Horne hires former Phoenix police leader as school safety director
In his latest effort to shift the direction of Arizona schools, Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne has appointed a former Phoenix police leader to oversee school safety efforts.
Michael Kurtenbach, who served as second-in-command of the Phoenix Police Department from 2016 to 2022, has been named the Arizona Department of Education’s director of school safety. He will be assisted by Allen Smith, a former Phoenix police commander, according to a press release sent Wednesday by the Education Department.
“One of the essential facets of school safety is that students and administrators have a healthy line of communication,” said Kurtenbach in a statement. “Our training will help focus on strategies to accomplish that.”
Kurtenbach and Smith will work with schools across the state to implement safety procedures and help administrators build trust with students to foster “specific types of communication” that the department said will help support a safer school environment. Their salaries will be funded through Arizona’s school safety grant program, which has been used to pay for schools to hire counselors, social workers, guards or officers.
The Horne administration has advocated for a police officer, or armed security guard, in every school to protect students from shootings.
“Children and adults must be safe when they’re on a school campus. That is literally a life-or-death issue,” said Doug Nick, a spokesperson for the education department. “He and his team will serve schools throughout the state and show them effective ways to enhance safety.”
The appointments come amid a national reckoning, years in the making, over the efficacy of police in ensuring the safety of students. Last spring, hundreds of police and tactical officers failed to intervene in the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. During the summer of 2020, amid protests of police killings, students across the country, including at campuses in Arizona, called for police to be removed from schools.
The Phoenix Police Department, where Kurtenbach and Smith spent much of their career, has come under fire for its use of excessive force. The department has been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for
civil rights violations since August 2021.
Several Arizona schools have been locked down in response to threats this school year. In one situation, family members of students tried to push past police officers to enter a school amid reports of an active shooter. A parent who wanted to enter the building to retrieve his child, at an El Mirage school in August, was shot with a stun gun and charged with disorderly conduct.
Horne’s push for more school police does not sit well with advocates who want schools to have counselors or social workers to support student mental health.
“Armed security guards or armed police officers on school campuses does nothing to improve school climate or school safety,” said ACLU of Arizona Policy Director Darrell Hill, who has worked to limit the suspension of students in Arizona schools. “It’s really kind of a sad day for students.”
Kurtenbach has a background in community relations
Kurtenbach worked extensively in community relations while with the Phoenix Police Department.
He oversaw the school resource program that served more than 70 schools when he was in charge of the Community Relations Bureau in 2015. He also
headed the department’s Community Services Division, served as an advisory board member of Arizona State University’s Center for Violence Prevention and received a Hero Award from the Center for Neighborhood Leadership, now called Poder in Action.
Kurtenbach will be paid $115,000 yearly in his position with the Arizona Department of Education.
Smith was most recently the director of the Southeast Arizona Communications Center, which handles emergency communications for two police departments in the region. While with the Phoenix Police Department, Smith was commander of the South Mountain Precinct, an area considered by the police department to have high gun crime rates. Smith will be paid $85,000 a year.
Both Kurtenbach and Smith worked with the Phoenix Police Department during a time now included in a federal investigation into whether the department engaged in retaliatory activity, unlawfully seized belongings of people experiencing homelessness and unlawfully used deadly force.
In April, three Phoenix police officers filed a lawsuit against Kurtenbach and former Chief Jerri Williams. The officers alleged the police leaders falsely claimed they weren’t informed of plans to charge protesters as gang members. The protesters were demonstrating following the death of George Floyd, who a Minneapolis police officer murdered in May 2020. The lawsuit is ongoing, according to the education department.
Kurtenbach was removed from his position as executive assistant chief of the Phoenix police in July after Williams announced her retirement. At the time, city officials said removing Kurtenbach from the position would allow the interim chief to select a second-in-command.
In a statement, Kurtenbach said he had received an honorable retirement from the department.
Significant shift for education department in school safety strategy
Horne’s approach to school safety is a sharp departure from that of his predecessor, Kathy Hoffman.
In a 2019 press conference with several March for Our Lives students, who were organizing against school shootings, Hoffman launched a school safety task force to help schools develop safety plans. That task force recommended funding for a statewide safety tip line, more investment in mental health tools and more after-school programs.
She also helped advocate to expand the scope of a state grant for school safety staff to include social workers and counselors and then added $21 million to the grant pool from federal pandemic relief funds. Requests for school counselors and social workers made up nearly 75% of requests by school districts and charter schools in the first round of the expanded grant.
The education department said it will only recommend school safety grant requests for counselors or social workers to the State Board of Education if the grant-seeking school already has a police officer or armed security guard on campus, according to the department’s press release.
“Superintendent Horne and I share the view that the first priority is to make sure that students and teachers are safe,” said Kurtenbach. “Counselors are valuable resources, but they are not trained public safety personnel, and if an armed gunman was to attack a school, the first and best line of defense would be a resource officer.”