We can appreciate Hamilton County Commissioner David Sharpe’s desire to reallocate county money that currently pays for 27 school resource officers (SROs) to fund security officers for each of the district’s 79 schools.
He wants to know, he told the newspaper last week, “there is someone that gets up every day and their priority is ensuring that our schools are as safe as they can be.”
Optimally, every school would have an SRO, who is a trained and certified patrol deputy hired by the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office and assigned to a certain school through the HCSO’s school resource officer unit. The SROs are state certified officers, have the authority to make arrests, and have training in suicide prevention and other safety measures for children.
Security officers, on the other hand, do not come with the sanctioning of the HCSO, have no arrest authority and may be retired law enforcement officers who may be certified by the Peace Officer Standards & Training Commission but do not perform the duties of a certified law enforcement officer.
The problem, as it is in so many issues, is money.