Penns Valley School District releases school security survey results. What comes next?

Months after starting a discussion around school safety, the Penns Valley Area school board on Wednesday released the results of a community-wide survey on adding school security personnel.

The board has been discussing hiring school safety personnel since September, with several board discussions and two town hall meetings in October. Penns Valley Area School District is the only district in Centre County without school resource officers or school police officers.

The survey was almost evenly split between families and community members and had only 445 responses, despite several emails, mailers and Facebook posts sent to the community. About 85% said they wanted the district to employ school security staff, with 48.4% of those responses in favor of an armed school police officer.

Superintendent Brian Griffith said the board is leaning toward hiring four school police officers rather than working with a local municipal department for resource officers. Although similar, school police officers are hired by the district, while resource officers are municipal police officers who work with the district. Both types must complete National Association of School Resource Officer training to work in schools.

Griffith said finding a municipal department that could supply four full-time SROs could be a problem, compared to hiring retired officers or state troopers to serve as SPOs.

If the board does decide to go the SPO route, the district will establish its own police force and all officers will be district employees.

The district does not have a direct cost estimate but has looked at other districts’ salaries and contracts, ranging from $36,000 to $117,000 per officer per year. Although a SPO’s salary may be in the $40,000 range, the district has to cover benefits, retirement, equipment, training and supply costs. Startup costs for a school police force in the Bald Eagle Area School District were $40,000, according to documents provided by Griffith.

Despite the costs, 90% of survey takers said they were willing to support a $9 yearly tax increase for every officer the district hired.

Central Pennsylvania Institute of Science and Technology SRO Shane Dickey, Spring Township Manager Michael Danneker and Moshannon Valley SPO Kent Bernier were also at the meeting. The three helped answer board questions about the position of school security officer and explained the differences between an SRO and SPO.

Although the board expressed interest in starting the hiring process, they were unable to vote to do so as agenda items must be made public at least 24 hours prior to a meeting. Griffith said the next steps would be to garner interest in the positions for when the board does decide to move forward. The motion will be made at a Jan. 4 board work session and voted on at the Jan. 18 meeting, he said.