Should Student Safety be a Law Enforcement or Education Issue?

Over the past few weeks, there has been much debate over efforts to provide maximum security in Manatee County elementary schools within the resources available. The dialog has been mired down in the politics of a dysfunctional school board, along with the other political lines that such a subject inherently crosses. However, I think the real question this fiasco has raised is whether security and policing in our schools should be a function of our educational system in the first place, when law enforcement seems much better equipped to make such decisions.

Some background: The district, like most in Florida, has used local LEOs to provide a law enforcement, security and what you might call a community relations presence in many of its schools. In Manatee's case, it's primarily been deputies from the Manatee County Sheriff's Office in the role of “School Resource Officers.”

At one point in the recent recession, the district's budget (once approaching a billion dollars annually) was nearly cut in half. What started as a series of accounting problems led to further shortfalls, until it was eventually discovered that systemic misuse and shell-gaming of district funds had been papering over upward of $30 million in fiscal peril. School Resource Officers were among the many cutbacks, compounded by the MCSO ending some cost sharing agreements on the SROs and in the end, the elementary schools were left with the smallest presence. 

Fast forward through multiple years of budget recovery, at which point the new administration under Superintendent Rick Mills announced the first positive fund balance and surplus in four years. With the district back on track fiscally, one of the first orders of business was to decide which financially-beleaguered areas of the budget to address first. Mills and his team, eager to build trust with a community wary of financial shenanigans, wanted maximum public input and held a series of public forums and surveys as to help discover which areas the taxpayers found most pressing.

Keeping students safe was far and away the most popular response at the top of the list. Mills and company responded with a series of workshops, meetings and the formation of a committee, then came forward with a plan to put armed security guards in every elementary school in the district (click here to view the district's timeline on the process). Bedlam ensued.

The primary reason for armed security guards over local law enforcement was the realities of cost and allocation. For the $1 million available each year, the district could put an armed guard in every elementary school or seven Sheriff's Deputies rotating between 30-plus schools for a few hours every few days. The administration felt that the former would do more in terms of making sure that a maximum amount of safety was provided per dollar spent, and I think it's hard to argue with that if you feel that such a presence is essential.

So where did things get mucked up? At first, there were obvious political machinations between various factions on the board. I wrote more about that in a column here. Then there were relationships with various police departments. The City of Holmes Beach PD had been providing Anna Maria Island Elementary with a School Resource Officer, and a SAC member from that school came to a board meeting suggesting that the district cover some of the cost, so that they could continue to do so. Board member Dave Miner jumped all over the issue, pledging his support. The police chief contacted the district next asking for help. The board approved paying roughly half the cost of the SRO, about the same as one of the armed guards or “Community Security Officers” would have cost.

As the school district was moving forward with their plan for rolling out the CSOs, Palmetto Police Chief Rick Wells committed to providing an SRO in much the same fashion and said he hoped the district would give the PPD the same deal as Holmes Beach. Then you had a legal question raised, as to whether state statutes dating back to the mid-'90s did or did not allow for the use of non-law enforcement officers to be armed in the schools. The superintendent requested an opinion from the Florida Attorney General's office, while deciding to introduce the CSOs in an unarmed capacity while it was sorted out. Now there's a Sunshine suit against the district on the CSO bidding process, making it even more likely that program will be scrapped.

Now let's look at the political realities of this situation. In terms of elected officials, you have five school board members on a deeply-divided board who have managed to turn just about every issue that comes before them into a political quagmire. You have an elected Sheriff who would obviously prefer that SROs continue to be under his purview and has voiced concerns over the CSOs and a preference for replacing them with a handful of deputies shared among the schools. You have that Sheriff's son, who is a state representative and has been trying unsuccessfully to get a bill passed to arm certain teachers and school employees (for the record, his father doesn't think that's a good idea either), then you have an elected State Attorney, Ed Brodsky, who has close political ties to several of the aforementioned parties and would be in the position to decide whether to pursue the matter legally. I don't think it's hyperbole to describe the situation as an ugly mess.

Now, I've already stated that I'd rather see the million dollars a year go into the classrooms. I'd rather extra teacher's aides and reading coaches than armed guards or shared SROs, and I think that there's a good argument that more safety can be achieved in one time investments in enhancing the physical security of school infrastructure by things like installing security doors and creating master lock down capability. I've explained why in a previous column. But what's starting to become more and more clear to me is that we're having the wrong debate, while approaching the issue in the most convoluted manner possible. If this is indeed a law enforcement issue, then why are we having it in the scope of public education dollars?

Nothing better illustrates this point than the various levels of commitment in the different areas of the county. Obviously, the district is in a position where they must try to allocate resources evenly. If they put deputies in certain schools and not others because they deem them more necessary in those locations and resources are limited, what happens if tragedy strikes in the least expected place? And are those even things school administrators are best suited to decide in the first place?

It would seem to me that this is really an issue for each community to approach from a perspective of how to best allocate their law enforcement resources to best protect and serve their residents, whether they are people driving on the roads, owners operating their business, the guy walking down the street or students and teachers in our schools. Instead of having the long-way-around-the-barn policy of taking school district tax revenues and paying them back into law enforcement (or security) and deciding how to best deploy them, take that element of local governance completely out of their domain. Let's have that conversation at the county and city levels in terms of, this is how much money we have to spend on your protection, where is it best spent?

It makes a lot more sense to frame the question as, we have X number of police officers, do we want to assign X number of them in the schools if it means that many less on the streets, and do we need to increase spending on law enforcement to get the adequate number overall? than to make decisions on how many deputies and/or armed guards come out of our public education spending.

There's also a lot less politics to it. Putting a school administration (or board) in charge of a law enforcement function seems a recipe for disaster. You're asking them to make a rational decision on a highly emotional issue, in which they have had no training and should not be expected to have expertise. Meanwhile, you have an elected, constitutional officer who is the expert on the subject, and several other professionals (the cities' police chiefs) who spend their careers making exactly those sort of decisions. But it doesn't work if the school district has to be responsible for the purse string end, while being pulled from every direction by all of the various and sometimes competing interests on the law enforcement/security side.

I can envision this conversation being much more fruitful if the Cities of Palmetto, Bradenton and Holmes Beach, their councils and police chiefs were having it for the schools within their respective city's limit; Sheriff Steube was having it with the Manatee Board of County Commissioners for those in the county at their budget meeting, and the citizens of all those different communities were lobbying their respective officials for the solutions that they feel best fit their community's specific needs.

The money is ultimately coming from the same pot – taxes and grants – so let's pay it in the most direct manner possible. Our public school system should be concerning itself with the education of our children – a focus that has surely been hindered by this political football, which has already taken up far too much of their time and energy. Let's charge the law enforcement experts with keeping students and teachers safe and making the case for the tax dollars to do so. This should be a question of cops here or cops there, not tasers or textbooks.

Dennis Maley's column appears every Thursday and Sunday in The Bradenton Times. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. Click here to visit his column archive. Click here to go to his bio page. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook.