Johnston Police Chief Lobbies for Second Officer in Schools

Johnston has just one police officer working the halls of multiple school buildings and meeting 6,200 students, a situation the city's police chief calls "grossly lacking."

Police Chief Bill Vaughn laid out details of the need for a second school resource officer to and members at a joint work session on Monday evening.

"Our SRO spends most of her time running back and forth between the high school and the middle school," Vaughn said. "She doesn't have the opportunity to make rounds or circulate to the other schools."

Backup Officer Needed to Cover Training, Sick Leave

Another disadvantage of having only one school officer is that when the officer is placed on special assignment, training or on sick leave, there is no one to fill her spot.

"We don't have a shift relief factor," Vaughn said. "To take and put an officer in a school, it takes some pretty significant training. I'm not flush with a lot of police officers so I don't have one that I can back fill in there."

Vaughn showed statistics from other metro schools for comparison. While the statistics were a year old, the showed Johnston was behind other school districts.

Mike Farrell, Johnston school board member, asked if there was a rule of thumb to the number of students per officer.

"There is not," Vaughn said. "We've had a number of high-profile events this year. When we get tied up in those they are just hugely time consuming to take from the event to resolution … it takes the SRO out of the loop for a significant amount of time."

School Officers Build Relationships With Students

While there aren't too many statistics from when the program began in 2007, Vaughn said most reports are informational or law enforcement-related.

"We were just largely reporting law enforcement things," Vaughn said. "One of the things I gave Jessica the task of doing, I don't want to hear just the bad things, I want some reporting on positive things. One of the big pieces the SRO does is not just build relationships with school officials, but with the students."

School board member John Dutcher said looking at the number of out of school suspensions from the beginning of the program to now was significant.

"So just looking at the data, the benefit is what we aren't seeing on here, the presence dissuades that activity," he said. "One of the things I noticed when I looked at our Johnston discipline information from 2006-07 if you look at the metric of out of school suspensions we had 168 then but by 2010-11 down to 103."

The issue is likely to come before both the school board and Johnston City Council in future work sessions.