Birmingham AL Aug  6 2018 One out of four K-12 public schools in Alabama don’t have a school resource officer or a security officer, according to a recent survey conducted by the Alabama State Department of Education.

That means approximately 375 schools, out of a statewide total of around 1,500, could choose to participate in the Alabama Sentry Program, which allows administrators to keep a firearm in a secured safe on campus for use during an active shooter incident.

Only schools without an SRO are allowed to participate in the program, created by Gov. Kay Ivey in the wake of the tragic shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 students and staff were killed on Valentine’s Day, and the May 18 shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas, where 10 students and staff were killed.

Ivey said having an SRO in every school is preferable, but until that can happen, the Sentry Program will provide a way for administrators to keep schools safe.

The survey of schools, conducted in early summer, had a 92 percent response rate, so not all schools responded to Alabama Superintendent Eric Mackey’s request for that information, according to officials with Ivey’s office.

Addressing questions from “members of the education-association community here in Montgomery,” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s lawyers state the Sentry Program does not conflict with any current state law.

The names and locations of schools without SROs were not provided to AL.com, but Press Secretary Daniel Sparkman said it is likely that most of those schools are in rural areas or are in schools with large numbers of students in poverty.

An AL.com analysis of federal data collected in the 2013-2014 and 2015-2016 school years showing which schools have SROs found Alabama’s county school districts to be more likely not to have an SRO than city school districts. That is likely due to the higher tax proceeds city school districts can use to pay for SROs.

State tax proceeds do not currently fund the cost to pay SROs. Local tax proceeds are most often used to pay SROs, but the way SROs are funded varies widely. In some districts, local government and police or sheriff departments provide the SROs at no cost to the district, where others share the cost with the district.

At the June 14 state board of education meeting, Mackey told state board members that there is a chance that state lawmakers could fund some portion of the cost of an SRO, but those details haven’t yet been worked out. He said he does not anticipate the state to fund the full cost to pay for SROs.

It’s unclear how many schools are eligible to participate, as no data exists showing how many schools do not have school resource officers.

On the survey, school officials were also asked how much time their District Safety Coordinator spent on safety-related activities. Six percent of respondents said their safety coordinator had very little time to spend on safety-related activities, while 71 percent said 25 percent of the safety coordinator’s time is spent on safety-related activities.

The remaining 23 percent said their safety coordinator spent 50 percent or more of their time on safety-related activities.

In April, prior to the creation of the Sentry Program, Ivey created the Securing Alabama’s Facilities of Education, or SAFE, Council. That Council, composed of heads of the departments of education, mental health, community colleges, information technology and law enforcement, made 10 recommendations to improve safety in Alabama’s schools.

Sparkman said five of those recommendations have been fully implemented.

Those five, recommendations six through 10 in the SAFE Council’s May 7 report, did not require legislative approval, Sparkman said.

Sparkman said Ivey used “several hundred thousand dollars” from a discretionary fund available to the Governor for use during natural disasters to support implementation of those five recommendations.

“We considered this a social emergency of equal magnitude of a natural disaster that we wanted to head off,” Sparkman said.

Those recommendations included enhancing the ability of the Alabama Fusion Center, a command post for law enforcement statewide, to follow threats to school safety, improving the timeliness of reporting serious discipline problems to the Fusion Center, ensuring schools follow through with required training and drills for students in the event of a school shooting, and creating seven regional school safety and compliance teams to support schools statewide.

Members of those seven teams were trained during the summer on the Colorado Threat Assessment model, Sparkman said, which was recommendation number five.

Recommendations one through four, which include funding for SROs, mental health supports for students, and improved building security measures, require legislative approval and cannot be fully implemented unless funding can be obtained.

State lawmakers are expected to take up that issue when the 2019 legislative session convenes on March 5.

AL.com 

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