LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A Louisville lawmaker who wants Jefferson County Public Schools to have school resource officers at every school campus called the security plan passed Thursday “a great first step.”
The Jefferson County Board of Education unanimously approved a nearly $7.3 million budget for the program and job descriptions for safety administrators and officers during a special meeting Thursday.
The board’s vote authorizes JCPS to hire 66 school-based safety administrators and 30 armed officers to cover groups of schools in designated zones. Fifteen of those officers would be reassigned security monitors.
State Rep. Kevin Bratcher, R-Louisville, sponsored legislation meant to require school resource officers to work on-site at school campuses by August, saying that is the original intent of the School Safety and Resiliency Act passed into law in 2019. JCPS officials, including General Counsel Kevin Brown, said the district’s security plan does not violate state law because every JCPS school will have an assigned officer.
Bratcher told WDRB News in an interview Friday that the JCPS board “did a great job last night” in passing a school safety plan even if it didn’t go as far as he’d like. He is crafting revisions to House Bill 63 that would direct school districts to make progress toward having officers at every school campus rather than setting a hard deadline.
HB 63 was slated for a hearing in the House Education Committee this week, but Bratcher had it pulled from consideration.
“Many school systems in the state have the shortage of sworn officers just like JCPS does,” he said. “However, they are making progress toward the goal. And after last night, you can say JCPS is making progress toward the goal, too.”
Bratcher said he has received “unbelievable amounts” of correspondence from teachers and school staff on the subject.
“They say, 'Please don't give up on this. We need security in the schools,'” he said. "... We need to have an SRO in every campus. That's really just my rallying cry."
Board members heralded the district’s safety plan as a compromise after school resource officers departed JCPS before the start of the 2019-20 school year. Seventeen Louisville Metro Police officers were pulled from schools because of city budget cuts, and contracts with other local law enforcement agencies for 11 other officers were not approved by a split school board.
Board member Linda Duncan, who represents District 5, shared her reservations about having safety officers primarily working out of their vehicles rather than in schools.
“It’s not enough for officers to be blocks away if a violent event starts to take place in a school,” she said. “It’s not enough. They need to be steps away, not blocks away.”
Duncan, who also worried about coverage for elementary schools under the plan, said she hoped the new security program at JCPS will be a starting point for future school boards to build upon. Still, she called Thursday’s unanimous vote “a step forward.”
“I hope over time we're able to expand these numbers so that we reduce the numbers of schools that officers are assigned to so that they can get to them more quickly,” Duncan said.
Tammy Berlin, vice president of the Jefferson County Teachers Association, said the union representing JCPS teachers supported the district’s decision to hire its own security officers to they can be trained and held accountable as employees.
“Our members tell us that there are sometimes dangerous situations that happen outside of the school building and then that spills over inside the school,” Berlin said. “We fell like there needs to be some sort of elevated security in situations like that.”
Berlin said opinions on whether school safety officers should work inside schools were split within JCTA membership.
Many JCPS teachers have seen “more intense” student behavior issues since district classrooms reopened after closing for more than a year during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said.
“We were getting a lot of people saying that they felt like they needed more security in the buildings, so whether having security officers as opposed to SROs will alleviate that for members remains to be seen,” Berlin said. “We’ll see how they feel about it once it’s in place.”
Superintendent Marty Pollio told reporters Thursday that he hoped to have school safety administrators in place by the start of the 2022-23 school year and safety officers hired and trained as quickly as possible.
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