COLUMN: If It Happens Here ...

*This is an opinion column*

TUSCALOOSA, AL — By this point, we've all seen the pictures, videos and posts.

A terrified little girl with her hand pressed against a school bus window, squalling and traumatized; police heroically neutralizing the Nashville school shooter; the myriad boneheaded opinions blurted from politicians and pundits alike politicizing these dead children and adults for nothing more than political capital with their base.

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And in a week or so, us folks in Tuscaloosa will likely forget about it and move on with our lives until the next tragedy, giving little thought to the blind spots in our own community that could allow for such a heinous act of violence.

Indeed, I remember well a conversation I had with a friend on Feb. 8 after a student at Brookwood High School was arrested for having a gun on campus. Had it not been for the quick thinking and decisive action of the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Office's school resource officer on duty that day, the situation could have been much worse.

But never mind that less than a week later, voters in Tuscaloosa County — minus the city of Tuscaloosa — flatly voted down a measure to raise property taxes in the county to fund needed improvements for the Tuscaloosa County School System. Given the latest big-picture social development, one of the top wish-list items for the anticipated revenue was adding new school resource officers for county schools, along with new security upgrades for existing buildings.

The measure failed with roughly 80% of the vote opposed. Never mind the older schools in the TCSS footprint that barely have central air and lack the high-tech security infrastructure enjoyed by their peers, which allow entire schools to be locked down with the push of a button.

And never mind that the Tuscaloosa County School System — with schools spread out over a bigger surface area than the state of Rhode Island — have less school resource officers (SROs) than Tuscaloosa City Schools. None of that matters if you're solely worried about an extra $300 on your annual property tax bill.

I guess the Tuscaloosa County Farmers Federation has more important thoughts about school safety than us peon parents.

But, then again, we in Tuscaloosa County have tended to take school safety for granted, especially when considering that we've not had the unenviable distinction of being dragged across the national media cycle for a senseless act of violence against the softest of targets in our community.

There's been so much to say on the political right about the dangers of "drag queens" and so much on the left about dread over our nation's gun culture. But when 80% of a local electorate votes down such a common sense measure that would only improve the safety of our local youth, that says to me that the different sides in our community are only willing to carry water so far for their political positions.

Indeed.

I hate hypotheticals, but in a situation where empathy is so sorely needed, let's consider if such a tragic act as seen in Nashville happened in Tuscaloosa tomorrow.

We had our chance to do something and, in our selfish pride, opted to be penny-pinching misers instead of considering for a second the basic safety of our community.

It could happen anywhere. Our kid goes to Northport Intermediate School — the most secure in the entire county — but none of that matters. It could be way up in the fringes of the county in Samantha or Lake View, or at the largest of them all, Tuscaloosa County High School.

The possibilities become jarring when realizing that the Tuscaloosa County School System has a total of 11 SROs for more than 30 schools and roughly 19,000 students. Had the proposed property tax increase passed, the county school system had hoped to hire 20 more school resource officers, along with implementing security upgrades at every school within its dominion.

Now, compare that to the much smaller City of Tuscaloosa school system, which has a total of 14 SROs — 10 full-time and four auxiliary officers.

"For most of this school year, we've had 10 full-time officers in the schools," Tuscaloosa City Schools Public Information Officer Lydia Avant told Patch on Tuesday. "Four of those are auxiliary, but they are still full time. We also utilize 45 part-time contract officers to fill in so that we have an officer on each one of our school campuses most of the time."

Unfortunately, the much-larger county school system does not have such luxuries and left their fate up to the local electorate. But to be fair, both school systems have done an exemplary job integrating their SROs into their school communities.

Hell, I still adore my SRO from Northside High School — Deputy Martha Hocutt — and if the school resource officers in this county are half the cop she is, we'll be in good shape.

But it must be noted at this point that the majority of the county school system's funding comes from federal sources, giving administrators little wiggle room to be creative with how they use the biggest chunk of their allocated funding. For the state's small portion of funding, it's even more restrictive and doesn't even provide a line item for school resource officers.

Instead, that responsibility falls on the county. And it's been the Tuscaloosa County Commission that has mostly financed SROs through its partnership with TCSS. The county's coffers are indeed deep thanks to fiscal responsibility over recent years, but that money is far from being thrown around as a cure to every problem that comes up.

"TCSS is the largest school system in the state, from a geographic standpoint, and the ninth-largest in student population," TCSS Superintendent Keri Johnson told me last November. "At the same time, we rank at the very bottom of the state in local funding. In a district our size, with 35 school buildings and a growing population, additional resources are necessary to address the needs we have. More than 90 percent of our funding is already committed by state and federal law, so that leaves us very little to address our local needs."

As Patch previously reported, TCSS has said its goal through the proposed tax increase was to add roughly 20 more school resource officers, which would present a recurring cost to the school system. Never mind Gov. Kay Ivey is mulling how to parcel out the state's financial surplus, but seems more focused on building new prisons than boosting funding for schools that need it.

At present, there are 11 school resource officers working in the different Tuscaloosa County school zones, with six fully funded by the Tuscaloosa County Commission, while TCSS funds one.

The salary and benefits cost for the other four officers are split between the commission and the school system. Costing anywhere between $90,000 to $100,000 a year for each school resource officer's salary and benefits, there is no state line item to help the school system fund additional SROs on campus, thus, any funding must come from local sources.

I write all this to say that I'm tired of the grandstanding from both sides who are more willing to enlist in the culture wars than they are to support common sense measures to protect our children. I'm tired of being yelled at in all-caps on social media about how guns aren't the problem, all while our state is admittedly more interested in incarcerating people than addressing its mental health issues and flimsy gun laws.

The state isn't going to fix this problem for us, neither are the feds. It has to start at the local level before it's too late.

So, look into your heart and ask yourself how much such peace of mind is really worth?

If we haven't done enough or invested enough as a community and death comes calling, by that point it will be too late.

And then what? What will you do? How will you react?

Will you kick the idealogical can?

Will you praise the police for doing all they could?

Will you start to homeschool your child?

Will you donate to a congressman parroting your viewpoint?

Will you shove you head in the sand and ignore it?

Will you go to the store and buy another gun?

Will you protest in front of an empty administrative office?

Will you blame people in your own community instead of wondering what proactive measures could have been in place?

Or will you demand reasonable action today in your community? Action that produces results you can see and put your trust in.

Proactive measures are not a panacea, but certainly provide a more suitable option to this parent than giving guns to exhausted and underpaid teachers or abolishing public education because it's too "woke."

Safety for our children shouldn't be politicized. It should be a basic expectation if we really are supposed to be the exceptional nation that we pretend to be.

Ryan Phillips is an award-winning journalist, editor and opinion columnist. He is also the founder and field editor of Tuscaloosa Patch. The views expressed in this column are his own and in no way reflective of any views held by our parent company or sponsors.