By a 3-2 vote Tuesday, seven days into the new fiscal year, the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners amended the fiscal 2027 county budget to fund two additional school resource officers as employees of the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office.
These include one SRO to be assigned to private Trinity Christian School and one to public Langston Chapel Elementary School.
This was the latest in a series of closely divided votes by the commissioners on tax and budgeting matters. Commissioners had approved the budget by a 4-3 vote on June 18, before the county’s 2027 fiscal year began on July 1, 2026. In fact, that decision was made by countywide-elected Chairman David Bennett casting a tiebreaker vote after the six other commissioners split 3-3 on the budget’s passage.
That, in turn, had followed a June 9 meeting in which the commissioners, by separate 4-1 and 3-2 votes, had added funding for six Sheriff’s Office hires plus some Bulloch County Correctional Institution staff additions to operate waste collection centers. The 4-3 budget vote on June 18 with Bennett’s tiebreaker in effect stripped those additions away and restored the budget to its pre-June 9 form.
But a resolution for an amendment to the budget and annual “position control schedule” adding two full-time school resource officer positions was placed on the agenda before the Tuesday, July 7 meeting, with cost and funding estimates shown in a summary memo.
The amendment appropriates an additional $189,464 in personnel costs for the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office. But reimbursement contracts with the private school and the public school district for service during the school year are expected to provide $114,628, leaving $74,836 to be covered by the non-school portion of county property taxes.
Trinity’s appeal
During public comments time early in the meeting, two citizens spoke in support of the budget amendment, both specifically for the school resource officer to serve at Trinity Christian School.
John Godbee, a Bulloch County resident for most of his life, noted that he and his children have attended public and private schools in the county.
“Schools and churches have been a soft target for criminals in our nation at large. …,” Godbee said. “The parents, grandparents and supporters of Trinity Christian School are taxpayers like the rest of the Bulloch County residents, and we are willing to pay our portion toward a school resource officer.”
Garrett Gay said he spoke both as an educator and a member of Trinity Christian Church. After teaching at Trinity Christian School for three years, he will be teaching in the county schools next school year.
“Unfortunately, we all know too well why this conversation matters,” Gay said in the middle of his remarks. “The tragedy at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee on March 27, 2023, shattered the belief that Christian schools are somehow insulated from violence. It reminded every parent, every educator, every pastor, every community leader that evil does not discriminate based upon whether a school is public or private. The children inside those classrooms were no less valuable, and the educators who gave everything, including their lives to protect them, were no less committed than any other teacher in the United States.”
Johnson’s critique
Also during the public comments time, Spencer Johnson, a Portal resident and current candidate for commissioner – running as a Republican to challenge Commissioner Anthony Simmons, the longtime Democratic incumbent in District 1, Seat B – criticized the four commissioners who voted for the previously approved budget. But he wasn’t asking them to spend more money on anything.
Calling the four by name, Johnson asserted that the commissioners should have applied all available revenue from the Floating Local Option Sales Tax, approved by Bulloch voters last November and collected as the ninth-penny tax here since Jan. 1, to a full rollback of the property tax millage rate.
“David Bennett, Toby Conner, Ray Mosley and Anthony Simmons – these commissioners have failed the citizens they were elected to serve,” Johnson said. “The voters approved FLOST because they were told it would (provide) property tax relief, yet at the last meeting the board approved a county budget increase from $72 million to $76 million. …”
He acknowledged that a partial rollback is still expected, but said, “the relief comes from FLOST revenue, not from the county leaders making tough decisions to control their spending.”
BSCO request
When the commissioners arrived at the proposed budget amendment as the last of four “new business” items on a fairly short agenda, Bennett called on Sgt. James “Bubba” Revell of the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office as the presenter. Revell is one of the supervisors in the department’s SRO division.
“The citizens of the county, the schools have asked us to protect their children and to mentor the children, and honestly, we can’t do that without staff on site,” Revell said. “So we’re asking for two positions that, when we run the cost analysis on it, we get two people for less than what it would cost to hire just one person because the school systems are paying a big portion of those expenses.”
An officer of corporal rank serving as an SRO is proposed for base wages of $51,151, plus budgeted overtime of $10,230. A deputy-rank officer serving as an SRO is proposed for base wages of $49,359, with budgeted overtime of $9,872. The employer’s Social Security and Medicare contribution, retirement plan and insurance contributions bring the corporal SRO budget cost to $95,965 and the deputy SRO cost to $93,499.
So those add up to the $189,464 appropriation, offset by the approximate $114,628 from the schools (cents rounded to nearest dollar).
“So at the end of the day, you’re hiring two people for 74,834 dollars and 88 cents, and that’s including their benefit packages,” Revell said to the commissioners. “And when it was voted down last meeting, it just …. There’s no way I could not come back and try to ask for this for our children. They’re the most valuable resource we have in our community.”
Newkirk’s request
When Bennett asked for questions or comments from the board, Commissioner Nick Newkirk first said he appreciates the work of the Sheriff’s Office and the school resource officers.
“I feel what y’all do are great, I really do. I think the schools need them,” Newkirk said. “But unfortunately, we’ve got to work on the money side of it. We just approved a $76 million budget. That was $4 million above where we were last year, and I think that’s something we could probably save in-house.”
Noting that $76,000 for two SROs would be “one-tenth of 1 percent” of the county’s $76 million budget, Newkirk said, “I’d like this to be tabled. I’d like our county manager to sit down with our two assistant managers; I’d like all of the department heads to sit in a room and figure out a way that we can cut one-tenth of 1 percent of our budget … to make this work for y’all so we don’t have to go back to the taxpaying citizens and ask for more money.”
But when Bennett called for a motion on the budget amendment, Simmons made a motion to approve, Commissioner Timmy Rushing seconded it, and Conner joined them in voting in favor. Commissioner Ray Davis joined Newkirk in voting against the amendment.
Commissioner Ray Mosley was absent, leaving five district members to vote on any issue.
Now 22 SROs
The additional two officers means that the sheriff’s department will have 22 school resource officers assigned to schools during class days, including at all 15 public Bulloch County Schools campuses and two private schools. Bulloch Academy, largest private school in the county, already contributed to fund a resource officer last year.
One of the public comments speakers had said Trinity and Bible Baptist Christian Academy might be the last schools to not have resource officers but were also the smallest.
Bible Baptist leaders have also been in discussions with the sheriff’s staff, Revell confirmed.
“There’s negotiations still,” he said, “because it’s a big expense. They fund the majority, pay for 180 days with the officer.”