Morgan County School District wants more school resource officers

Morgan County School District has requested that Morgan County help it fund school resource officers in all county schools. On Aug. 1 Sheriff Corey Stark presented the proposal to county commissioners.

“Since 1999 when the Columbine tragedy happened we've had this tremendous amount of people and citizens wanting more officers in schools,” Stark told the commissioners. “… On behalf of the school board that's why I'm here just starting a conversation, seeing what we can come up with and see if we can start throwing some numbers around.”

“I think the school's getting pressure from the parents as am I, but the schools will want it as well and of course the legislators, they actually passed the law last year where during school hours I have to have an officer within six minutes of any school,” Stark said.

Currently, there is a resource officer at Morgan High School which the school district pays Morgan County $30,000/year for, but the school board wants three full-time officers to be in place during the school year, with one at the high school, another covering Morgan Middle and Elementary schools and a third to cover Mountain Green Middle and Elementary schools.

The school district would come up with $150,000, an amount that would cover just the salary, benefits and a patrol car for one officer, and is asking Morgan County to fund the rest, Stark said.

“The cost of a deputy and their wages and their patrol car and getting them outfitted and benefits is about $150 000 for one,” he said.

While commissioners expressed support for the idea, in their discussion they indicated that the county might have difficulty coming up with the funds to help fund the additional officers. The only option would be to increase taxes, Commission Chair Mike Newton said.

“They want us to supply officers for their schools; I'm not opposed to that,” he said. “I would love to have an officer in every school absolutely, but the cost is very expensive. The way I see it, and we will know pretty quick when we start going through budgets, I think the only way to make that happen would be a tax increase and I'm not sure that the public would digest that very well.”

“I'm not opposed to the county sharing in the cost, but if we were talking about just the county covering everything else that's a lot for us to come up with,” Newton said. “That's a couple hundred thousand dollars. Last time we had to come up with $300,000 was the last time we increased taxes and that was a significant increase.”

Commissioners acknowledged that with the school district only utilizing these officers for nine months of the year the county could use them in the summertime and that at times they would be called away from the school to help with community policing. Those factors would need to be taken into consideration and officer coverage of after-school activities would need to be factored into those real costs, they said. Commissioner Jared Anderson suggested Stark come back to the commission with real cost projections.  

Further discussion seemed to indicate that the commissioners were willing to meet with the school board to see if some kind of equitable cost-sharing arrangement would be worked out to fund more school resource officers, if not all three. Stark said he would report back to the school board and work on gathering the figures needed to get an actual cost for the additional officers.λ