create enemies, I’m going to do it on behalf of these kids who don’t have anybody out here to fight for them.”
Reimagining SROs For a few school districts across the country, responding to the Black Lives Matter movement has meant severing ties with local police departments. But at KCPS, School Resource Officers—SROs—are a crucial part of the web keeping students feeling safe and welcome at school. Since 2015, Bedell has sat on the board for the National Association of School Resource Officers (NASRO), the largest school policing organization in the country. He says he’s “a huge supporter of security officers and SROs in schools”— as long as they’re properly trained. “SROs are individuals who have been trained specifically to serve in our schools,” he explains. “We need to decouple that from the larger conversation about police reform. There needs to be broad and deep reform of policing, not just in Kansas City, but across the nation. All those issues around how police are trained, how they’re equipped, all those kinds of issues—that’s separate from the fact that we have individual SROs who are very high-quality.” At KCPS, SROs wear khakis and polo shirts instead of traditional police uniforms; “I want them looking like they’re a part of the school,” Bedell says. They also have a clearly defined role—and it’s not disciplinary. “As a superintendent, my job was to let everyone know that it’s not the responsibility of SROs to go into a classroom and address a kid who has their head down,” he says. “Their job is to be visible, to give everybody a sense of safety, a sense that we’re not going to have a school shooting on our campus.” For SROs to maintain that role, administrators and teachers need training as well. “You don’t call an officer to come and handle a routine disciplinary infraction,” says Bedell. “That’s where you cross the line and start to have a lot of issues.” Just like the rest of the staff, SROs receive trauma-informed training, conflict resolution training, and implicit bias training. They travel to NASRO’s annual conference to get what Bedell calls “the best professional development available in this country,” with sessions on developing successful relationships with diverse students, becoming aware of implicit biases, and more. SROs are also encouraged to build relationships with the 12
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district’s kids. Many participate in mentoring or coaching sports. And thanks in large part to this training and relationship building, KCPS is “one of the safest school districts in the area,” Bedell tells us. “We also haven’t had to deal with local or national media because SROs are inappropriately handling students.” At KCPS, SROs aren’t meant to be a source of fear; they’re an integral part of the district’s mission to help kids feel a sense of safety and belonging.
The G.O.A.T. Decades removed from the teenager who shot hoops on that Rochester ice rink, Bedell hasn’t forgotten his first love: basketball. The skills he learned on the court, he tells us, helped make him the successful superintendent he is today. “Basketball created a leader,” he says. “I ended up becoming a team in college at a very early age. It taught me how to collaborate with people, work with people, treat people right. It’s a very influential piece of my life, and even at the age of 46, I still use it as a way to bond and connect with the community at large. That’s what works for me.” In just four short years, Bedell has won the trust of the Kansas City community, trust that allows him to accomplish the district’s important equity work successfully. He earned that confidence through several different avenues—for example, being the first superintendent in district history to have a child graduate from KCPS. But ultimately, much of the community’s faith in Bedell comes from something more personal: he plays ball with them. “I go into some tough neighborhoods and play pickup games—things that a superintendent has never done,” he says. “That has allowed me to get unprecedented buy-in, because most people in the community just have their guards up with superintendents.” Before COVID-19 hit, Bedell held community open gyms on Saturdays. ”I would invite the community into one of our high schools and we’d play ball,” he says. “It’s faculty, it’s staff, it’s police officers, it’s alumni, it’s current students—and I feel like it is the most wonderful thing that we’ve been able to do.” In the wake of the virus, though, these and other community-building events are on hold, and the separation is taking a toll on the superintendent. “It’s very depressing,” he told us honestly. “Not being able to see a lot of our kids, connect with them, encourage them—it’s been hard. It’s been very hard.” But Bedell is hopeful that before too long, he’ll be shooting