Under contracts the county commissioners were set to approve Tuesday, July 18, the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office will provide a deputy as school resource officer at private Bulloch Academy and will also expand SRO service in the public school system to include a deputy assigned to Brooklet Elementary School.

Bulloch Academy, with more than 700 students the largest private school in the county, will pay the same basic annual cost per officer as the Bulloch County Schools for the services of each deputy through the days school is in session, $52,450 and change. That amount would automatically increase by 3% for each year the contract remains in effect after its initial term of July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024.

As in past contracts between the Bulloch County Schools and the Sheriff’s Office, the payments from the schools are meant to compensate the county not just for a large part of the deputies’ salaries but for a portion of the costs of their uniforms and equipment, vehicles, training and insurance.

But because the deputies will perform regular sheriff’s department duties during non-school weeks or when called on for special details, the SRO payments aren’t meant to cover the full year’s salary and expenses. 

“Basically, the school board pays a portion and we pay a portion, kind of a happy medium,” said Sheriff Noel Brown. “The implementing of it is about half and half, as far as the vehicle, the equipment and the person, and then it goes just into hourly wage or salary thereafter.”

Under the contract terms, school resource officers are expected to be on the grounds of assigned schools from 7:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. when classes are in session. For any work performed by SROs at school after-hours, such as during extracurricular activities, the public school district and the private academy will pay an hourly rate of $36. 

According to County Manager Tom Couch, staff members calculated the current cost of paying and equipping a deputy, including a vehicle, to be almost $105,000, so the $52,450.33 school resource officer base payment is, indeed, roughly half.

Updated from 2019

Both the annual basic payment and the extracurricular hourly rate have been increased substantially from the Bulloch County Schools’ last previous written agreement for SROs, signed in 2019. That agreement made the basic payment $43,688 and the extracurricular hourly rate $25. That earlier contract also included a 3% annual escalator clause, and the 2023 contract restores that after first adjusting for recent higher inflation, Couch said.

“We re-evaluated the cost model because of wage and non-wage price increases, and what we do is we take the base salary and project some overtime, but then we use an indirect cost formula based on the amount of overhead … and we amortize the price of a sheriff’s vehicle,” he said.

Nine SRO deputies

With the addition of one SRO at Brooklet Elementary, the Sheriff’s Office will be providing eight school resource officers to the county schools during the 2023-24 session. That new rate per officer makes the apparent total base cost to the public schools for the services of those eight officers $419,603. 

The Bulloch County Board of Education unanimously approved the new intergovernmental agreement Thursday evening, July 13. The Board of Commissioners agenda for its 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, July 18, meeting included both the public schools’ agreement and Bulloch Academy’s contract for potential approval.

With the addition of Bulloch Academy’s base payment, the county government should receive at least $472,053 for supplying a total of nine SROs.

While that base revenue goes to the county general fund for the cost of employing and equipping the officers, any extracurricular hourly payments go directly to the Sheriff’s Office, Couch said. 

Few in Boro

Meanwhile, the Statesboro Police Department has one full-time school resource officer, assigned to Statesboro High School. But the city department has other officers who help out at the high school at various times during the day shift when school is in session, said Statesboro Police Chief Mike Broadhead.

“We currently provide one at the high school, and then we have our Community Outreach Team, which is a supervisor and two other officers,” he said. “They help out by rotating in and out of there.”

Neither department currently has resource officers assigned to the four Bulloch County School District elementary schools within Statesboro’s city limits.

Countywide, the school district operates 15 schools. Two adjacent schools, Langston Chapel Elementary and Langston Chapel Middle, share one Sheriff’s Office deputy as a resource officer, while Southeast Bulloch Middle School and neighboring Southeast Bulloch High have two.

Brown says he wants to expand the number of resource officers further, to serve all of the county schools, including adding one next year for Portal Elementary. Portal Middle High School is already assigned a deputy.

“Our children are our most precious resource,” he said.

Interviewed last week, the sheriff said he previously told Statesboro city officials he would add deputies to serve as SROs at the four elementary schools in Statesboro if the city would subsidize his department’s budget for doing this.

“They did not want to do that,” Brown said.

Broadhead said was not aware of this offer, and the Statesboro Herald has yet to ask other Statesboro officials about it.