Arizona schools get $48 million for campus police, counselors and social workers

$48 million will be available to Arizona schools that request armed campus officers, counselors and social workers.

That announcement came Monday from the Arizona State Board of Education, which said in the money comes from a buildup of unused funds over the past several years.

Just under $40 million s will be allocated to school resource and school safety officers, while the remaining $8 million will go toward 66 new counselor and social worker positions.

State Superintendent Tom Horne said the shortage of available police officers around the state has been a problem in the past, but he’s found a solution.

“We’ve solved that problem by using something called school safety officers as opposed to school resource officers,” he said, “School resource officers are police that are there full-time, and that’s a big benefit. Not only do they protect [the kids], they get to know the kids, and the kids get to trust them rather than treat them as an enemy.”

It’s important to note that school safety officers, said Horne, are police that aren’t at the school full-time, usually working overtime, and they often split up the weekdays between different officers.

He said it’s not ideal, but that it’s preferable to not having a trained officer at all.

Horne said that luckily Arizona schools have not yet been subjected to “the ultimate test” despite school threats increasing nationwide over the past several years, but that he is confident in the abilities of school resource and safety officers.

“We use Navy SEALs to train [officers] because it’s a special skill beyond that of ordinary police officers to handle an invasion,” he said, “... and the training has gotten so much praise that we got requests from all over the state for the SEALs to give them that training.”