Kenton County officials discuss models, alternatives to retaining school resource officers

Discussions of contract negotiations for school resource officers, or SROs, in Independence took place at the meeting of the Kenton County Mayors Group in Fort Wright on Saturday and led into broader discussions of the challenges of recruiting and retaining SROs.

The topic was broached by Independence Mayor Chris Reinersman, who stated that he was beginning to work with schools on contract negotiations for the resource officers in Independence.

School resource officers are police officers stationed in schools to respond to any criminal activity that may arise. They often provide other safety and security services throughout the course of the school day. In 2022, the state passed House Bill 63, which required all schools to have dedicated SROs, but the state provided no funding mechanism to facilitate this. Instead, the cost of hiring and retaining resource officers fell to local jurisdictions.

Independence currently has six SROs throughout the different schools–both public and private–in the city. They are all employed by the city police department directly.

Historically, the schools have reimbursed the city for the cost of SROs’ salaries while the city covered training, vehicles, equipment and other ancillary expenses. Reinersman said the city has been gradually drifting away from that model and that recent negotiation discussions suggested to him that the city wouldn’t be able to keep up with the cost of year-to-year pay increases for the officers. As a result, he hoped to get back to the original model of splitting costs with the school districts.

School district representatives did not attend the meeting.

“I think it’d be helpful, particularly for those of us that really have most of the schools to be on the same page on this,” Reinersman said and opened the topic up for discussion.

Different cities use different models for providing SROs. The Kenton County Sheriff’s Office provides SROs for many of the schools in the unincorporated county as well some schools in the independent school districts. Funding models for paying the officers varies from place to place as well. With so many municipalities in Kenton County, keeping track of all the different contracts and navigating jurisdictional overlap can be difficult.

Reinersman said, for instance, that only a portion of the students who go to the county schools located in the city live in Independence. Naturally, the county school district services the whole of Kenton County.

“So I can’t ask our taxpayers to pay the full freight on it,” Reinersman said.

“It would be great if eventually we could have a consistent model,” said Kenton County Judge/Executive Kris Knochelmann.

Knochelmann also discussed how some schools can fill their positions. Covington Mayor Joe Meyer, for instance, confirmed with LINK nky after the meeting that several of the elementary schools in Covington lacked an SRO. Other cities in the region have also struggled to meet the SRO staffing requirement in the past.

“If you have a fully qualified SRO, which, of course, most of them if not all of them are, it adds to the safety of the kids, right?” Knochelmann said. “And then when we’ve got kids who are in schools that do not have them, I think that’s concerning.”

Another issue, Reinersman argued, is that many officers will begin retiring soon, which will cause additional gaps in service.

“This SRO model is going to be out the window within the next year, probably the next two or three years, really,” as a result, Reinersman said.

One alternative that has been floated at the state level has come in the form of Senate Bill 2, which would grant school boards the right to hire so-called guardians to temporarily fill the gap of an empty SRO position. Guardians would work directly for the school board–unlike an SRO who works for a police department–and “may only include honorably discharged veterans, retired Kentucky state troopers, retired special and sworn law enforcement officers, and former federal law enforcement officers,” according to the draft of the bill.

Guardians would not have the power to make arrests, but they would be able to carry guns and would be granted similar legal immunities to conventional police officers. School boards themselves would also not be held liable for acts guardians perform in the course of their work. The bill passed the Senate with a 28-10 vote on March 5 and is currently awaiting a vote in the House.

Kenton County Chief Deputy Pat Morgan said he believed the bill would likely pass “in some form,” although he admitted “there’s a lot of heartache,” about it. Reinersman himself expressed trepidation about the idea to LINK nky after the meeting with the caveat that he had not yet researched the topic deeply.

“There are school board officials who are on board with this,” Morgan said. “There’s several in the rural areas who want this because they don’t have the law enforcement people.”

“We’ve got some real challenges coming up,” at any rate, Reinersman said.

The next meeting of the Kenton County Mayors Group will take place on Saturday, April 20 at 9 a.m. at the Edgewood Senior Center on Freedom Park Drive.