There will be no Broward County Public Schools police force created in the near future. On Tuesday, the school board voted unanimously to table the idea.
Broward’s public schools will continue to be served by a mixture of school resource officers provided by local police agencies and armed guardians.
“I have seen firsthand how our current SROs have served our schools with excellence, and I think through our own department, by providing uniform training on the specific needs of students, we can even improve on that,” said board member Sarah Leonardi, expressing support for the proposal even though she voted against it.
She was one of the few board members who seemed to support the plan, which would spend $37 million to hire 369 police officers as a start to the new police department.
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“When I started peeling back the layers of the proposal, and then having more conversations with law enforcement and elected officials, that it needed more work,” said school board chair and Parkland victim Lori Alhadeff.
Public comments were united in opposition to the plan.
“I think this creates an atmosphere of what could be a political police department rather than a police department," said Coconut Creek City Commissioner John Brody. "The beauty of an SRO is they’re not governed by politicians, they’re governed by the law."
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“The idea of forming a new agency, a new bureaucracy on top of what we already have, what we already know works, is like reinventing the wheel — in other words, the old adage, if it’s not broke, why fix it?” said one of the armed guardians who testified Tuesday.
“I’m not not in favor of it, but I don’t know that I’m in favor of it today. I think we have a huge amount of things that are more important that directly impact our students,” said board member and Parkland victim Debbi Hixon.
Superintendent Dr. Peter Licata echoed Leonardi’s thoughts, saying even without a new schools police department, SROs contracted through other agencies should receive advanced training.
“Just having the basic SRO training for schools is a 40-hour program and that’s great, but there’s advanced, there’s diverse students, there’s students with special needs, there’s adults, a lot of mental health issues, and we believe the SROs should be equipped with that because it’s not the same as road patrol,” Licata said.
The idea of creating a Broward County Schools Police force could come up again in the future, but it won’t be soon. Licata said the priority is to concentrate on raising the district’s grade to an “A” and on repurposing under-enrolled schools.
