The Okaloosa County Board of Commissioners will reassess its agreement with the Okaloosa County School District to fund 50% of the costs to staff School Resource Officers in each school annually, after Commissioner Paul Mixon raised concerns that the partnership has not been equal for several years at the commission’s budget workshop on July 21.
“We fund what we believe to be half of the School Resource program and that goes to great use; glad to see that we can provide safety and security inside of the schools,” Mixon said at the budget workshop. “However, we started that with the intention of funding half. I have good reason to believe that the funding is no longer half.”
After the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, the Board of Commissioners at the time decided to place School Resource Officers in every OCSD institution, County Administrator John Hofstad said.
“The board made the decision that we would be equal partners in the funding of that operation, so we have funded School Resource Officers to the tune of 50% of that cost since 2018,” Hofstad said. “I will tell you, since 2019 the board’s allocation to fund that officer program exceeds $25 million. This year alone, our cost is $4.25 million.”
In 2018, the Florida Department of Education established the Office of Safe Schools to oversee school safety and security and place “safe-school officers” at each school, according to its website.
Hofstad said OCSD began receiving funding from this office to place SROs in schools in 2019.
“What that did was effectively reduce [OCSD’s] contribution significantly,” he said. “That was an over $2 million contribution from the state [yearly]. When I looked at it last year, the school district was funding school resource officers [with] $1.7 million.”
Mixon said the original SRO funding agreement between the county and OCSD was not based on these numbers.
“We entered this in good faith to be 50/50 partners, and based on my research so far, we’re not 50/50 partners,” he said. “We’re a vast majority stakeholder in that and I’d like to see if there’s the appetite for staff to look into the last seven years and give that back to us so that we can utilize that as we put the budget together in the future.”
Commissioner Trey Goodwin said the issue at hand isn’t about support for SROs; it’s about transparency.
“I think what this is about is county government constantly looking at its own accountability, reevaluating how we’re spending county taxpayer dollars and determining if we’re spending those dollars within our proper channels and silos,” Goodwin told Mid Bay News.
Goodwin said he proposed returning money the county would be using on SRO funding to the taxpayers.
“I had proposed that we simply return that back to the county taxpayers in the form of a tax reduction, and how that funding would then look going forward would be a function of the district’s budgeting process and how they interact with their legislative funding from the state of Florida.”
Mixon specifically asked researchers to find how much OCSD budgets annually for the SRO program, how much Safe Schools money it receives annually and how those numbers compare to the county’s yearly contributions. The board will present these numbers and decide how to proceed with the partnership at a future meeting.
“I’m very grateful that we can do what we can to protect the children that are inside of the institutions,” Mixon said. “However, our partnership is off. We’re not 50/50 partners. Someone else is paying most of their bill, and they’re not contributing to ours. As good partners, we would have been noticed of that the first year and our 50% would’ve been adjusted based on, potentially, half of the Safe School money, but that’s not what happened. So, I believe the numbers will show us that over the last seven years, we’ve continuously been the overwhelming partner in this.”
Hofstad said for “full disclosure” he previously met with OCSD Superintendent Marcus Chambers and Sheriff Eric Aden regarding the uneven SRO funding split. He said the county has an estimated budget of $4.4 million for the program in the upcoming fiscal year, and the school district will receive another $2.9 million from the Department of Education in Safe Schools money.
