EAST SPENCER — The school board hopes to bring resource officers back to all Rowan County middle schools.
And one school system official said Monday they’re needed. Discipline problems are on the rise, with a quarter of the incidents the system reports to the state coming from middle schools last year.
On Monday, the Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education approved a draft grant application presented by Nathan Currie, assistant superintendent of administration. The application deadline is Oct. 11, and the state will award the grants on Dec. 1.
The board voted 6-0 to approve the application. Board member Chuck Hughes missed the meeting.
Currie said the number of school resource officers that any school system can apply for is based on its average daily membership. Rowan County qualifies for five.
The school board included $276,000 for resource officers in this year’s budget, anticipating the grant’s two-to-one local match requirement. For five officers, that match would actually be $70,000. The total requested money from the state (including up to $14,000 for training) is $154,000.
“We’ve had conversations with the middle school principals, and they are excited about the notion of having SROs back in our school system,” Currie said. “Remember, they were in our system until I think the 2009-10 school year, where several cuts were made, including all seven of the SROs from middle schools.”
Currently, only one of the seven middle schools in the Rowan-Salisbury School System has a resource officer. The officer at Knox Middle School is funded through the city of Salisbury.
If the system gets a grant to fund five officers, that still leaves one school without an resource officer. Currie said he is proposing that the school system fund an additional resource officer for $51,000 per year.
“The commitment from the school board with an additional SRO would be $121,000 per year,” Currie said. “Essentially, that’s a $155,000 savings from what board budgeted for last month.”
The state will award grants according to need, based on school crime and violence rates, the number of disadvantaged children and the county population. Some statistics in the draft grant proposal show how the Rowan-Salisbury School System meets these criteria, Currie said.
School systems are required to report 16 “reportable offenses” to the state. These include bomb threats and hoaxes, underage drinking, possession of a controlled substance, possession of a firearm or other weapon on campus, assault involving a weapon or resulting in serious injury, robbery with a dangerous weapon, sexual offenses and homicide.
In the 2011-12 school year, Currie said, 14 percent of Rowan-Salisbury’s reportable offenses came from middle schools. In 2012-13, that number rose to 24 percent. Currie also said that in the past year, 31 percent of the system’s short-term suspensions (10 days or fewer) came from its middle schools.
“There’s definitely a need. We’re seeing an increase in discipline,” he said.
He said the officers’ training would have three components. The first — that they obtain school resource officer certification — is required.
The second piece is involvement in the Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT) program, where officers would be responsible for talking to students about gang awareness. The third piece is a program called Connected Schools, which all middle schools are taking part in, Currie said. It would teach the officers about building relationships with students and staff.
“We certainly don’t want to take a police officer off the street and place them in a school environment, because that can be a totally different world,” he said. “So there will be training.”
Eventually, Currie said he would like to make resource officers available to both middle and elementary schools.

Contact reporter Karissa Minn at 704-797-4222.
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