Tom Horne announces plan to fill Arizona schools' police vacancies with off-duty officers
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne on Wednesday announced a new program to address vacant school resource officer positions in Arizona schools.
The Arizona Department of Education has contracted with Off Duty Management, a company that schedules off-duty police officers for security positions, to assign off-duty officers to schools that do not have a dedicated school resource officer, which is the title used for a full-time police officer assigned to a school.
The Department of Education granted funding to every school district that requested a school resource officer through its School Safety Program. This state-funded competitive grant program was established by the Legislature in 1994 to place school resource officers in schools and expanded in 2019 to include the placement of school counselors and social workers.
But, due to a shortage of police officers in the state, there weren't enough officers to fill the positions funded in the most recent grant cycle. There are 138 vacant school resource officer positions across the state, Horne said.
"That was quite a serious problem," he said. The positions staffed by this new initiative — school safety officers — will be armed, perform the same duties as a school resource officer, conduct site assessments, provide recommendations for school safety and ensure their assigned school has an updated Emergency Response Plan, according to the Department of Education.
The school safety officers won't receive as much training as school resource officers. While school resource officers receive 40 hours of training, school safety officers will receive eight hours of asynchronous training from the Department of Education on "things that are unique to the school environment," said Michael Kurtenbach, who oversees school safety efforts for the Department of Education. Part of that training is to let officers know they are at schools to enforce the law, not as an extension of the school administration to enforce school policies, he said.
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Horne said the school safety officers, as compared to school resource officers, won't "do as well" cultivating relationships with students because an individual school safety officer is more likely to be at a school one or two days a week — different officers may fill the position at a school throughout the week — rather than five.
Off-duty officers in the Phoenix area will make $100 an hour through this program, Horne said.
It will be a cross-jurisdictional program, with officers able to travel to other cities to fill positions in schools.
Brian Manley, the president of Off Duty Management, said it was the first agreement the national company has had with a state entity like Arizona's Education Department. Off-duty officers are typically scheduled for security positions at places like movie theaters, restaurants and traffic construction zones, he said.
Thirty-three school districts, which had School Safety Program requests for school resource officers approved but were unable to staff those positions, have opted into the program for the school year, Kurtenbach said.
Horne said he hopes that the shortage of police officers will ultimately be solved and schools can hire full-time school resource officers.
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Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter: @maddieparrish61.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Horne announces program for off-duty officers to staff Arizona schools
