Dysart Unified among school districts using off-duty police for security. Here's why

Dozens of off-duty officers are reporting to Arizona campuses to fill vacancies left by short-staffed police departments.

The part-time roles follow a recent change to the Arizona Department of Education’s longstanding School Safety Program, which funds the placement of full-time police officers, known as school resource officers, in schools across the state. The department pledged to fund more than 300 school resource officer positions this year under the $80 million grant program, which runs in three-year cycles, yet officer shortages left nearly half of the spots — 138 — unfilled.

The department in October announced it was repurposing funds for school resource offers to allow schools to hire school safety officers, a name used for part-time, off-duty police officers. Rather than a single officer stationed daily at the same school, school safety officers can work shifts at different campuses as their schedules allow, meaning a given school might rotate officers every day of the week.

Not all school districts are buying in. Less than half of the grantee districts that were unable to find a school resource officer have opted into the fledgling school safety officer program so far, according to the education department.

But for Dysart Unified School District, where fiscal restraints have for years limited armed security to middle and high schools, district leaders say the program was a logical means to expanding officer presence to every campus.

“Unfortunately, we live in a society now where our schools have to be secured,” Superintendent John Croteau said. “We know that if students aren't safe, and they don’t feel safe, and their parents don’t feel safe, then our goal of student learning is not going to happen.”

What is a 'school safety officer'? How is the role different from 'school resource officer'?

The difference between a school resource officer and a school safety officer is negligible to Joey Tokhi, principal of Dysart Unified's Sunset Hills Elementary in Surprise.

Both monitor school drop-off lines in the morning and keep tabs on the hallway during passing periods. Both check in on lunch and recess. Both conduct criminal investigations as needed.

Neither, however, was present on Tokhi's campus of roughly 1,000 students before this fall. Having an officer by any title is a welcome addition, she said. In the event of an emergency, the response from an officer already familiar with the school’s layout will be quicker.

“It’s a huge relief for me,” Tokhi said, adding that the benefit is not exclusive to security: “The memories that (students) are going to go home with? They’ll never forget that moment that, on the playground, they got to play basketball with a police officer.”

School safety officers are expected to form relationships with the students and staff they serve, often through simple gestures like stepping in to help students struggling with their homework or passing out stickers on the playground, according to Dysart Unified safety officials.

By encouraging interaction outside of strictly punitive environments, school officers help foster trust, said Officer Jessica McCloskey, who works for the Surprise Police Department and spends her off-duty Fridays as a school safety officer at Sunset Hills and other Dysart Unified schools.

“It can have a determining factor as to how they see law enforcement in the future,” McCloskey said. “It just helps bridge the gap.”

Battling a shortage of police officers in metro Phoenix

Like most police officers, Sgt. Fred Cuthbertson didn’t join the force to work at a school.

“I wanted to stop bad guys. I wanted to be like Batman,” Cuthbertson said.

A chance opportunity led him to oversee the Surprise Police Department’s school resource officer program. One unifying truth he’s found among any officer who transitions to a school resource officer role, he said, is that once they step foot on a school campus, they’re sold.

The trouble is getting them there.

To backfill school resource officer vacancies caused by police staffing shortages, the education department contracted with Off Duty Management, a company that facilitates scheduling between local police departments and schools. School safety officers make $100 an hour in Maricopa County for each shift they voluntarily pick up.

Jason Yeager, Dysart Unified’s safety coordinator, said the school safety officer model may expose more officers to working in a school setting, perhaps inspiring future school resource officers in the process.

Though the school safety officer positions use grant funds available because of school resource officer vacancies, state law governing the grant program does not explicitly allow for that switch. A School Safety Task Force pulled together by Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne recommended at its final meeting in December that the Legislature should codify school safety officers as a valid School Safety Program expenditure.

Even so, school leaders recognize school safety officers are not the end-all, be-all of school safety. In comparison to their full-time counterparts, the ability of school safety officers to build relationships with students is limited because they work just a couple of times a month. Part-timers are not going to be as familiar with students’ backgrounds and may not be as likely to recognize triggers or behavior patterns, limiting their ability to mediate when certain problems arise, Yeager said.

School safety officers are not required to undergo the same 40-hour training as school resource officers, instead relying in large part on their pre-existing knowledge, according to McCloskey, who said she did not receive specialized training to work in schools. The education department said it would provide school safety officers eight hours of asynchronous training “within 60 days of joining the program.”

There are a few situations school safety officers are not equipped to handle, Yeager said, like custody issues or students displaying extreme and hard-to-manage behaviors. In those events, schools can call in support from others in the local police department who have the necessary training.

“We know there’s a lot of benefits from a full-time SRO. We’ve seen those relationships are more longstanding,” Yeager said. “You just get a little deeper when you have an SRO versus SSO.”

Physical safety trumps mental health needs, Arizona superintendent says

In 2019, the education department expanded the school safety grant to include social workers and school counselors, which now account for the majority of requests under the program. There are 566 school counselors and social workers currently being funded.

Even so, Arizona schools chief Horne said his goal is to fund police officers in every school first. Mental health professionals come second.

“I’m all for counselors. I think it’s very important, but the first priority should be to keep these kids safe,” Horne said. “A tragedy you could have is some maniac walks in and kills 20 kids, and parents would never recover from that. If they find out the school could have had a police officer there and didn’t, you could imagine how they’d feel about that.”

Dysart Unified followed Horne's line of thinking. Social workers and counselors were not a priority when the district applied for School Safety Program grant funds about a year ago, Yeager said. They need officers first and foremost.

Last month, the Dysart Unified governing board voted to eliminate 24 budgeted social worker positions at the end of the school year. Those positions had been funded by about $2 million in Elementary and Secondary Emergency Relief funding granted during the pandemic. That federal money is now drying up and must be spent by January 2025.

Fifteen of those positions are actively filled, and those employees will be cut at the end of the year, Croteau said. Other mental health support roles will remain on school campuses, including psychologists, high school counselors, behavioral analysts and behavior coaches.

The decision to prioritize grant funding for officers allows Dysart Unified to shift dollars to other needs, Croteau said. Several school resource officers were previously funded under the school budget at $150,000 apiece between salary, training, benefits and equipment. The grant offered a way to not only fund new positions without cutting into the district budget but to also save money on existing school resource officer positions by shifting their costs to the grant.

All 24 Dysart Unified officer positions — 13 school resource officers and 11 school safety officers — now receive grant funding. That's more than any other district.

“We don’t take the decisions lightly, but there's only so many resources we can provide with the funding that we have, and we do have other positions available to make sure our families are supported,” Croteau said. “They're all equally important, and it just comes down to a financial decision for the district.”

Reach the reporter at nicholas.sullivan@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Why Dysart Unified School District has off-duty police for security