Sheriff proposes plan to beef up school security

KINGSPORT, Tenn. – School Resource Officer Jeff McKittrick roamed Sullivan South High School’s cafeteria Friday afternoon and chatted with some of its 1,000 students while they were eating lunch.

“It’s hard to plan a day because you never know what may come up and where it’s going to lead me,” said McKittrick, one of Sullivan County’s four school resource officers who provide security at the county’s 27 public schools.

Each officer is assigned to provide security at one of the county’s four high schools and all of the schools that feed it with students, meaning that McKittrick is responsible for South High, Colonial Heights Middle, Sullivan Middle, Miller Perry Elementary, Rock Springs Elementary and Sullivan Elementary schools.

Before he finishes his day, McKittrick will help two high school students settle their differences, before things get out of hand and what he describes as a misunderstanding between teenagers becomes violent. He’ll also check in with the other five schools he patrols in the south school zone, an area that stretches across the county’s southwest corner, and run security at a Friday night football game that pits South’s Rebels against Daniel Boone High School.

“They’re kind of unsung heroes until something happens,” Sheriff Wayne Anderson said of the school resource officers. The sheriff’s office, together with the school system, runs the resource officer program.

On Aug. 30, that something was an armed intruder who walked into Sullivan Central, threatening to harm the students and staff. But thanks to a school resource officer who was at the right place at the right time, Anderson said, what could have been potentially devastating ended without injury to students or school personnel.

Less than six hours after the intruder’s death, Anderson held a news conference to discuss the situation and praise his officers and school officials for their professional behavior during the crisis. He also made a simple plea for help.

“These are your children and there is only so much we can do to keep them safe,” Anderson said as he publicly asked for money to hire eight new school resource officers to patrol each of the county’s middle and intermediate schools.

In a funding request Anderson plans to present to county and school officials this month, he estimates meeting his goal will cost more than half a million dollars during the first year. After that, he said, the cost will be $366,000 a year.

Hiring additional officers would make the county one of only a few Mountain Empire localities that has an officer at every middle and high school – places where a national law enforcement organization claims such officers are needed the most, because of safety concerns and the impact they can have on the students they serve.

While many law enforcement agencies in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia would like to meet that goal, they simply cannot because of the costs to hire, train and equip the officers and station them in the schools.

The tight economy is even forcing some localities in the region to cut back on the few school resource officers they do have, according to a survey of local law enforcement agencies the Bristol Herald Courier conducted last week.

“Everything is about funding nowadays,” said Kevin Quinn, the second vice president of the National Association of School Resource Officers and the agency’s official spokesperson. “When you’ve got budget limitations you’ve got to work within them.”

Something happened

No one knows exactly why Thomas Richard Cowan, a 62-year-old Kingsport resident who had a history of problems with law enforcement, arrived at Central High School at 9:15 a.m. Aug. 30 with two handguns and several rounds of ammunition. But when he pulled one of the weapons and pointed it at the principal, it was a school resource officer who stepped in between them.

Anderson said School Resource Officer Carolyn Gudger managed to keep Cowan calm and move him into an area where he couldn’t harm students or school personnel.

Meanwhile, witnesses to the incident called 9-1-1 and initiated an immediate lockdown, an emergency response exercise where school personnel try to get every student out of the hallways or open spaces and safely behind a locked classroom door.

State law requires all of Tennessee’s schools to practice lock-down drills twice a year. Central High’s last lockdown drill was Nov. 11, 2009, school officials said.

Anderson said two deputies arrived at Central High School within minutes of Cowan’s arrival. They tried convincing Cowan to put down his weapon, but ended up shooting him when he didn’t follow that order and continued pointing his weapon back at them.

“It just couldn’t have gone any better unless it didn’t happen,” Anderson said that afternoon during the news conference in which he thanked his officers for their hard work and the school’s faculty for knowing what to do and keeping their heads cool amid the chaos.

The sheriff then made his plea to hire the additional officers – a request he reinforced by saying Gudger was checking in on an unruly student at another school Aug. 30 and had returned to Central’s campus just minutes before Cowan arrived at its front door.

Because Gudger was there when the armed intruder showed up and was able to work with the school’s faculty and staff the way she did, things at Central quickly returned to some degree of normal in the days following the incident.

Although 200 students stayed home the day after the shooting, school officials said Central’s attendance returned to normal levels Thursday, with only about 60 of its 1,100 students not showing up for class.

Gudger also is expected to return to school this week, Anderson said, after spending the past few days on administrative leave so she could be debriefed about the shooting and have a few days to reflect on what happened.

The officers

A gray-haired man selling South High School memorabilia in advance of the Friday night football game walked up to McKittrick and started talking with the school resource officer about Cowan’s visit to Central.

“It was only a matter of time before something like that happened here,” in the county, the man said before he and McKittrick nodded their heads and went back to work.

Quinn, the national association spokesman who also is a school resource officer in Central Arizona’s Chandler School District, agrees with that assessment. An armed intruder like Cowan can show up anywhere regardless of a school’s location or grade level, he said; that’s why in an ideal world there would be an armed school resource officer at every school.

“If you’ve got an officer at every school then that’s your first responder, there’s no time delay in the response to your threat,” Quinn said.

But he said he also knows that equipping, training and paying school resource officers – the Tennessee Department of Education recommends they should have at least two years of law enforcement experience – can pose considerable costs.

Anderson pays his school resource officers an average salary of $33,000 a year, which means the eight new officers he wants would cost the county $363,000 including benefits.

Other Mountain Empire localities expect their school resource officers to have at least three years of experience and pay them starting wages of $29,000 a year, a cost that comes to about $38,000 each when factoring in the benefits.

Recognizing it’s not an ideal world, especially during these tough economic times, Quinn said, his organization recommends a resource officer at every middle school and high school – because that’s where the problems are most likely to erupt.

At those age levels, Quinn said, students begin experimenting with alcohol and drugs, they’re most likely to run into gangs, and most incidents of fighting, bullying and other violent behaviors start to take place.

“That’s where a lot of your bad choices are being made,” Quinn said, adding that having a school resource officer at every middle and high school ensures each school has a person to handle the situations these bad behaviors might cause.

Putting an officer at each middle and high school also gives students a chance to build a strong relationship with law enforcement while they’re an impressionable age, said James Chumney, past president of the Tennessee School Resource Officers Association.

“The best time to start training a child and getting them to trust law enforcement officers is in middle school,” said Chumney, who spent 12 years working as a school resource officer in Lexington, Tenn. “Once they get to high school they are set in their ways.”

McKittrick said he plays this mentoring role for South’s 1,000 students every day; in fact it’s one of the reasons he asked to be the campus’ school resource officer when the job became available four years ago.

“I thought it would be something challenging for me to do, where I could have a chance to help the children,” said McKittrick who has a teenage daughter and a pre-teen son.

The school resource officer said he’s often approached by students who ask him questions about drugs or other situations and ask him for help when they’re having problems with their classmates, their friends or in their relationships.

Some students have even come to McKittrick with problems from home, he said, adding that unfortunately some students at the schools he patrols have come forward to report significant instances of abuse and neglect.

Lately though, he said, most of the high school’s students have been asking whether McKittrick has ever been in a situation like Gudger and had a gun pointed in his face, whether he’s ever had to shoot anyone and whether he’s ever been in a police chase.

“They’re kind of curious about that stuff,” McKittrick said, adding that many of his students are surprised to learn he spent 10 years working as a police officer in Florida before he came to the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Office.

Numbers and funding

The Mountain Empire is home to 61 school resource officers like McKittrick, according to survey of local law enforcement agencies the Herald Courier conducted last week.

Of the 16 Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia localities in the survey, only four – Bristol, Va., Bristol Tenn., Kingsport, Tenn., and Johnson City, Tenn. – had enough personnel to place an officer in every school with seventh-graders.

“Our goal would be to have a school resource officer at every high school and one to patrol the middle and elementary schools,” said Washington County, Va., Sheriff Fred Newman, whose locality has the region’s second-largest school system with 17 schools.

The county school system also is home to seven resource officers, including five from Newman’s office and two from the town of Abingdon’s Police Department.

The two Abingdon officers work at Abingdon High School and E.B. Stanley Middle School, Newman said, because those two schools are inside the town limits.

The five officers from Newman’s office patrol the county’s three other public high schools: Holston High School in Damascus, John Battle High School in Bristol, and Patrick Henry High School in Glade Spring.

They also patrol the Neff Center for Science and Technology, Patrick Henry High School, the Washington County Technical School, and the county’s three remaining middle schools and seven elementary schools.

School resource officers in Washington County earn a base salary of about $29,000 a year, which comes to $38,000 with benefits, and have at least three years of experience.

Newman said the county government contributes $76,000 toward the school resource officer program. The rest of the money comes from the Virginia Compensation Board, a state agency that pays salaries for sheriff’s deputies and other constitutional officers.

The sheriff said last week’s incident at Central High School has made him think about the role his officers play in providing security at the schools.

“Money’s always a concern,” Newman said, adding that before he can hire new officers he’ll have to figure out a way to pay them without removing his staff from other law enforcement functions such as patrol and investigative work.

Wise County Sheriff Ronnie Oakes also has been looking at his county’s school resource officers after last week’s incident. His department, too, has concerns about money.

“It’s been our goal to get one in every high school and middle school,” said Oakes, whose county has 15 public schools. “But we just couldn’t get the funding.”

Last year, Wise County had five school resource officers who worked at its schools, including one who came from the Pound Police Department and worked at Pound High School. The school system paid the salaries of the other four officers, a total cost of about $152,000 including benefits. But the county school system had to cut one of its resource officers this year, Oakes said, after state budget cuts cost it $10 million revenue.

The Pound Police Department also pulled its officer due to budget cuts this year, Oakes said, which would have left the county with only three school resource officers if the Wise County Board of Supervisors hadn’t stepped in and agreed to pay one officer’s salary.

As a result of the cuts, Oakes said, the county now has a school resource officer at Coeburn High School, one at Powell Valley High School, one at J.J. Kelly High School, and a fourth who patrols Appalachia, St. Paul and Pound high schools.

“We need a police officer in every school building,” the Wise County sheriff said. “The thing [at Central High School] underscores the fact that we need one in every school.”

Wise County isn’t the only locality in the Mountain Empire that’s lost a school resource officer this year. The city of Norton lost its only resource officer, Police Capt. James Love said, after the sheriff’s deputy who held the position retired last spring.

Since that loss, Love said, the Norton Police Department’s officers have walked through the city’s two schools – Norton Elementary School and J.J. Burton High School – whenever they are out on patrol.

The department also is applying for a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services program so it can fill the position on a more permanent basis without taking officers off the streets.

gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518