HOWELL – Following the tragic school shooting that occurred in Uvalde, Texas, members of the Howell Township Council have approved a resolution to fund School Resource Officers (SRO) in every school.
This new shared service is a joint agreement between the Township Council, Howell Board of Education and the Howell Police Department.
The project was announced at the June 14 council meeting and was added on last minute as the members felt it should be dealt with as soon as possible.
“I want to say thank you to Howell Police Department. I want to say thank you to the Board of Education. Thank you to the team that worked on this so quickly right after these horrible events that happened in the past few weeks,” Mayor Theresa Berger said.
Township Manager Joe Clark explained how the team took their old agreement and formed a new one to better protect the schools.
“We had a preexisting shared service (agreement) with the Howell Board of Education for the provisional Class III Special Police Officers. I had a meeting with Superintendent Joseph Isola and part of want I wanted to discuss was in light of the recent tragedies, obviously every parent who has a child in the school has these worries about it happening here,” Clark said. “We pivoted away from this old agreement that has some officers in the schools to a ‘we’re all in it together’ right? We all have a responsibility as a community member to make sure that the kids in our schools our safe. So, what’s it going to take to get a Class III officer in every school?”
Clark said that when meeting with the Howell Police Department, they already had information ready with charts and staffing levels to figure out how to make this expansion work. After a third meeting, an agreement was cemented.
“It took five minutes to make an agreement,” Clark said. “Starting in September, we will have a Class III Officer in every school in Howell.”
Howell Police Acting Chief Mark J. Pilecki said the SLEO program is for recently retired officers to come back in the capacity of SLEO 3, which gives them police powers on school property.
“We’ve been doing this for several years. We always wanted to have officers in the schools. Unfortunately, some of the events that took place over the last couple of months were very disturbing. It gave us the opportunity to revisit this and do what we had to do,” Pilecki said. “All of our officers are trained in active shooting… We are well prepared for something I never want to see.”
Councilman John Bonevich said while going through the process to expand the service agreement, it was learned that originally there were not enough officers to cover every school.
“We learned that we have eight SLEOs but there are 12 posts. They were alternating. We came to an agreement of upwards of 17 SLEOs will fill those 12 posts,” Bonevich said.
At the council meeting, Board of Education President Al Miller was present to express his gratitude to everyone who helped make this agreement possible.
“This is an extremely important program. We’ve done this in the past and now with this expansion it’s only going to benefit our students,” Miller said.
At the next meeting on July 12, the council is expected to vote to approve a shared services agreement with the district to hire between 12 to 15 officers.
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