Should sheriff’s office police county schools?
Different role of current officers, cost worries mark debate.
Every few years, a debate reignites about whether Palm Beach County’s public schools should hand over control of their campus police force to the county sheriff ’s office. Each time, the proposal is aborted by a lack of interest from the school board and superintendent, but somehow the matter is never quite settled.
In the wake of February’s school shooting in Parkland — and the subsequent rush to find more school police officers — the debate has revved up once more.
Here’s a brief overview of the issue, why it’s back on the front burner, and some of the typical arguments for and against a sheriff ’s office takeover.
Who polices the schools now?
Palm Beach County’s public school system is one of the few in Florida to have its own police force. The department, founded in 1972, has about 160 officer and 90 civilian employees, including detectives, dispatchers, and a police chief, who ultimately reports to the schools superintendent.
With a $21 million annual budget, the department also monitors security systems, manages the school district’s ID badges and handles fingerprinting and employee background checks for the district.
Today, for the most part, every high school and middle school has one assigned officer, and other officers rotate between three or four elementary schools each.
Like teachers, school district police officers work roughly 10
months a year. As a result, they earn considerably less than officers in the county’s other large police agencies.
The base salary for a new school district officer is about $43,000 a year, compared to $53,000 for sheriff ’s deputies and $50,000 for West Palm Beach police officers.
For the most part, the school district has policed its own schools over the years without major controversy.
But some critics complain that controlling its own police force lets the district suppress criminal incidents. Proponents of the district police, on the other hand, say letting the district police its schools reduces the risk of juvenile behavior being excessively criminalized.
A report commissioned by the district showed this month that the number of juveniles arrested by school police officers fell by more than half in the past eight years while enrollment grew.
Have we been down this road before?
Debates about a sheriff ’s office takeover have gone on for a long time and seem to have picked up since Sheriff Ric Bradshaw began taking over policing duties in municipalities across the county.
Since Bradshaw took office in 2005, his agency has taken over policing in Royal Palm Beach, Lake Worth, Belle Glade and Greenacres. He argues that those cities benefit from his agency’s deep resources and specialized units, and that some saved money in the process.
In 2008, then-Superintendent Art Johnson asked Bradshaw to research how a merger might work, but no formal talks ever occurred.
Three years later, a schools advisory committee asked Bradshaw to prepare a presentation for school board members. But after seeing skeptical comments from board members in news reports, Bradshaw declined to participate, saying “Given the climate there, we can move on to something else.”
In 2012, the school district police officers union said an informal officer poll found that 60 percent of officers supported a sheriff ’s takeover.
The next year, the school board unexpectedly moved, by a 4-3 vote, to ask Bradshaw to make a presentation about a takeover.
But after the split vote the sheriff declined, saying it was too late in the budget cycle. He told board members that “hopefully, at some point in the future we can revisit the concept.”
How did Parkland influence the debate?
Talk of a takeover remained muted ever since. But that changed in February, when a former student stormed into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland and killed 17 people.
A few weeks later, the Legislature passed a law requiring all public schools to be staffed with armed safety officers by the start of the new school year.
That requirement set off a mad dash across the state to find and hire officers. Some large counties, like Broward and Pinellas, plan to use armed security guards, a less costly option.
But the Palm Beach County School District said it planned to staff every school with a sworn law enforcement officer.
The district says its 23 high schools and 33 middle schools are already covered, but it needs to hire another 75 officers to cover all of its 107 elementary schools.
Hiring that many officers is expected to take more than a year. In the meantime, the district hopes to fill the schools with city cops and sheriff ’s deputies working overtime shifts.
The district has reached a tentative agreement with 11 cities to do so but is at loggerheads with the sheriff ’s office.
So who wants a takeover?
Publicly, Bradshaw has maintained a take-itor-leave-it attitude about patrolling the county’s public schools. But in an interview last week he said he believes his agency could do a better job of keeping the schools safe.
“This isn’t something that I’m looking to do or (am) avid about,” he said. “Do I think personally that it would be the best thing that could happen for the teachers, the kids and the system? Yes.”
Also pushing for a takeover are some of the district’s police officers themselves. Many officers say district administrators have little interest in or understanding of policing. The officers complain about low pay, old equipment and the fact that many don’t have patrol cars.
Under the sheriff ’s office control, that would change, some argue.
Of the school board’s seven members, most have generally been skeptical about relinquishing control of their police department. But one vocal supporter is board member Karen Brill, who for years has pushed for the board to at least study the issue.
“I really believe that we should be in the business of educating children, and I believe that the school safety should be provided by the experts,” she said this week. “If we were to merge with (the sheriff ), we would maintain the same officers we have. However, he would also add whatever additional officers. And we would have more resources.”
After the Parkland shooting, State Attorney Dave Aronberg convened a grand jury to study school safety. Some speculate that its final report, expected to be released this month, could recommend changes to how the county’s public schools are policed.
What do proponents say?
Bradshaw argues that his agency is well-practiced at assimilating smaller departments, and that the schools would benefit his agency’s superior resources.
“I’ve already merged with 10 other cities,” he said. “We have the model to do it and if you go talk to the leadership of these cities they’ll tell you it’s worked out fine and we’ve made a significant impact.”
Among the benefits, he said, are that the sheriff ’s office can provide more seamless law enforcement.
School district officers only have jurisdiction on school grounds, so they can’t investigate student behavior that occurs off of school property, he said. The sheriff’s office, on the other hand, could investigate drug sales being carried out on and off school campuses by the same people.
The sheriff ’s office has a full-time detective bureau, including detectives who specialize in investigating homicides, crimes against children, robberies, vehicle theft and financial crimes. The agency also has a SWAT team, a gang intelligence unit, helicopters, drones and more modern vehicles and policing equipment.
Deputies also are better equipped to combat a heavily armed school shooter, Bradshaw argues. In addition to their handguns, all road deputies have body armor and three-quarters of them have rifles, Bradshaw said.
If the sheriff’s office patrolled the schools, officers would be focused more narrowly on security, enforcement and safety, Bradshaw said. There would be less focus on counseling, teaching and outreach.
The officer’s “primary mission is to protect the school,” Bradshaw said. “His focus has got to be on perimeter security. He can’t be the guidance counselor with a gun.”
“You have to focus on protecting the schools and get (other) people to network with the kids,” he continued.
What do opponents say?
Those who oppose a sheriff ’s office takeover float two main arguments: the policing approach and the cost.
The school district is better suited to the task because of important differences between street policing and school policing, this argument goes.
The district’s officers deal primarily with children, which requires a different skill set and approach than that of officers who deal mostly with adults, he said.
Some activists worry that arrest rates would climb under the sheriff ’s office, saying that deputies would have a different threshold for deciding whether a student should face criminal charges for, say, starting a fight or stealing something from a classroom.
“The school police officers are trained to assist students. The sheriff is trained to arrest,” LaTanzia Jackson, then-chairwoman of the Coalition of Black Student Achievement, said in 2013.
Amid growing national concerns about over-policing in schools, the number of juvenile cases that the department sends to prosecutors has fallen dramatically in the past eight years, from 811 in 2009 to 373 in 2017, according to a recent report by the Council of the Great City Schools. Schools Superintendent Donald Fennoy denied that school administrators discourage officers from making arrests in criminal incidents.
Another concern is the prospect of elevated costs to the school district if school officers become deputies. The school district pays its officers on a 10-month basis while the sheriff ’s office pays its deputies on a 12-month basis.
“Is it gonna cost more for us? Probably,” Bradshaw said. “It will cost more because (deputies) are yeararound employees.”
Not only are salaries higher, the school board would lose control over future increases. Board members determine what their own officers are paid, but Bradshaw determines his deputies’ pay. And he would determine how much to charge the school district for his services each year.
Fennoy said the costs for the district would go beyond even higher salaries for officers.
The school district police department provides services that the sheriff ’s office would not, including background checks for new teachers and other district employees, monitoring school bus security cameras and maintaining radio systems.
“Not only would I increase the cost there (for police services),” Fennoy said, “but then I still have to find other money to maintain all the ancillary pieces that my police department does for me. That doesn’t make any fiscal sense.”
So, what happens next?
Bradshaw concedes that under the sheriff ’s office, school police would be more focused on security and enforcement, and that outsourcing to his agency likely would cost the public schools more money.
Proponents of a takeover argue that Parkland was a game-changer for schools, the same way that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks transformed airport safety, and that the response requires a new approach.
But ultimately the decision is the school board’s, and most board members, along with Fennoy and other district leaders, have expressed skepticism about letting the sheriff ’s office take over.
The loss of financial and administrative control over policing on their own campuses is a deal-breaker, they say.
School Board Chairman Chuck Shaw did not respond to a request to discuss the issue this week, but when asked about a potential takeover in 2011 he gave this answer:
“When I was a middle school principal, I knew what my school police officer did every day and what he did to keep people safe,” he said. “I like our school police officers . ... I want to see what we can do to keep the quality we’ve got while potentially saving some money.”