Employees of rural Boone County school districts are nearing the end of their training to become reserve deputies for the sheriff’s office, but the school boards still have to decide whether they want to allow employees to carry firearms on campus.
“If schools choose to allow them to be a reserve school resource officer in their school, they’ll have that opportunity,” Boone County Sheriff Mike Moore said.
Three employees of the Omaha School District volunteered for the reserve-deputy training program, Superintendent Jerry Parrett said. If they finish all components of the program and become deputies, Parrett anticipates that they will enhance the district’s security, especially since the 415-student school district does not have a school resource police officer.
“The sheriff’s office is a good 30 to 40 minutes away from getting to our campus,” Parrett said. “In Boone County, every school does have a resource officer but us. This is a way we can do it.”
A class of 16 training to be reserve deputies in Boone County included 10 employees from four school districts, Moore said. They recently finished a 110-hour training course that started in October, but they still have to pass psychological and physical exams. Those who plan to work in schools also have “active shooter” training and weapons retention training to complete.
Lawmakers, educators and law enforcement agencies across the nation took a heightened interest in securing campuses after the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six staff members. In 2013, 29 state legislatures, including Arkansas’, passed 44 bills related to school safety, according to a 2014 report from the Education Commission of the states. Nine states passed 11 bills amending or creating policies that regulate the presence of firearms or weapons on school grounds, including two bills specifically focused on higher education campuses.
The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers opposed proposals in states to arm teachers.
Some school superintendents in the state sought a greater armed presence on campuses but said they couldn’t afford to pay private security agencies or full-time law enforcement officers. A few districts in Arkansas had used the state’s security-guard laws to arm staff members, and at least one district had done so since the late 1990s. The Clarksville School District in Johnson County drew national attention last summer for its plans to commission about 20 employees, including some teachers, as armed security guards.
An Aug. 1 opinion by Attorney General Dustin McDaniel said school districts could not use the state’s security-guard law to permit employees to carry weapons on campuses. Subsequently, the Arkansas Board of Private Investigators and Private Security Agencies in September voted to allow previously commissioned school employees to remain private security guards for two years, but it said it would not approve any new commissions. Training school employees as reserve deputies became another option for districts to have an armed presence on campus, Moore said. He proposed the idea to rural school districts in Boone County as one option for improving the security of their campuses.
Clarksville, a district of 2,600 students in Johnson County, is nearing the end of its first year of having about 20 school employees carry concealed guns as security guards for four campuses, Superintendent David Hopkins said. The security guards are in addition to the armed school resource police officers also in place in the district. “I believe you need armed personnel,” he said. “You’ve got to be able to respond.”
The district’s standard-operating procedures call for employees who also are security guards to carry their firearms under their clothing and not to touch the weapons unless an emergency occurs, he said. If team members must remove their firearms while at work, they have a place on campus with a locked door and a gun safe where they can do so, Hopkins said.
All team members wear a security badge alongside their school identification, Hopkins said. Team members continue to train every six months and must achieve a certain score at a firearm-requalification session to continue, Hopkins said.
Hopkins would prefer to have full-time dedicated security officers who are trained in law enforcement.
“That’s a lot to ask and a lot of money tied up in it,” Hopkins said. “And you wouldn’t just have one.”
In the Alpena School District in Boone County, the idea of having a teacher as a reserve deputy on campus has raised questions for the School Board, including about children’s supervision if their teacher must leave to respond to an emergency, Superintendent Andrea Martin said.
The district has given a higher priority to implementing other safety measures, Martin said. The district has a Boone County sheriff’s reserve deputy, Travis Conner, on campus. He’s also the district’s technology director.
School resource police officer Cameron Pace began working for the Lead Hill School District last week, Lead Hill School Board President Troy Burleson said. School district employees also have been training on responding to a gunman on campus.
Three employees of the Lead Hill School District also are in the reserve-deputy training program, but Burleson said the School Board will wait until they are certified to make final decisions on whether to have them act in that role on campus. In Valley Springs, Judy Green, the district’s curriculum and testing coordinator, is learning about the reserve-deputy program as she prepares to become superintendent for the 2014-15 school year. She supports the concept, she said.
If all complete the training, the district would have four trained reserve deputies, plus a school resource officer, on the small but spread-out campus.
“When you read and research school violence, it happens in seconds, not minutes,” Green said. “I feel very fortunate and comfortable with them on my campus.”
Last school year, Parrett of the Omaha School District remembers calling the sheriff’s office to respond to a drunken parent who was on school grounds. By the time a deputy arrived 30 minutes later, Parrett had persuaded the parent to leave but was concerned about the parent’s ability to safely drive.
A reserve deputy could have detained the parent until a sheriff’s deputy arrived, he said.
Parrett is developing procedures for having reserve deputies on campus and plans to notify parents of their presence through the district’s website, a weekly newsletter and by posting signs.
Reserve deputies already help monitor events that attract large crowds, such as basketball games, Parrett said.
“It brings about a sense of security and safety, not only for the administration, it also does for the public, too,” Parrett said. “I feel like that same sense of security and safety is going to be applied to the personnel we have on campus.”