BAY MINETTE, Alabama Starting next week, the Baldwin County school system will have two more school resource officers patrolling its campuses, courtesy of the Baldwin County Sheriff s Office.
Sheriff Huey Hoss Mack announced Friday that two additional deputy sheriffs were assigned to the School Resource Program, which will now have four deputies in charge of keeping schools safe.
One deputy will be permanently assigned to C.F. Taylor Alternative School in Robertsdale; the other three will be divided among schools based upon a north, central, and south region of the public schools in the unincorporated areas of Baldwin County, Mack said.
Many of Baldwin County s municipalities already have designated officers to patrol schools, including Orange Beach and Gulf Shores. The to Foley s high school, middle school and intermediate and elementary campuses. The cities of Fairhope and Daphne also have resource officers who check the schools regularly.
The two new positions were funded out of the sheriff department s budget, which was approved by the County Commission in October, Mack said, and the department held a pretty rigorous selection process to make the assignments.
We wanted to make sure we had people who had a passion for working with the kids, he said.
Mack said the expansion of the school resource officer program has been three years in the making. Parents of children who attend schools in the county s most rural areas are particularly concerned about the possibility of lengthy response times in the event of an incident, he said.
For the schools in the unincorporated areas, we re not only the school resource deputy for that school, but we are the first responders as well, he said.
Some of the smaller municipalities, such as Robertsdale, do not have the funding or the manpower to patrol the schools, he noted.
The resource officers will work to build good relationships with the staff and students, he said, and will offer regular educational programs to prevent bullying and drug and alcohol abuse.
This is not a hard-core law enforcement-type operation, he said. This is building relationships and rapport. A lot of what we do in the beginning stages of these programs is building a good relationship. Then we get into some of the educational aspects of it.
The school resource officer program is a joint effort between the Sheriff s Office and the municipal police agencies of Baldwin County, along with the school board, Mack said.
We could not be there if the board of education didn t want us there, he said. They have embraced it. I think it s just a good, cooperative effort between different parts of government to work together to make it safe for our children.