By Staff Reporter |
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne is pleading with the state legislature to approve an additional $40 million for school safety.
Horne said in a Monday press release that those proposed millions are just the minimum that hardly reflects the outsized need on Arizona’s campuses for security.
Superintendent Horne said the latest deadline for school safety grant requests yielded a demand of over 800 counselors or social workers and over 700 officers. He said the funding needed to fulfill the cost of these requests would amount to nearly $187 million.
Under Horne’s administration, the number of armed officers under the School Safety Program (SSP) grew from just over 100 to nearly 500—nearly five times the size in just three years. SSP determines the distribution of resources through competitive, state-funded grants lasting three-year cycles.
Horne said that the best model for the SSP is to have officers present to work alongside the certified mental health counselors. There are nearly 600 counselors and social workers that work alongside the nearly 500 armed officers at over 1,100 locations statewide.
There are over 1,500 district public schools and over 500 public charter schools in the state. Over 1 million students attend these schools, and nearly 60,700 educators that teach in them.
The average SSO salary according to the fiscal year 2027 FAQ runs at about $157,000.
“If the funding isn’t there to provide for them, and then a tragedy happens in one of those schools, that would be a terrible occurrence,” said Horne. “Any school that asks for a police officer should be able to get one to defend the students, to defend the staff and the teachers.”
Superintendent Horne cited the recent near-tragedy that occurred in Oklahoma earlier this month. An unarmed high school principal, Kirk Moore, confronted and stopped an adult former student, Victor Lee Hawkins, who was attempting to shoot up the school. Moore survived the encounter with a gunshot wound to the leg; no fatalities occurred.
He also cited the 2012 tragedy out of New England, where another principal made a similar attempt to stop a gunman and lost her life in the infamous Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. An elementary school principal, Dawn Hochsprung, was shot and killed by gunman Adam Lanza as she confronted him.
Both cases, Horne says, justified his argument that every Arizona school requires an armed officer to prevent injuries or deaths.
“My biggest nightmare is that an armed maniac gets onto a school campus and kills people. Just a few weeks ago, a heroic principal in Oklahoma subdued an armed gunman at a school and was wounded in the process. While we praise his actions, having unarmed teachers be the first line of defense is not acceptable,” said Horne.
Horne said that current law will ensure those 500 armed officers remain funded, but that no new funding will mean no additional officers and, further, will mean a loss of funding for the nearly 600 counselors and social workers.
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