MAYFLOWER — Members of the Mayflower School Board voted unanimously Monday night to enter an agreement with the city to hire a full-time school resource officer.
“The safety argument for the students was very strong,” said John Gray, Mayflower School District superintendent.
Now the Mayflower City Council has to approve the officer, he said.
Gray said the district would split the $40,000 cost with the city — the school would pay $10,000 a semester, Gray said.
The district is having a money crunch because of a decrease in state funding tied to declining enrollment. Gray said in an earlier interview that enrollment has declined by 47 students since the city’s 2014 tornado, and hadn’t fully recovered from the Exxon-pipeline oil spill the year before.
“By making a decision [about the officer] early, it’ll be in time to get it in our budget process so we can see what we can afford and not afford,” Gray said. For example, the high school is scheduled to buy a new copier, but the existing machine is “still going strong, so we can delay that.”
Gray said the district tries to buy a new bus every year, “but if these expenses mean we can’t, we won’t be buying a bus next year.”
“The way things are these days, we put safety No. 1,” he said. “We do have issues on a regular basis. … Overall, we do pretty well, but we still have to deal with those issues.”
Mayflower School Board President Scott Sewell said having an officer on campus is worth the effort to make sacrifices elsewhere.
“We’re hoping enrollment will come back up and the money will start coming back in; we’re optimistic,” Sewell said. “We’re just going to have to adjust some other things to get it done, but … we think it’s worth the effort to get it in place and get it going.
“You think about it. … The one time someone does something in small-town USA, you say, ‘We should have done this; we should have done that.’ The safety of our staff and kids is pretty important.”
Mayflower Police Chief Robert Alcon said in an earlier interview that he thinks a school resource officer would negate some problems before they start and would promote “a good positive image for the school.”
The school district previously had a part-time officer through the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office, but he has been assigned other duties.
The city already purchased a 2015 Dodge Charger and plans to do a “wrap” on the car to designate it as a school-resource-
officer vehicle. It will have Mayflower’s Eagle mascot on it and names of sponsors who have donated money for the project.
“I’m to take the agreement to the next City Council meeting and try to get them to agree to it, and if they do, it’s all systems go,” Gray said.
Mayor Randy Holland said he is confident that the council will approve the move, too. Its next meeting will be June 28.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.