By Patricia A. Scheyer
NKyTribune reporter
Kenton County Mayors discussed the difficulty of acquiring School Resource Officers, in all schools but particularly in parochial schools at the monthly Mayors’ group meeting Saturday.
Villa Hills Mayor Heather Jansen told the group she has two parochial schools asking for SRO’s.
“Right now we have a contract with Kenton County to fund River Ridge as well as the school board,” she explained. “But recently, of course, in light of events last year we had our two parochial schools ask how much it would cost to fund a school resource officer for them. We looked at it, and the problem we have is that without legislative backing we can’t use any taxpayer dollars on our end to pay for this SRO unless we can show that we can use this SRO as part of our police force. The elementary already told us that there is no way they can get the funding for that, because it would also include start up costs. Has there been any movement for parochial schools to be covered under the rules for SRO?”
Kentucky Senator Shelley Frommeyer said she didn’t know, but they do know that the commitment is there. The idea is to share the resources so that all schools have an SRO, at least part time.
Walton Mayor Gabe Brown said he has Assumption Church in his city, which is separate from the Diocese of Covington, and they have an unofficial program where dads of the students take turns coming in and sitting in the office.
“They don’t work there, they are there in case,” said Brown. “I don’t think that is necessarily ideal, I think it would be better for things that could go wrong to have an SRO.”
Independence Mayor Christopher Reinersman said the city puts an SRO in St Cecelia school. He said the Kenton County school district pays for the salary for the SRO, and the city pays for the training, the uniforms, the gun, any benefits and the car. He offered St Cecelia the same deal, if they pay the salary, they pay for the rest. He said his SROs are part time retired officers.
“It is a big expense,” he said “Overall we break it down to a per student rate. I sent my kids to Catholic schools for 12 years.”
Mayor Jansen related how at the end of the school year last year they had an incident where a student threatened to come in the next day and shoot all the fifth grade girls because ‘they annoyed him.’
“We were on it, I mean, my police they were great, they handled everything,” she said. “It is something to sit back, and while I trusted the principal, and the SRO from Covington Catholic was there, it is something to knowingly send your child into something that could be — I wasn’t too worried, but it is terrifying, sending your child in and knowing you might not see them again.”
House bill 63 was signed by Governor Andy Beshear in 2022 which required all public school campuses to have an SRO. This last legislative session in 2023 took the movement one step farther by allowing private and parochial schools to enter into agreements with local law enforcement agencies or the Department of Kentucky State Police to provide School Resource Officers. When the Governor signed the bill, he said the government did it because it is the right thing, and because parents want hard working, capable officers there in the school with their children to protect them.
The problem with the legislation is that it is an unfunded mandate, and parochial schools, in particular, are having trouble affording the extra protection.
Pat Morgan, chief deputy for the Kenton County Sheriff’s office, added that there is a shortage of law enforcement officers all over the country. He said his office covers Holmes, Holmes Middle Schools, because Covington won’t do it.
“Senator (Chris) McDaniel asked our group how bad this SRO problem is, and we said — quite honestly — it is bad,” Morgan said.
He said there are people who want to work in the schools, and they usually have to be involved with juvenile issues because if there are juvenile issues they have to transport the juveniles all the way downstate if they make an arrest. Morgan thinks it is a symptomatic of other problems involved, and he thinks it will get worse before it gets better.
Mayor Reinersman told the group he agreed to put officers in the schools this year, so as not to leave them without an SRO at the last minute, but he isn’t sure what is going to happen next year. There was a little extra expense this year, and the city agreed to cover it. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually it would come to the point of Kenton County school district having their own police department.
Another problem is with the Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 police officers. Reinersman explained that the pool of retired officers came from the Tier 1 officers who could retire in their late 40’s or early 50’s. The state has been tightening the rules on how long the officers have to work before retiring, so the tier 2 and tier officers have to work longer before they retire. Reinersman said their department has tier 3 officers now, so the fear of no longer having the retired officers to choose from is very real.
Taylor Mill Mayor Daniel Bell said Scott and Woodland need an SRO, but he had problems with the school district because they didn’t like the increase that they would pay 75 percent of the cost and the city would fund 25 percent.
“The issue is the school board doesn’t understand, and haven’t read, or doesn’t want to understand the legislation,” Bell said. “The actual legislation says they have to pay for it. We don’t have to pay for it. The legislation came through the first time and there was an amendment of $71 million dollars to help supplement the cost of the salaries for resource officers. That was cut out of the original bill. So with Scott, we did that for years on a 50/50 basis. So because of the new legislation, we said ‘hey tell you what we’ll do, we don’t want to leave you high and dry, we’ll do 75/25.’ Don’t forget we have the uniform, the car, we have the training, we said significant training for our guys when we were doing that. They refused our offer. Then they complained we weren’t going to do a resource officer.”
Bell said the city was going to do a resource officer but at a greater cost to the school board. He said it is important for everyone to read the legislation. Bell also said he thought it was important for all the cities to get on the same page in this matter.
Morgan said the Diocese of Covington told them that they would be trying to find a way to fund resource officers. They said Catholic schools can have an SRO, but they had to figure out a way to fund it. Some of the schools have come up with ways to fund it and some haven’t. Morgan said they told the Diocese about a stopgap way to have officers stop in during the day but not stay too long. and the Diocese told them that would be good, even though they would like an officer to be there all day.
“They said we really want somebody there all the time,” remembered Morgan. “I said I understand, we would like to have someone there all the time too, but if we don’t have the funding mechanism, we don’t have the resources to put there, something is better than nothing.”