After 17 students and staffers were shot to death in last month’s high school massacre in Florida, President Trump suggested that arming weapons-savvy teachers and other employees could head off such atrocities. Among the places the idea gained traction was Florida, where lawmakers voted to spend more money on armed school security officers.

But in one of the Bay Area’s biggest school districts, officials are going in the opposite direction — taking a serious look at removing armed law enforcement officers from campuses.

The West Contra Costa Unified School District encompasses 54 schools in Richmond and surrounding cities. In November, the district’s board voted to end the suspension and expulsion of any of the district’s 29,000 students for nonviolent incidents. It also convened a task force to recommend by the end of the year whether to phase out school resource officers — police who are posted at campuses.

The five-member board suggested that a police presence at schools contributes to a “school-to-prison pipeline.” That outraged law enforcement officials, who believe their presence on campus is crucial for community policing and building relationships with youths.

District Superintendent Matt Duffy said the school board feared that having armed officers on campuses runs the risk of creating “more punitive environments” and might “more likely lead to arrests.” The task force is trying to sort out such issues, he said.

“We just need to dig a little deeper to make sure we understand how the (school resource officers) are being utilized,” Duffy said.

The district pays $2.5 million a year for 11 school resource officers, who rotate shifts at middle and high schools. Duffy said a re-evaluation doesn’t necessarily mean that officers will be removed from campuses, but school board member Mister Phillips argued that removal is exactly the district’s intention.

“Some people think they don’t contribute to a positive climate, and I think others think that they’re part of the school-to-prison pipeline, and others believe that communities of color are overly policed,” Phillips said. “In the current climate that we have with the shootings that have gone on around the country, with issues that we’ve had in our own district, I think that it would be foolish to eliminate school resource officers.”

Phillips voted for the proposal to look at removing school resource officers because it was attached to the elimination of suspensions and expulsions for nonviolent incidents, which disproportionately affect African American and Latino students, he said.

In 2016 and 2017, there were 78 juvenile arrests initiated by school resource officers in West Contra Costa schools. Sixteen of those were for assault, while most of the rest were for lesser crimes such as theft, trespassing, disturbing the peace and possessing marijuana, according to the Bay Area Legal Aid, which compiled the data from police departments in the district.

One of the arrests involved a seventh-grader who brought a gun to Pinole Middle School in February 2017. No injuries were reported.

“Some people would ask, ‘When we need the police, can’t we just call the police and they come?’ Why do we have to pay for an officer to be full time?” Duffy said. “That is really the question that we are digging into.”

Lillian Chen, a youth justice attorney at Bay Area Legal Aid, said the district should spend its money on teacher training, more counselors and mental health professionals, and providing more resources to the wellness centers on campuses.

“We are focusing on emotional safety as well as physical safety,” said Chen, whose organization helped craft the ban on suspensions and expulsions. “When emotional safety is at threat, that leads to physical safety being threatened.

“If you have the positive support at school like mental health and social workers to focus on prevention and intervention, you’ll see the suspensions and arrests go down.”

School board member Tom Panas said it was too early to say whether resource officers would be pulled off campuses.

“I don’t know who’s driving the narrative that this is some kind of an effort to remove all of the school resource officers from the school,” Panas said. “When people show me some data, I can start to form some opinions and start asking some questions.”

Officials in some of the cities in the district have banded together with law enforcement to fight the idea.

“Officers participate in our career day and our active shooter training — they mentor kids,” Hercules Mayor Chris Kelley said. “So, this is absolutely critical for us. If we didn’t have these officers building these relationships, I don’t know what would happen.”

El Cerrito Mayor Gabriel Quinto said the presence of school resource officers helped curb gang violence in his city’s schools.

“We need to remember why they were put there in the first place, and that is to make sure that our students are safe,” he said.

Phillip Johnson, the principal of Kennedy High School in Richmond and a former police officer, said school resource officers allow for an immediate response if there’s an incident on campus.

“Just based on what happened in Florida, I think that there’s a strong need for school resource officers to be on campus,” Johnson said. “And I think that most of our teachers feel safer when we have officers here.”

In December, police chiefs for all of the cities within the West Contra Costa district — El Cerrito, Pinole, Hercules, San Pablo and Richmond — wrote a sharply worded letter to Duffy expressing concerns that law enforcement wasn’t consulted in the decision to re-evaluate the program.

“We are disappointed that, despite our collective and individual beliefs that we were collaborating partners with the district on these programs, we were left out of discussions that led to the board’s decision point,” they wrote.

Richmond Police Chief Allwyn Brown said he hasn’t heard back from Duffy. The superintendent said he had met instead with “all the city managers that all the chiefs report to.”

Brown said the role of uniformed officers on campus often is misconstrued.

“It’s not about enforcing laws,” Brown said. “It’s primarily about being good mentors and good role models for kids from all backgrounds.”

Richmond school resource officer Gary Lewis said he recently received a stack of notes from students at Sylvester Greenwood Academy, where he’s stationed.

“A lot of them say, ‘Thank you for being here — we actually feel safe,’” Lewis said. “I always say, ‘I’m here to motivate you, to counsel you, whatever you may need, if you want to sit down and talk.’”

Even as it considers phasing out resource officers, the West Contra Costa district decided to bring in a retired Richmond police lieutenant last week to evaluate school safety procedures.

Former Lt. Michael Booker was a school resource officer in the district for seven years. He said that such officers are “an important piece” for school safety and that if they’re removed the district will have a security hole to fill.

“The question would be moving forward,” Booker said. “How is that going to work? That would be a question for the superintendent. But I do believe that there is a place for school resource officers.”