Following last school year’s deadly school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, school systems around the country have revisited ways to keep schools safe.
In Habersham County, a partnership is placing a school resource officer in each of the county’s schools, doubling the number of officers on campus around the county.
Sheriff Joey Terrell says placing an officer on each campus is something he and school leaders have wanted to do for some time, but the shooting in Uvalde followed by a shooting across from two Habersham County schools the next day expedited things.
“In light of the unfortunate events that happened in Texas, and then even with our event that we had here that didn't really have anything to do with the school, but it happened right across in the school, Mr. Cooper got with us, and we decided it was time – that it had to happen,” Terrell said. “So, I'm excited – excited for not only our students, but our teachers, our administrators, and the things it's going to help bring, because we're putting resource officers in the schools, we're not putting deputies in the school. So, we're there to come alongside of them and work with them. And I know they're excited and we've actually already received quite a few applications and we're well on our way.”
Terrell stressed the officers are there not only to protect the county’s 7,000-plus students and 1,200 staff members, but also to build relationships and serve as mentors.
“One in every school and then we'll have two at the high school and one of the ones that high school will be a supervisor and if she needs to leave and go look at other things, she can,” Terrell said. “And if we need to rotate some of the other SROs around if say we have outages at the high school or something somebody is out sick or whatever, then we can pull those out from the from the elementaries up to cover some of the other schools. Our goal is to have somebody at every school every day.”
Terrell said teamwork has made the additional officers possible in such a short period of time. While a couple of positions remain to be filled, nearly a dozen SROs are in the schools as of the first day of the new school year.
“It's a partnership between us, the board of education, and our board of commissioners,” Terrell said. The board of education is funding the new SROs 100% this year and then we’re going to talk about next year how we get into that, you know, that all depends on budgets and what the tax digest and all that stuff looks like. There's so many moving parts. The sheriff's office is, we’re absorbing the uniforms, the weapons, the vehicles. We've got all that. The way things are trying to get vehicles, we haven't turned any vehicles in. So, we have those vehicles actually setting here at the sheriff's office. We have most of them. We're getting a few new ones in along and along. It's going to help. New ones go to patrol, the old ones will go we'll push out towards the SROs and stuff. We're covering those expenses. We're going to make it work. That was my promise to the board of education, actually to the commissioners. My promise to our commissioners was that we're going to make this work. I'm not asking for a couple hundred thousand dollars for vehicles and all this other stuff. We're going to suck it up and make it work.”
Even before classes for the new school year began on Friday, SROs in their roles as protectors arrested two adults on the county’s school campuses.
