LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio is “very disappointed” that the drive-by shooting death of 16-year-old Tyree Smith at a bus top last week is being used as a catalyst for some to push for the district to hire its own school resource officers, he said Tuesday.
Pollio’s comments come a day after Louisville Metro Police Chief Erika Shields reiterated her call for Kentucky’s largest school district to create an internal force of trained law enforcement officers.
Pollio said he will discuss the matter with the Jefferson County Board of Education, which has authority to create such a security team. Pollio, board members and other stakeholders had talked about possible policies governing an internal team of school security officers before the COVID-19 pandemic sidelined those discussions.
“I’m very disappointed that one of our children, a student in JCPS, was shot and killed — an innocent young man was shot and killed on the street corner in Louisville, Kentucky, waiting for the school bus — and the argument we are having right now is about school resource officers,” Pollio told reporters. “... We have no idea whether that would have had impact on this specific scenario or not.”
Kentucky’s largest school district has been without school resource officers since LMPD pulled 17 officers from schools because of budget constraints and contracts with other law enforcement agencies for 11 officers were not approved by the board.
Shields said in a video posted by LMPD on Twitter that school resource officers can help make Louisville a safer community and that such officers can provide local police “information that we need to know what's going to come back into our communities.”
“The violence that we’re seeing being committed in the communities does not end when the child gets on the bus and goes off to school for the day,” she said. “It goes into the schools.”
Pollio agreed that school security officers should be considered at JCPS, but he challenged others to explore the “deeper root causes to these problems and solutions that we can have as a community.”
“Maybe that’s a conversation we should have, but we’ve got to have a lot more conversations than just about school resource officers,” he said.
Violent behavior at JCPS is declining so far this school year, Pollio said. Fighting incidents have dropped more than 45 percent compared to the first 30 days of the 2019-20 school year, he said. Student restraints are down about 70 percent and suspensions have declined by about 25 percent in that timeframe, he said.
He also expressed concern about hiring an internal security force as JCPS and law enforcement agencies face staffing issues. Hiring a school resource officer for every school in the 155-school district would be “a big challenge,” he said.
“That has to go into this discussion, to say is it even possible to do that,” Pollio said. “So yeah, that is a real concern.”
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