LOUISVILLE, Ky. Aug 20 2021  While the mask mandate in JCPS schools has been hotly debated, there’s another major safety issue one former teacher says is being ignored.

It was August 2019 when three votes did away with armed school resources officers at all JCPS schools.

Now that class is back in session, some are asking what is the district doing to keep nearly 100 thousand students and teachers safe.

“It’s even more dangerous now than it was in 2019,” Mike Beard, a 20-year former teacher, coach and athletic director at Iroquois High School told WAVE 3 News.

It’s the same school where, before COVID, the principal was attacked twice in two weeks. It’s also where on the first day of class this year a student brought a gun.

“What you really worry about is all the ones that you don’t know about,” Beard said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that on the first day of school this year, Iroquois High School was not the only school that had a gun brought to it.”

The threat, he believes, may be even greater today with double-digit increases in shootings in Louisville among children and teens.

According to LMPD, since the first of the year, 21 homicide victims were JCPS students. An additional 74 of them were shot but survived.

In the four months after SRO’s were removed in 2019, Beard documented eight guns brought to JCPS schools at Seneca, Ballard, Southern, Shawnee, Hazelwood, Waggener and two at PRP.

The classroom reflects the community, Beard said, which is another troublesome statistic.

The number of shootings in Louisville have increased from this time in 2019 to today by 155 percent. Nearly 15 percent of the shooting victims so far this year are between the ages of 11 to 17, according to LMPD data.

But now, Beard pointed out, SRO’s aren’t there to talk to kids and potentially prevent or stop bad things from happening as they did in April 2019. That’s when, according to reports, two SRO’s stopped a student who was armed with a revolver and a 50 round box of ammo from entering Valley High School.

At Greenwood Elementary last March, it was left to cafeteria workers to block an irate parent pointing a loaded gun through the cafeteria window while children ate inside, according to the citation.

“We had no security, nothing,” one cafeteria worker told the school board during a meeting in July. “Us teachers, employees, cafeteria employees – they are trained to cook, not to save innocent children’s lives.”

During that same meeting, there were five off-duty corrections officers, one LMPD Officer and 10 JCPS security members present.

“It’s funny, they don’t want officers in school buildings, but they sure wanted officers in the school buildings that night,” Beard said.

Corrections officers were also spotted at the Van Hoose Center, JCPS’s headquarters, during normal business hours on several occasions, up to the date of this report.

WAVE 3 News obtained invoices showing the district has paid $9,500 for off-duty officers for the month of July alone.

“It’s very hypocritical,” Beard said.

Sources also supplied emails showing schools like Breckenridge and Minor Daniels offering to pay off-duty police and corrections officers $50 an hour. JCPS said corrections officers have not been requested to work off-duty in schools.

They added Breckenridge and Minor Daniels requested police officers “due to their unique circumstances,” JCPS spokeswoman Renee Murphy responded.

The SRO’s were removed from JCPS after pressure from some who argued they traumatize and criminalize children.

“We don’t want police violence in our schools,” a group yelled during a board meeting in 2019.

“Children who probably should have received counseling being taken away in handcuffs,” one person told the board.

The vote was spearheaded by Chris Kolb, who recently stepped down as the board’s vice chair after tweeting a senator “F*** You.”

The decision to remove SRO’s dumbfounds Beard, who points to a survey taken by JCPS in December 2019 asking all middle and high school staff members if they wanted an SRO in their school. Those results showed 90 percent said they did want an SRO while 82 percent also wanted them armed.

“It’s to the point now where, literally, very possibly could be a life and death situation,” Beard said.

After the board ended the contracts with the SRO’s, the district set off to create its own security force.

It’s now comprised of 27 people, most of whom roam from school to school, responding to wherever they are needed.

However, that security force is unarmed. It’s a far different picture of what Pollio said he wanted in previous interviews during the SRO debate.

“We’d be looking to have an SRO in every middle and high school one-to-one,” a former JCPS spokesperson said during a presentation to board members at the time.

The JCPS security force members are classified as Special Law Enforcement Officers, or SLEO’s. According to the state’s definition, they are mostly intended as building security, with training on protecting public property from intrusion, vandalism or trespass, not specifically trained on responding to an armed threat.

According to the Kentucky Justice & Public Safety Cabinet, SLEO’s are required to take 80 hours of training, versus the 20 weeks a Peace Officer Professional Standards, or POPS-certified, SRO are required to take.

SRO’s also have to take additional training in subjects like youth mental health awareness, students with special needs, social media and cyber security.

According to the Kentucky Safe Schools and Resiliency Act of 2019, or SSRA, every district in the state has to place an armed SRO at every school campus, as funds allow.

So far, JCPS has not hired SRO’s.

Murphy said they are working to hire more SLEO’s and added that the Senate Bills 1 and 8, those behind SSRA, have not been funded by the legislature.

The Justice and Public Safety Cabinet said 640 SRO’s have completed, or are currently in the process of completing, training since SSRA became law.

Murphy said JCPS security respond to threats along with law enforcement and that several maintain their POPS certification. But because they are not classified as SRO’s, the scarce, additional SRO training may not be available to them.

JCPS said they are currently working with the state to ensure the necessary training.

Murphy added, “Every school has a safety and emergency procedures plan specific to the individual school community and school administrator go through safety and emergency procedures training, and that staff undergoes active shooter training, provided by the state, as well as ALICE (Alert Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate) training.”

Each school, she said, also has a team of staff members who are trained in safe crisis management.

WAVE 3 News asked every member of the school board and Superintendent Pollio for an on camera interview.

None of the members who voted to remove SRO’s agreed to answer questions.

Kolb was the only to respond to the request but referred questions to Murphy.

“There’s too much going on for me right now and JCPS administration is a lot more on top of where all the different issues stand,” Kolb wrote. “Thanks again for asking.”

The board’s chair, Diane Porter, who voted in favor of keeping SRO’s, at first agreed to an interview. She later cancelled and has not yet agreed to reschedule. She did provide the following statement,

The safety and well-being of our students and staff is central to our work. The legislature has not funded school resource officers in all school buildings. Soon after the passage of SB 1 in 2019, JCPS began collecting stakeholder feedback to hear from our community what they would want to see in an internal security force. While this was being developed and discussed, we were faced with a global pandemic that closed our schools and halted us from having an opportunity to engage in more meaningful stakeholder feedback. Safety is of the utmost importance, but we understand the concern from many in our community about the possible disproportionate impact having law enforcement in our schools has on Black and Brown students. This matter is a priority to this board and will be discussed again in the near future as we gain community input.

WAVE

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