Orange County students head back-to-school soon, and 9 Investigates learned an effort to hire additional officers to protect the students is taking longer than leaders planned.
Badges and guns were assigned to five Orange County Public School Police Department officers, which is an independent department.
The goal over the summer was to double the department's size for its second school year.
“The only large urban district without its own police agency and we really needed to get up with the times,” said School Board chairman Bill Sublette.
But when children head back to class, only two more officers will be on the job.
Sgt. Celena Cutts and Sgt. Ron Krueger are in the department's field training program.
Like the other officers with the Orange County Public School Police Department, they won't replace on-campus resource officers.
“We still have local contracts with every one of our local agencies,” said Sublette.
Sublette told Channel 9 that last year 1,000 arrests were made in Orange County schools.
But none of those arrests were made by the district's police department.
Security expert and longtime police Officer Zach Hudson said that's not a bad thing.
“When you make an arrest, you're going to have about four hours-worth of paperwork to do. So if you're doing paperwork you're not doing school security,” said Hudson.
OCPS will monitor social media. It's just one thing the district wouldn't be able to do without an accredited agency.
“We need to have access to national criminal databases to find out whether there's gang activity in our schools what's going on with students' criminal records in our schools,” said Sublette.
Sublette said the goal is to make fewer arrests through civil citations and prevention, with the help of a student-centric agency that over the next decade could stand alone to protect students.
“We're not rushing into it. We want to do it right,” said Sublette.
Sublette said this year's budget allows them to hire eight more officers.
Cox Media Group
