronto District School Board surveyed students, staff and parents at the 45 secondary schools that had a School Resource Officer, then voted to end the programme. This site reconstructs the published survey results as an analysable dataset: 255 response rows across 52 questions and three surveys, with the counts the report printed alongside the percentages.
This rebuild corrects the earlier version of this page. Appendix B of the report is a set of page images, so the first version of this site was transcribed by eye and carried errors — among them staff “very uncomfortable” shown as 1.2% when the report says 12.2%, and the whole of the staff visibility item. Every figure here is now generated from data/, which is checked two ways: each printed count must reproduce its printed percentage, and the nine raw counts quoted in the report’s own summary must match the appendix tables. Both checks pass.

Start here

Survey data — all 52 questions, grouped by topic, with counts, percentages and the exact wording each survey used.

Analysis — what marginals alone can and cannot support: the structure of “Not Sure”, what contact explains, where the three surveys really disagree, and why the race-by-outcome pattern is not recoverable from the published tables.

Student voice — the 94 focus-group comments published in Appendix C.

Three things the data show

Most students had no contact and no view. 78.6% never interacted with the officer; 46.2% could not say what the officer did; 53.4% were unsure whether the officer was trustworthy. Uncertainty, not disapproval, is the largest feature of the student survey.

Contact, not role, explains the student–staff gap. Among those who actually interacted, students and staff report discomfort at the same rate — 20.3% each. The apparent gap in the headline numbers comes from who had contact at all.

Counts and rates tell different stories. 14.7% of students agreed the officer made them feel targeted or watched. The same answer is 2,207 students. The report uses percentages for approval and counts for harm.

The data

Tidy CSVs, one row per response option, plus question metadata, collapsed summaries, the consultation schedule and the focus-group quotes.

sro_responses.csv sro_questions.csv sro_summary.csv sro_focus_group_quotes.csv sro_focus_groups.csv sro_community_meetings.csv sro_context.csv

Source and caveats

TDSB, School Resource Officer Program Review, report 11-17-3269, Planning and Priorities Committee, 15 November 2017. Fieldwork ran 18 September to 25 October 2017, while the programme was suspended pending the review — so every response is retrospective.

The surveys were voluntary and anonymous, administered in schools that had an officer. They are not a probability sample of TDSB students, so percentages describe respondents, not the student body. Item bases vary from 13,699 to 15,444 for students. “Not Sure” and “Don’t know” are kept as their own categories rather than dropped.

Original TDSB report (PDF)