Report: Keep policing with school district
At issue is how best to protect students in wake of Parkland massacre.
On the heels of a report highlighting the potential benefits of letting the Palm Beach County sheriff police the county’s public schools, a new, rival report makes the case for leaving school-policing to the county school district.
The new report, commissioned by the district, is the second in as many days to be released on the topic of school safety. It comes as the sheriff ’s office and school district tangle over how to safeguard the county’s schools in the aftermath of February’s mass school shooting in Parkland.
But while the first report, commissioned by Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, called for close consideration of whether his agency ought to take over the school district’s police department, the school district-commissioned report make a case for leaving things as they are.
Though it did not directly tackle the issue of which agency is better suited to patrol county schools, Thursday’s report by the nonprofit Council of the Great City Schools praises the school district’s police department and calls for district leaders to “maintain the current organizational structure.”
“The district has made several recent investments in order to create safer conditions in its schools,” the report said, adding that “the district’s senior management recognizes the value and importance of moving the department forward.”
Superintendent Donald Fennoy has dismissed proposals to let the sheriff’s office take over the district’s police department, and Bradshaw said this week that he was uninterested in a takeover as well.
But other public officials and police union leaders have been making the case for one.
Amid that debate, the district is negotiating with the sheriff ’s office to patrol dozens of its schools next year.
The school district has received tentative support from 11 city police departments to patrol 47 elementary schools within their respective city limits until the schools can hire their own officers. District officials are hoping the sheriff ’s office will agree to cover another 45 to 50 elementary schools outside of cities.
Among the recommendations in Thursday’s report: boosting the district police department’s pay and benefits in order to “better compete for and retain employees.”
It also addressed low morale among officers, saying that the district needed to “move beyond a culture of victimization and defensiveness in the department, created, in part, from budget cuts and other exigencies that its leadership has not had control over.”
Officer salaries have been a recent point of contention, with police union leaders saying that district officers are so underpaid that the department is at risk of losing increasing numbers of officers to higher-paying agencies.
A new officer in the school district’s police department typically earns a base salary of $43,300 a year, $10,000 less than the starting salary for sheriff’s deputies ($53,200).
The school district points out, however, that school district officers work about 10 months a year while sheriff ’s deputies work year-around.
Even so, Fennoy said last week that officers’ pay needs to be higher and that the district is working to raise their salaries.
The school district’s roughly 160-officer police department has been rocked by change lately. To comply with a new state law requiring officers at every public school, Fennoy is racing to hire new officers and strike deals with the sheriff ’s office and city police departments.
At the same time, he has also ousted the district’s longtime police chief, Lawrence Leon, and is conducting a national search to hire a replacement.
Wanda Paul, the school district’s chief operating officer, said that the report called attention to some important concerns, such as ensuring that all school staff be alert for potential threats or suspicious behavior.
But she said that the report underscored the vital role that the school police department plays in the county’s more than 180 campuses.
“I can’t see having a school district without them being here,” she said. “They’re woven into the fabric of every school.”