Horne gives more details on plan to bring off-duty police officers into Arizona schools

By Kirsten Dorman
Published: Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 2:21pm

Bridget Dowd/KJZZ
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne held a press conference on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023, to announce a short-term solution to the state's school resource officer shortage.

Earlier this month, the state Department of Education announced that it’s working with a company called Off Duty Management to connect off-duty police officers with schools that need on-campus officers.

The bipartisan School Safety Task Force met again this week. And Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne went into more detail on how the partnership would work.

“It may be one day a week that they’re off-duty, that they can serve as a police officer in a school,” said Horne. “And so you’d need five of those per week, so that you have full coverage. We’re not participating in anything that doesn’t have full coverage because you don’t want a maniac invading a school, and there’s nobody there.”

Horne also suggested that if schools face a shortage of social workers or psychologists, a similar solution could apply.

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