Police officers will continue their presence in Evanston/Skokie School District 65 middle schools despite a nearly $4 million deficit and mixed feelings from Evanston parents and residents.

The council voted Saturday to remove the D65 police liaison program from its list of proposed city budget cuts, which would have saved the city nearly $200,000.

For more than a decade, an Evanston Police Department officer has been assigned to each of the three D65 middle schools to head the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program for sixth-graders and to help all middle-school students form healthy relationships with law enforcement personnel, said Richard Rochelle, assistant principal of Nichols Middle School.

“The children react to police officers in a positive way and see them as friends,” Rochelle said. “They are a part of our community and help teach values to the children.”

But some residents are concerned that having officers in the schools can be detrimental to learning and can have a negative effect on children’s views on discipline.

Bennett Johnson, president of the Evanston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said having officers in schools can create a prison-like atmosphere and is not a positive factor in children’s education.

“(The presence of police officers) is subversive of and undercuts the authority of teachers,” said Johnson, a former Chicago high school teacher and probation officer in the California court system. “Kids can feel like they’re being monitored, turning schools into a place of detention rather than a place of learning.”

Evanston parent Peggy Tarr said any disciplinary issues within the schools should be dealt with by parents and teachers, who know the children better than the officers might.

“We have a whole society that always looks to police for the answers. This keeps us from looking into creative solutions to our problems,” said Tarr, who ran for alderman in April.

Tarr said the police presence is not necessarily beneficial for students, but makes adults feel more comfortable knowing that an officer is in the school in case a situation should arise.

“This doesn’t make kids have self-discipline as much as they know there are officers (in school) with the capacity to do something to them,” Tarr said.

While the officers are expected to remain in the schools as much as possible during school days, they are sometimes called into the community to help assist other officers, Rochelle said. Katherine Davis, assistant principal of Haven Middle School, said the officers are accessible when administrators need them.

Supporters of the police liaison program have different ideas of what an officer’s role is in a school environment. Rochelle said the officers help prevent crime in schools but are not meant to be a primary disciplinary force. Instead the officers are there to “form positive relationships” with students.

“If people are looking at police officers as a security force, then they’re looking at it inappropriately and misunderstanding it,” Rochelle said.

D65 board member Hecky Powell also supports the liaison program, but sees it as a proactive, rather than a reactive, measure to keep crime out of schools.

“People who oppose this need to read the papers and see what’s happening out there,” Powell said. “We’re not immune to all those things that are happening. We are an urban community. People need to get their heads out of the sand and face reality.”