Elsewhere, in the Woodstock area, the Onteora School Board is thinking about reintroducing an SRO in its next budget, though finances are extremely tight. The Rondout Valley School Board signed off on an agreement to allow the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office access to its video feeds during school lockdowns and emergency situations. Ellenville mayor Jeff Kaplan and his fellow board members recently passed resolutions calling for more funding for school resource officers (SROs) and mental health services. Saugerties officials didn’t have much to say about the issue, though the SRO program seems to be going well.
“Regarding whether people like/dislike the SRO, I’ve never heard a single complaint,” said Saugerties School Board vice president Tom Ham.
Ulster BOCES also has an in-school police officer, which Khoury described as “basically … a security presence.” That campus hosts over 1,000 students per day from local high schools, as well as continuing education courses in the evening and childcare facilities, making for a place with a lot of coming-and-going.
How much would it cost?
For school boards looking to add SROs to their schools, finding the money won’t be easy. With pension and health-care costs for staff past and present growing fast, and the two-percent tax cap to consider, it’s tough to find a spare $70,000 in a budget. Supporters hope the funding could come from the state or through a $150 million White House proposal, which includes SROs, counselors, psychologists, social workers and safety equipment.
Although the incident that prompted this involved a shooting at an elementary school, few talk about what it would cost to place an SRO in those buildings. Because they are smaller schools and each district usually has several, the costs would be quite high. Taking the $68,958 Ulster BOCES paid for an officer in June of 2012 (salary plus benefits) as representative, about $480,000 is being spent on the county’s seven SROs. Placing an armed cop at all 50 schools in Ulster districts — plus one officer at BOCES — would cost towns, cities and school districts roughly $3.52 million. That’s more than a sevenfold increase — which also does not account for the cost of training or equipping new officers.
Two eras in school safety
Educators tend to see two distinct eras in school safety — everything before the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School that left 12 students and two gunmen dead, and everything after.
Charles Khoury, the Ulster BOCES superintendent, compared the response to that of 9/11.
“Well, 10 or 20 years ago — that was pre-Columbine. Certainly, schools were more open and I think Columbine was kind of like the World Trade Center. You used to be able to get into an airport and go right to the gate. Now you have to go through all kinds of security. So we’re really a mirror of what’s occurred in society,” he said.
New York school districts began drafting safety plans after the Safe Schools Against Violence in Education law was passed in 2000.
“Columbine, of course, made a difference for everyone, and I think that was the wake-up call for the United States in that regard,” said New Paltz superintendent Maria Rice. “If you think about it, the protocols that even the police had for Columbine proved to be ineffective — the wait until the tactical teams got there. All of that has been completely changed.”
Early in her career, schools were more porous places. “As a young teacher, parents could just show up and almost just walk through the halls and get to your classroom without being stopped,” she said.
While recent tragedies at Columbine, Virginia Tech and Newtown are part of our collective memory, those of the past are largely forgotten. Perhaps most widely known is the 1966 shooting at the University of Texas, in which Charles Whitman shot 14 students dead and wounded over 30 others with a sniper rifle. The first modern school massacre was actually deadlier than Newtown. It took place in 1927 in Bath, Mich., a small town northeast of Lansing. It left 38 young schoolchildren and seven adults dead, and it didn’t involve guns. Andrew Kehoe, fed up with property taxes, blew up the school with dynamite.
So in the coming weeks, those in the Hudson Valley who’d like to see more funding for school safety initiatives will watch the machinations of Washington and Albany closely while others, no less concerned about the welfare of local children, will look at the failure of similar measures at Columbine and Sandy Hook, and conclude that there’s really nothing we can do to prevent the unthinkable — an uncomfortable thought, indeed.
