‘Safety need’ met now
Orange County pledges to fund deputies in every school all day
Orange County will provide the money needed to provide every school with a deputy, filling a “critical safety need,” Mayor Teresa Jacobs wrote Friday in a memo to Sheriff Jerry Demings, a day after he said he didn’t have enough officers to assign one full-time to all schools in unincorporated areas when classes resume Monday.
A new state law requires every public school to have security personnel, such as a law-enforcement officer, though Orange school district leaders said this week they don’t interpret the law to mean they must have an officer stationed all day at every school. Jacobs, who along with county commissioners controls the sheriff ’s budget, balked at that reading in her memo to Demings.
“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, who is running for School Board chair in the Aug. 28 primary. Demings, sheriff since 2008, is running to succeed termlimited Jacobs as county mayor.
Aside from adding law officers to classrooms, Superintendent Barbara Jenkins said in a new safety measure the district purchased metal-detector wands for middle and high schools that administra-
“We just frankly think it’s ironic, the entire concept of introducing additional firearms onto campus in the hands of untrained personnel.” Bill Sublette, School Board chairman
tors will use to check students on a “random” basis.
The district will continue to screen all students at randomly selected schools when they arrive at the start of the day, as it has done since 2013. Those screenings will become more frequent, said Bryan Holmes, chief of the district’s in-house police force.
School safety and security has been at the top of parents’ minds since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 students and employees dead and was a key issue during the past legislative session.
The state provided $97.5 million to Florida school districts to hire additional security personnel this year. A new law requires districts and law-enforcement agencies to “establish or assign” one or more safe-school officers at each campus.
In the long run, the school district intends to provide a full-time officer for every campus, said School Board Chairman Bill Sublette, who has held the position for eight years and isn’t running for re-election.
Cities in Orange County will provide officers for every school in those jurisdictions.
Demings said Friday he temporarily re-assigned 38 additional deputies to serve on school campuses in response to the new state law. A total of 105 officers will be stationed daily at 117 campuses in unincorporated areas of the county at a total cost of $16.8 million. He previously said he was relying on existing deputies working overtime because he couldn’t hire additional personnel quickly enough.
Demings and a Sheriff’s Office spokesman didn’t respond Friday to questions about the memo from Jacobs, who initially proposed assigning deputies to all of the elementary schools in unincorporated areas in 2012 in the aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left 26 children and employees dead.
Holmes wouldn’t say how many total officers will staff schools across the county now but said there would be “one assigned to every school.”
“We don’t like to get into numbers specifically because we don’t want anyone to assume there’s not going to be one at a school,” he said.
High school and middle school campuses will have their own full-time personnel, while others “will be receiving visits” or officers will be there all day.
In lieu of law enforcement, districts can allow some school personnel to carry firearms on campus or hire additional non-law-enforcement employees to serve as guardians.
Some counties that initially dismissed this idea, including Broward, where Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is located, have changed course, deciding to use guardians to fill openings where law-enforcement officers weren’t available. But Orange leaders have remained steadfast.
“Our board has said from the very start they were not interested in having armed individuals unless they were law enforcement and that opinion has not changed,” Jenkins said Friday.
Sublette said board members had unanimously agreed on that matter.
“We just frankly think it’s ironic, the entire concept of introducing additional firearms onto campus in the hands of untrained personnel,” he said.
In addition to bringing in more law enforcement officers, district leaders stressed Friday that they’ve made many other enhancements over the summer intended to make campuses safer. Some of those changes won’t be apparent to students and parents, Jenkins said, and school leaders won't discuss them because of fears that they’ll compromise security.
Demings said deputies assigned to schools attended a 40-hour crisis intervention class this summer. And lawenforcement officers across the county will have active shooter kits “readily available,” he said. These kits include ballistic helmets, outer layer ballistic vests and steel plates that go inside the vests.
“There is no question in my mind that our school district is as safe as it has ever been at the beginning of this school year,” Demings said.