Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Resource Officers in the Schools

Topic 4: Resource Officers in the Schools – August 7 Work Session
These are my notes, the notes of one citizen who attended. They are not minutes of the meeting. I post them here, because if you wait for the official minutes to come out, it will be October, and then if there were anything discussed that you wanted to take action about, it will be too late. If anyone was there and had a different take on what happened, just hit the Comments button and add your two cents.

There was a petition circulated where hundreds of citizens asked for resource officers in the schools. Dr. Randy Thomas presented that the schools didn’t have an immediate problem, that there were some resource officers there now. He said he thought officers in the school were a good thing, and it would be nice to have more of them. Their value, in addition to being available for problems, also existed in making the students feel more safe, getting them to feel like officers were helpful to them, and keeping some students from being bullied. Bullying in the schools is often the problem, and many of the problems in the news were about students who felt bullied. In the new plan, when the new schools are built, and there is less overcrowding, it will be possible to have everyone in one building and a lockdown can occur when there is any threat. This will be the effective security measure. Chairman LaFrance and Supervisor Cubbage said they don’t think the citizens who asked for this understand the tax implications of it. I think the conclusion of this was that the appropriate number of resource officers would have to be included in the personnel forecasts and budgeted, but I’m not sure exactly how it turned out.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

We need to have a resource officer in our school during school hours to protect our kids now. Not when a few has been killed before they do anything. Let us PREVENT anyone from hurting our kids.I totally agree about getting ALL new school board members and supervisors.

Page County Watch said...

I think the discussion was that there are already officers in the schools, just not every minute. Also, that in the incidents that have occurred at Virginia Tech and other places, it was never a stranger who came in, but always someone who belonged there (ie an enrolled student). So the person would have been allowed in anyway and the resource officer would not have prevented that person from coming in.

I think that considering there was a petition with over 400 signatures presented to them, that the Supervisors should have answered the petition with their reasons for taking whatever action they took (and here again, I was unclear about what action they took. I couldn't hear any decision.)

Page County Watch said...

I think the discussion was that there are already officers in the schools, just not every minute. Also, that in the incidents that have occurred at Virginia Tech and other places, it was never a stranger who came in, but always someone who belonged there (ie an enrolled student). So the person would have been allowed in anyway and the resource officer would not have prevented that person from coming in.

I think that considering there was a petition with over 400 signatures presented to them, that the Supervisors should have answered the petition with their reasons for taking whatever action they took (and here again, I was unclear about what action they took. I couldn't hear any decision.)