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While not in a hurry to act, the Beebe School Board is starting to take a look at adding a commissioned school security officer program.
Assistant Superintendent Travis Fletcher presented on the program at last week’s board meeting, saying that a lot of districts are using it. “What this does is it allows school staff to carry a firearm on campus, and you will see different districts use it for different things.”
Fletcher said that at his previous school district, Concord, it did not have school resource officers. He said the district relied on the county, and the response time was about 30 to 35 minutes, so the CSSO program was something the district thought it needed to have.
“Here [in the Beebe School District], we have SROs, but I will say there’s a lot of advantages and positives to this [program] if it’s carried out properly,” he said.
Flethcer said that having commissioned officers improves “law enforcement response time. It also kind of demonstrates a proactive commitment to students/staff safety. This is not something that everybody can do. There’s a vetting process, extensive training that’s involved in this.”
He said while the CSSO program provides school employees with authority to carry a firearm on campus, “they’re not armed teachers, they’re trained, vetted, certified officers of the district. You have to actually go through the Arkansas State Police, an approved program, background checks, all those things, and then you’ve got to have at least 60 hours of instruction conducted by the Arkansas State Police certified instructors.”
Fletcher said the company the Concord School District used was called D2 Solutions. He said it’s actually the Harding University campus police that do that. They come on campus and train the officers and will go to the range probably 15 times during the school year.
“It’s a very thorough, vetted process,” Fletcher said. “That training includes legal authority for CSSOs, use of force, weapons of safety, live fire training, active shooter response simulations, stop the bleed and every aspect of it.”
Fletcher made it clear that the program would not be replacing SROs. The Beebe School District has its own police department.
“This is just more firepower throughout the district,” he said. “We’ve got a widespread district, and they [SROs] can’t be everywhere all at once. If you think about our high school, our high school has three campuses. This just has more eyes out there. These individuals, they’re not arresting people, they’re not writing tickets; they are there just worst-case scenario situation.”
School districts in Bald Knob, Des Arc, Heber Springs, Concord, Shirley and Poyen, Bismarck and Blytheville are provided training by D2 Solutions, according to Fletcher.
“It’s extensive,” Fletcher said, referring to the training. “And you find out real quick if it is something that you can do. They put you through a lot. They shoot rubber bullets at you, all those things, during the training.”
Superintendent Zeb Prothro said the district’s report on the program was strictly informational right now. He said his style is if the district was going to do something, it would be doing it slowly.
“My recommendation would be that we might only send one or two staff members first, starting with the administration,” Prothro said. “Our safety director, Mr. [Clint] Williams, has actually gone through the training already as well [in Bald Knob].”
Prothro said he was not familiar with D2 Solutions, so there would be a process for selecting a company for the training.
Board President Clay Goff said, “I think we need to press forward with it.” The district will be investigating the program further.
