“The idea to create a safety department came about because the local law enforcement agency assigned to protect the district was having difficulty recruiting school resource officers, and the school board wanted more safety and security personnel on its K-12 campuses.”
Why this is important: Over the past decade, elementary and secondary schools across the country have been increasing security staff. Of the 98,469 public schools nationwide, 65 percent had one or more security staff during the 2019-2020 school year, according to data available from the National Center for Education Statistics. That is up from 42 percent 10 years before. About half of public schools nationwide reported having sworn law enforcement officers routinely carrying a firearm.
Interest in further expanding school security forces intensified following the 2018 school shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida and the 2022 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Now, school officials who have already added to their security teams are urging their peers to proceed carefully and deliberately to ensure staff have the necessary training, and comply with recently updated state regulations.
One example comes from Tennessee, where the Hamilton County School District, which serves more than 44,000 students, has assembled a team of 51 security officers since 2019. The district started the program after the local sheriff’s department struggled to recruit school resource officers, or SROs.
SROs are employed by a municipal law enforcement agency and assigned to a school building. Some districts, like Hamilton County, also hire armed security officers who are employed by the district. The responsibilities and legal authority of SROs and security officers – including the ability to issue citations, arrest, or conduct searches – varies from state to state, according to a 50-state analysis conducted by the Education Commission of the States.
As this article explains, James Corbin, student safety and security coordinator for Hamilton County schools, shared words of caution when speaking with Campus Safety Magazine in July. He encouraged school administrators not only to make sure their security teams comply with state licensing requirements and regulations, such as those for armed security officers, but also to give them the time and training to learn how to work with students in a school environment. This includes training that goes beyond active shooter drills to also include verbal de-escalation tactics and counseling work, he said. The Hamilton program costs the district about $1.8 million per year.
State legislatures have stepped in to financially support and enact laws to oversee such efforts. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 608 of the more than 2,000 bills related to school safety that have been introduced nationwide from 2018 to 2022 were specific to law enforcement or school resource officers.
In Pennsylvania, for example, recent legislation not only made tens of millions of dollars available to school districts that wanted to hire more security staff, but also updated training requirements. Similarly, in Virginia, where the governor in May announced a new grant program aimed at improving school safety in high-need schools, the Legislature has enacted more than two dozen bills since 2018 related to training, qualification, and responsibilities of school security staff. --- Jamie L. Martines , 2023 Summer Associate
