Surry County Schools, as part of its budget for the coming year, has made a request to the Surry County Board of Commissioners to add four more school resource officers to staff. This would mean the county would have a full-time officer assigned to each campus.
“Safety is of paramount factor in all our schools,” Surry County Schools Superintendent Dr. Travis Reeves said Tuesday evening during the budget hearing.
“Currently we have three officers we pay out of at-risk funds, and we have other officers we pay for out of grant funds. The board of education is requesting four additional full-time officers, this would add a full-time officer at every school,” he said.
The elementary schools are splitting officers and he said that for some of the remote campuses, such as Cedar Ridge Elementary, an officer could be 15 or more minutes away from the school if a situation were to arise.
Chairman Van Tucker asked if the request for additional School Resource Officers was ultimately to be found among the budget request from Surry County Schools or from the Surry County Sheriff’s Office.
Reeves said that it was the Surry County Board of Education which was making the request to add the four new officers, but that funding for those would be found among Sheriff Steve C. Hiatt’s budget request.
County Manager Chris Knopf said there was no such request in the Surry County Sherrif’s preliminary budget request. “Has the sheriff seen this?” he asked.
“The sheriff is aware we are asking. In my conversation with the sheriff, I know that there has been expansion at the jail and that there has been shortage on patrol officers. I do believe he supports the request, but I know there are other issues with which he is dealing,” Reeves said.
“It’s got to show up in somebody’s request,” Tucker said. “So, I am trying to establish where this request, whose line item it would show up in. I believe we have established it would be a request that the sheriff would have to make.”
Reeves reminded the commissioners that the Town of Dobson and Town of Pilot Mountain were each funding their own school resource officers for their respective elementary schools.
At the moment, Pilot Mountain is not able to provide that officer. Reeves diplomatically said that Pilot Mountain Police were still in a transitional phase and not operating at full strength.
The officer from Pilot who had been assigned as the SRO to Pilot Elementary, Jason Chrismon, was one of the officers involved last year in an alleged long running fraud perpetrated by members of the police department who were incorrectly charging for off-duty security. He was one of four officers relieved of duty, including the chief of police.
Pilot Mountain Town Manager Michael Boaz provided an update this week to the staffing situation at the Pilot Police Department. “We are diligently working to get things back up to speed.”
“We have added two officers in recent weeks that are coming in from other agencies. We also have two more that we will bring on after they finish BLET (basic law enforcement training). We should be close to full strength by July or so.”
The board took no action on the request and will likely wait and see if Sheriff Hiatt makes such a request in his final budget request.
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