Bridget Dowd/KJZZ

Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne speaks at a meeting of a school safety task force on Aug. 2, 2023.

The Arizona Department of Education hosted the first meeting of a bipartisan school safety task force Wednesday.

But not everyone at the meeting was on the same page about the role of law enforcement in schools. 

Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, said the education department has plenty of funding for school resource officers — police stationed in schools.

The problem, Horne said, is there’s not enough officers to go around. 

“The police department can’t afford to share the person because they’re short staffed," Horne said. "That’s a very serious, immediate problem.”

The Phoenix Police Department is also facing its lowest staffing levels since 1999, according to the department's director of school safety.

Staffing school counselor positions is an issue too. Christina Culbertson is a former school counselor who works for the Arizona School Counselors Association. She said counselors in positions funded by the state’s three-year school safety grants often worry about their job stability.

“Actually why I left my district and went into this position was [because] it was going to be the third year of the grant and I have two children and a husband and we have this family that I need to sustain," Culbertson said.

But Democrats and some stakeholders, like the Rev. Gerald Richard of Tucson, said they were concerned that school resource officers aren’t the best solution in every community. 

“There are too many individuals that believe that school resource officers represent a pipeline to prison," Richard said. "We cannot have that.”

Richard said it’s important to have input from the community before assigning officers to schools.