Rio Rancho NM public schools vote to arm security officers
Rio Rancho NM November 14 2018
With two mass shootings in the U.S. in the last few weeks, public safety is as important as ever.
A New Mexico school is now looking at a big change in how it protects its students.
Rio Rancho Public Schools has approved arming its school guards.
The school board gave the green light at Monday night’s meeting.
This is something that has been in the works for months.
Rio Rancho spokesperson Beth Pendergrass said they wanted to involve the community in this decision as much as they could.
“We had meetings with our community members. We’ve allowed public comment at our school board meetings. We’ve sent out surveys to our community and our parents,” she said.
Around 2,700 parents and nearly 600 staffers filled out the survey.
The community results were overwhelmingly in favor of armed guards, with more than 78 percent saying they strongly support the idea.
Meanwhile, staff results showed more than 60 percent surveyed strongly support it, while more than 15 percent are strongly opposed.
Rio Rancho decided at the beginning of the year they were going to add more security to its elementary schools, and if the measure passes Monday night, we could see those security guards being armed once they meet all the requirements.
Those requirements include being former law enforcement, military or corrections, as well as passing a firearms training course.
Pendergrass said this would be different than the handful of armed school resource officers they already have.
“We don’t have very many of those officers and they’re only at our high schools and they go to the other schools as needed. This would allow us to arm our current school security personnel to ensure that we’re covering more campuses with armed guards,” she said.
She said right now they are budgeted for roughly eight to 12 armed guards.
