Board declines to arm school guards
President wanted to hold more discussions
Santa Fe school board President Steven Carrillo made an unsuccessful final attempt to win approval for the idea of hiring armed officers for the district’s two high schools this school year. During Tuesday’s board meeting, he couldn’t even sway the other four members to support the idea of holding a special study session to discuss the issue, let alone get them to agree to commit to hiring such guards, commonly known as school resource officers or SROs, with the goal of better protecting students against shooters on campus.
“I’m not ready to entertain SROs,” board member Maureen Cashmon told Carrillo. She reiterated previous concerns that it’s unfair to students at middle and elementary schools not to have those officers on hand while the two high schools use them.
Board member Kate Noble agreed with Cashmon, saying she didn’t think the community would go for the idea either. “It’s probably a nonstarter,” she said.
While board member Rudy Garcia said he had “split” emotions over the idea, he agreed with Cashmon and Noble that there was little use in holding a study session because the board had already approved this year’s
budget and money for those officers — at least $200,000 for just three of them — would be hard to find.
Though board member Lorraine Price did not expressly object to the idea, she did not back Carrillo’s plan either. When he told the board that a school resource officer in Maryland had killed a suspect who used a handgun to shoot two students in a high school in March, she said, “We also had an SRO who hid.”
She was referring to an armed school resource officer who hid outside a Parkland, Fla., high school during a shooting incident in which 17 people were killed in February.
Despite recent school shootings around the nation, including one in Aztec that took the lives of two students, the Santa Fe school board has not displayed a collective appetite for placing armed guards on campuses.
Several board members said they would rather invest money in counselors who could help students with mental or behavioral health problems and thus may want to act out in a physical manner.
And Cashmon told Carrillo that since the city of Santa Fe is having trouble hiring enough police officers — the department reported 26 vacancies in late August — it would be a challenge for the district to find even an additional three.