Every middle school and high school in Atlanta will soon have at least one full-time Atlanta Police Department officer patrolling its halls in a daily effort to create safer campuses.
Under the plan, approved by the city school board this week, police will build relationships with students and work to identify discipline problems before they become criminal matters, said Deputy Superintendent Larry Hoskins.
The 55-officer force will replace a less organized group of about 235 part-time, off-duty officers who moved from school to school and didn’t always work full school days.
The permanent officers will be like officers working a beat, except they’ll be in schools instead of neighborhoods, said Sgt. Gregory Lyon.
“They’ll get to, literally every day, engage the students and teachers, learning about them,” Lyon said. “Off-duty jobs are off-duty. They’re secondary. The officers working here, this will be their primary duty and function.”
As a result, the incoming police officers will become familiar faces who students know and trust, Hoskins said.
“When officers have relationships with students, students are more inclined to be more proactive and go to officers when there are things that may potentially happen. They’ll share that information,” said Hoskins, who oversees Atlanta Public Schools’ operations.
The transition to a more structured policing organization comes after several shootings and fights this year, including a Grady High School student who accidentally shot herself in the leg and a Price Middle School student who was shot in the neck.
“We wanted to get more horsepower in here,” said Superintendent Erroll Davis. “We’ll have a more complete command structure to look at what problems we do and don’t have.”
Atlanta Public Schools had considered creating its own independent police force — similar to what’s in place in Gwinnett, Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton counties — but instead it decided to continue working with the Atlanta Police Department. The result will be a security system that’s like those in other school districts, except the officers will be APD employees.
Unlike the part-time officers used in the past, the school-based police will be required to go through training by state agencies on how to work with kids, Hoskins said.
Dedicated school officers do a better job than off-duty police who work with students on the side, said Kevin Quinn, president of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
“Part-time officers don’t have a knowledge of what they’re supposed to do on campus other than being a hired gun,” Quinn said. “You can’t just take a street cop and throw them in school and expect them to be a good SRO.”
Atlanta Public Schools already has the highest security expenses in the metro area despite having the fifth-largest student population, and that won’t change.
Safety and security costs are budgeted to rise about $700,000 next school year, to $10.1 million, in large part because APS will be responsible for officers’ benefits compensation, and the school system is adding the equivalent of two full-time officers, Hoskins said.
Between two and four officers will be in place in high schools when school starts Aug. 7, depending on each school’s size and security needs, he said. Middle schools will continue using part-time officers until Jan. 1, and then they will gain one or two full-time officers each.
The 55 school resource officers will be distributed among 30 middle and high schools. They’ll assist at elementary schools when needed, Hoskins said.
In addition, another 18 officers will work in a districtwide school detectives section that’s similar to other police zones, with a major in charge, Davis said. Previously, a lieutenant was the top-ranked officer in the detectives unit.
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