Orange County Schools superintendent Maria Vazquez will ultimately decide if some schools in the district will get school guardians next year instead of school resource officers.
That’s if the district can’t reach an agreement with five local law enforcement agencies to provide school resource officers at 30 schools in the district.
What's at stake without SROs
Law enforcement agencies in Apopka, Ocoee, Winter Garden, Winter Park and Windermere have so far failed to reach an agreement on a new contract with Orange County Schools.
If an agreement can’t be reached by January, schools in those cities will lose 34 SROs, and it would be up to Superintendent Maria Vazquez to decide whether to replace them with school guardians.
Unlike school resource officers that are trained in law enforcement, school guardians can be school staff including teachers who are armed after only 144 hours of training.
School guardians can’t make arrests, break up school fights, or take a gun or drugs off a student, but they can use deadly force to respond to a school threat.
School board members were unanimously opposed to the school guardian program at a work session on Tuesday.
School board members oppose school guardians
Member Angie Gallo, who has been the most outspoken against a possible school guardian program, said it doesn’t provide the same level of safety and security as SROs.
“We're either going to prioritize students' safety or we're not. My personal opinion as a school board member, and I think every law enforcement agency in Orange County, would agree that the safest option, in fact, they've said it publicly, the safest option for our schools is one that has a school resource officer,” said Gallo.
Gallo said there’s also grave inequities at play.
Law enforcement in Orange County, Orlando, Maitland and Eatonville have all signed onto the contract and will be providing SROs in their schools next year.
Gallo said that means schools in the same district will possibly have different types of security, with some getting SROs and others utilizing school guardians.
Member Vicki-Elaine Felder echoed Gallo’s concerns about school guardianship programs. Felder said as a teacher, she’s seen the efficacy of school resource officers, not only at keeping kids safe, but acting as a positive role model for them.
Watch the full OCPS board work session here:
She said SROs know their students and the communities they work in, which is not always the case with guardians, who might volunteer to work in a community they’ve never been in before. SROs also receive training to respond to students with special needs, and might feel more comfortable de-escalating a situation instead of using force.
“SROs in the school is something that I prefer from my own personal experience as a teacher, and knowing what it did for some of the children that I taught who got in trouble and they saw an SRO who saw them about to do something bad, and they were able to de-escalate that outside of the school,” said Felder.
For these reasons, Gallo and Felder both expressed concerns that the school district didn’t have any plans to take the decision to a vote of the school board or to public comment.
“I really would welcome input from the public. They need to hear, and we need to hear from them and let them discuss it with us,” said Felder.
One last chance to negotiate
The district will meet with the five law enforcement agencies on January 14 to try one last time to come to an agreement.
In the meantime, school board members Maria Salamanca and Alicia Farrant called on residents to write to the district, their school board members and their local police departments, and ask them to continue to send SROs to all schools.
“I want to urge our community. I want to urge those municipalities who are holding out and kind of pushing back to consider every child and every teacher, every parent who's dropping their child off, we want the very best for them. And for us, I think it's very clear: all of us, we want SROs. They've been incredible,” said Farrant.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office, Orlando Police Department, Maitland Police Department and Eatonville PD have all signed onto the three-year contract with the district and will receive a 25% pay increase over the next three years.
In a memo, law enforcement officials in Apopka, Ocoee, Winter Garden, Winter Park and Windermere say that’s not enough to balance out an increase in spending and a shortage of staff within their departments.
There have been 81 school shootings in 2024 at campuses across the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
