The Florida Legislature passed a law last session requiring every public school in the state to have police or armed guards in place by the time schools opened their doors for the new school year. What the Legislature mandated, and the governor signed, was a plan that is long on ambition and short on cash.
Florida is the first state to require police or armed guards at all public schools. During the 2016-2017 school year, Florida’s Department of Education counted about 1,500 officers stationed at public schools.
The problem? There are more than 3,800 public schools in Florida.
Almost 500 of those schools are in Miami-Dade County alone. Miami-Dade County Public Schools has its own police force of about 200 officers, far below what would be required to put an officer in every school from kindergarten to senior high.
In reading the Bill Summary document, it states the law requires the School Districts to ensure that each public school is secured with safe-school officers or trained guardians. But, the money the legislature appropriated didn’t come close to covering the full cost of this one cop per school mandate.
Miami-Dade County and several municipalities are working with our public schools. Mayor Carlos Gimenez estimated earlier this summer that the cost of providing the 114 police officers to staff campuses in the unincorporated county additional officers would be about $20 million. Other cities are following suit, absorbing the costs in their municipal budgets.
The costs are staggering. Taking the figures that Mayor Gimenez used, it works out to about $175,000 per officer per school. Now, clearly not all of that is the officer’s salary. Police officers came with a lot of overhead, like pensions and support and administrative control.
But the bottom line is, using Gimenez’s figures, it’ll cost an additional $87.5 million to put an officer in every county school.
While the school board did allocate additional funds to increase police presence on its campuses, it shouldn’t depend on the county and the cities to cover these costs indefinitely. The school system in Miami-Dade County has a budget of $5.13 billion. The $87.5 million is less than two percent of the total budget.
One of several that needs to happen. The legislature could step in and fully fund its mandate that every school have a police officer assigned to, reimbursing the 67 counties and every municipality that is providing an officer for every dollar of cost.
However, it is unlikely that the Republican led legislature would forego the possibility of a new round of tax cuts to increase funding, even for something as vital as school safety.
Another alternative is for the school board to raise the millage rate to fully fund the required police officers. The county’s property tax base is about $210 billion right now. A one-half mill increase by the school board would generate about $105 million. That would be more than enough.
And the tax increase would only hurt a little. For the average homeowner, a half mill increase would add about $126 a year to their tax bill, or less than $11 a month.
If the school board doesn’t want to triple the size of its own police force, it could hire out. Right now, cities like Cutler Bay, Miami Lakes, and Palmetto Bay contract with the Miami-Dade County Police Department to provide police service, from the cop in the patrol car to command to all administrative functions. The school board could try to make the same arrangement and write the county a check every year.
Protecting children should be our top priority. The county and the cities are to be commended to working quickly with Miami-Dade County Public Schools to get officers in every school this school year with just a few months’ lead time.
But the legislature, the school board, the county, and the municipalities have some serious number crunching to do in the months ahead and some hard choices to make. Here’s hoping they put the costs where they belong.
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