LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The start of the school year was not looking good for Jefferson County Public School (JCPS) students, staff and administrators.
That is, as far as school security was concerned.
While many other districts throughout the state had added to their force of school resource officers (SROs), JCPS had actually lost some.
JCPS was already struggling with not enough sworn police officers, having only 17 last school year.
But that number dwindled to 13, leaving only three armed officers to patrol a district of 165 schools.
However, soon after FOCUS shed light on the problem, JCPS introduced its new police chief at the Sept. 26 Board of Education meeting, where he made a major announcement.
In just a couple of weeks, Todd Kessinger said, he had hired an additional 11 School Security Officers (SSOs), putting the total now at 14.
In a one-on-one interview with Kessinger, whose official title is JCPS Security & Investigations Executive Administrator, he said he expected to have 20 SSOs by as soon as February.
He also explained how he was able to hire so many when it was such a struggle previously.
“I had a lot of contacts, the majority of the people that we hired already had their phone numbers in my phone,” Kessinger said.
Before heading up corporate security at LG&E, Kessinger had retired from Louisville Metro Police (LMPD) as a major in Major Crimes.
He admitted many of the new hires are also former LMPD, and the sell to take the job of helping to protect schools involved more pay.
According to JCPS, it increased base pay for new hires in the district’s police force from 11% to 14%, with the maximum base salary going from $66,713 to $74,208.
“Once we made contact and hired [the] first couple of police officers, they kind of did some of the recruiting for us,” Kessinger said. “They went out and they reached out to other people.”
A few of the new hires are not former police officers, so they will have to go through the police academy.
Kessinger says he wants that mix of seasoned police officers and ones fresh out of the academy.
“Once we get this group in and we get them trained up, then get them deployed out on the streets, then we’ll really start recruiting more aggressively,” he said.
State School Security Marshal Ben Wilcox is pleased with the progress and says anytime districts pay more for police is a good thing, considering the average SRO salary in Kentucky is just $38,000, according to his latest data.
“Yeah, I’d like to see more if possible,” he said.
Wilcox estimated $50 million would be needed to pay for all the SROs to be in compliance with the state mandate that every school campus must have at least one dedicated police officer.
Despite the dramatic increase to the force at JCPS with 14 SSOs, that is still a ratio of one SSO responsible for almost 12 schools.
Besides protecting, SROs or SSOs are supposed to be part of the school community.
“The biggest thing is, to, having an SRO that has a relationship with the staff and the students,” Wilcox said.
It’s hard to build that relationship if SSOs at JCPS are supposed to be on patrol, moving from school to school.
“I think that that is a challenge for a lot of school districts, if they don’t have enough SROs,” he acknowledged. “Yeah, by law, we have to have one on every campus, but you gotta work with what you got at the time.”
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