$15M approved for Arizona school safety personnel after uptick in threats

The Arizona Department of Administration has approved a waiver request to allow $15 million in funding to be used for school safety personnel.

Late last week, the Arizona Department of Education identified $15 million in carryover dollars that could be used to pay for additional officers through the School Safety Program.

“It’s situations where we allocated money to schools and they didn’t get started right away,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne said. “There may have been a problem with the local police department didn’t have somebody available. Then eventually they got started, but there was left over money because they got started late. That’s what this is.”

That's a cumulative carryover for the life of the current grant going back to fiscal year 2022. ADE asked the state Department of Administration to waive a portion of state law that requires at least six weeks of public notice for grant application requests.

Now that the waiver is approved, schools can apply for funding for armed officers, school counselors and social workers. Priority will be given to requests for officers.

Horne said they saw an uptick in school threats over a span of 20 days in September.

“There have been 130 school threats,” he said, “[88] of them have been shooting threats or weapons in the school. That is really scary. I mean if you have that quantity of those kinds of threats, sooner or later something bad is gonna happen.”

Those numbers come from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. ACTIC reported that it received 177 school threats from Jan. 1, 2024, to Sept. 3, 2024. From Sept. 4, 2024, to Sept. 24, 2024, the ACTIC received over 130 school threats. Of those reports, 88 were shooting threats or weapons in school, eight were bomb threats, and eight were classified as general threats. The remaining threats were identified as duplicates or generic threats unrelated to a specific Arizona school.

Threats are daily occurrence, police say

Police are expressing alarm at the volume of threats of violence made against schools in recent weeks here and around the country. At a town hall in Scottsdale, law enforcement said the threats have become a nearly daily occurrence.

Phoenix police Executive Assistant Chief Derek Elmore said the department has checked out roughly 80 school threats since the academic year began.

"I think that part of it is the internet and the accessibility to the internet and then that the people keep propagating (the threat) by reposting it, so it becomes a new threat and then we have to investigate it all over again like it was all new again," Elmore said.

Scottsdale police say they have to treat each threat as legitimate. Last week, more than 40 officers swarmed Chaparral High School following a 911 call there that turned out to be a hoax.