Deputies running with guns drawn, victims screaming in agony, gunshots echoing through school hallways.
Thankfully, it was just a drill, with Broward Sheriff’s deputies preparing for a nightmare they hope will never occur again.
“We’re prepared, we’re doing the things that are important, we’re gonna continue to test our capabilities before bad things happen,” said Sheriff Gregory Tony.
The exercise at Boyd Anderson High School did not include armed guardians.
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“I don’t mean any disrespect to guardians, but you’re not police officers,” said Mike Hernandez, a Pembroke Pines city commissioner.
Hernandez is furious that when school starts next week, his city’s nine public elementary schools and three middle schools will not be protected by school resource officers, or SROs. They will have armed guardians on campus instead. The two high schools in Pembroke Pines, West Broward and Flanagan, will still have their usual SROs.
“I don’t think a parent in the city of Pembroke Pines is going to be OK with just guardians, I just don’t believe it, they do not have the relationships with administrators, with parents, with students that the SROs have built over more than a decade in some cases,” Hernandez said.
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“They’re just like sworn officers to us,” said Dr. Howard Hepburn, superintendent of Broward County Public Schools.
The superintendent pointed out that in the five years the guardian program has existed, many guardians do establish relationships at schools the way their SRO counterparts do.
“The guardians also get extensive training to understand how to react during everyday situations, and also, we have other cities where we utilize armed guardians instead of SRO too, so we’re not concerned about any lack of security,” Hepburn said.
Because the school district doesn’t have its own police department, it relies on cooperation with local police agencies to provide campus protection.
This has traditionally been a more or less 50-50 arrangement to share the costs, and the district increased the amount it pays police agencies from $64,000 to $113,000 per officer.
But Pembroke Pines says it’s losing more than $2 million with that deal, so the district will provide the cheaper alternative for the elementary and middle schools.
The sheriff’s office trains the guardians and supervises the program.
“A guardian will never substitute the wealth of knowledge and experience that a law enforcement officer has that comes in with all the other skill sets,” Tony said. “But what we’ve given them is the skill set to stop these threats if it arrives on our campus.”
The issue comes to a head Wednesday night at Pembroke Pines City Hall. Hernandez will introduce a motion to create an SRO division within the city’s police department to provide a rotating SRO presence at the elementary and middle schools.
