Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne plans to fill vacant school resource officer positions in Arizona’s schools with off-duty cops.
The Arizona Department of Education has contracted with a company that schedules off-duty police officers for security positions to assign them to schools that don’t have a dedicated school resource officer.
The department allocated funding to every school district that requested a school resource officer in 2019. However, more than a hundred positions remained vacant throughout the state due to a shortage.
These new officers, known as school safety officers, will receive less training than traditional school resource officers, who typically get 40 hours of training. School safety officers will take eight hours of asynchronous training on things unique to the school environment.
Grand Canyon Elementary and High School will get a school safety officer through this program, as well as Monument Valley High School and Kayenta Middle School.