Sheriff to ask county to pay for 75 officers
New deputies to ensure safety for every school
On the heels of a public spat with Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, Sheriff Jerry Demings will ask county commissioners today to hire 75 new deputies — enough to fund one for each school campus in unincorporated parts of the county.
The request comes after Demings and Jacobs bickered last week about the heightened issue of school safety — and with an election looming for both. Demings is running for mayor to succeed the term-limited Jacobs, who is running for Orange County School Board chair. Both races are on the Aug. 28 primary ballot.
Demings made the request in a memo, calling for approval to cover the cost of hiring, training and deploying 75 new school resource officers.
The $11.2 million cost of hiring and assigning the officers would be split among the School Board, the county and the state, the memo states. The county’s share is not yet known.
“All efforts to expedite the deployment of 75 new SROs will be applied,” Demings said in the memo.
A new state law — the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act — mandates that school districts work with local law enforcement to “establish or assign” one or more safe-school officers at each campus. The law was passed by the Legislature after the Feb. 14 shooting at the high school in Parkland left 17 students and faculty members dead.
Demings previously said he had reassigned deputies to serve on school campuses but not every school would have a full-time law enforcement officer. Once hired, the new deputies would fill that need, he said.
While the sheriff is following through on what he defined as a need, he cautioned it will take several months to fully deploy the 65 deputies and 10 supervisors.
Until one is assigned on each campus, Jacobs said the problem will not be solved.
“This doesn’t resolve the issue,” she said. “It’s a good step.”
Jane Dunkelberger, an Orange
County mother who after the Parkland shootings helped start a parents group pushing school safety improvements, said more deputies for local elementary schools would “absolutely” make parents feel more secure.
“I know that parents are definitely wanting to have that peace of mind,” said Dunkelberger, who has two children in public schools. “I think a lot of parents would be relieved to know he’s going out there for school security,” she said of the sheriff ’s request.
She and others who are part of Mothers Opposing Violence in Education group have been attending Orange County School Board meetings, asking questions and monitoring how the board is implementing Florida’s new school safety law.
“We’re going to be watching and making sure that all the regulations are met,” she added.
The issue turned political last week in a series of news conferences and news releases by both Demings and Jacobs.
Jacobs called a news conference rebutting comments sent out by Demings’ mayoral campaign. Jacobs said they were “incomplete and misleading.”
In a news conference later that day, Demings charged that Jacobs was “using this situation as a platform for politics” and that it was “simply wrong.”
Jacobs rejected that notion and said she offered to pay for an officer at each elementary school in unincorporated Orange County after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary that left 26 students and employees dead.
This month, Demings said he reassigned 38 deputies to serve on school campuses in response to the new law. In total, 105 officers would be stationed each day at 117 campuses in unincorporated parts of the county.
After the Orlando Sentinel reported that not every school would have a deputy assigned to it full time, Jacobs wrote a memo to Demings stating the county would provide the money needed to put one on each campus.
“While there may be other interpretations, I believe the parents, the children and our entire community expect that every school will have a dedicated law enforcement officer on campus throughout the school day,” wrote Jacobs in the memo.