The Daily Agenda: A problem money can't solve
Campus cops are only as good as their training ... You can always just close the schools ... And he's just the cutest little thief you've ever seen.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne announced his school safety plan yesterday, zeroing in on a handful of proposals to put more police in schools, even if they have less training.
Of the 301 grants for campus cops that the Department of Education awarded this year, 138 of those positions, or almost half, went unfilled. The money was there. Schools just couldn’t find cops willing to do the job.
“It’s not a money issue,” Mike Kurtenbach, director of school safety for the Arizona Department of Education, said. “The challenge is finding qualified staff to fill those positions.”
There are a few reasons for that — but the big one is there simply aren’t enough cops to go around. City police forces have shrunk in recent years and departments are hesitant to take active-duty officers off the streets and put them into schools.
Horne wants a handful of legislative changes that will help ensure that when the money is there to fund school security positions, schools can actually find the help they need. But since he can’t just create more cops, he’s looking to water down the requirements for what it takes to become a school cop.
When you think of campus cops, you’re probably thinking about “school resource officers” or SROs. They’re AZPOST-certified on-duty cops who undergo 40 hours of special training before working in schools. But since they’re in such short supply, Horne is looking to “school safety officers,” or SSOs, to fill the gap.
The big difference between SROs and SSOs is that the latter is an off-duty cop who only has to undergo eight hours of training, and they don't work in a single school full-time.
Any amount of additional security for schools is a good thing. But is eight hours of training really enough to take on the kind of “maniac” Horne fears?
As ProPublica and the Texas Tribune laid bare in their most recent investigation into the mass murder at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, the students had plenty of training on how to respond to an active shooter. But of the more than 100 police who showed up to stop the gunman, about a quarter had no active shooter training at all, and only three had enough training to meet the requirements put into place after the shooting.
Texas is among only two states that have ongoing active shooter training requirements for police, and those were only put in place after Uvalde, the news organizations found.
Setting aside scant training, replacing SROs with SSOs faces another problem: SSOs aren’t covered under the school safety grants. So Horne is asking lawmakers to amend the law to cover them, along with school psychologists.
And there are other legislative tweaks Horne hopes can artificially inflate the supply of police available to work in schools while the state keys in on a longer-term fix. Among those ideas are pension reforms that will make it easier for retired police officers to become SROs without jeopardizing their pensions.
In the meantime, the school safety fund still has millions in the bank that it can’t spend on approved positions. So Horne wants to open that up to pay for physical safety infrastructure as well, including potentially cameras equipped with artificial intelligence technology to spot potential weapons.
Horne wouldn’t estimate how much upgrades like those would cost, but it’s safe to say that while money isn’t the main hindrance to getting more police, it’ll be a big hindrance to equipping every school in the state with cameras and artificial intelligence software.
“That's going to be a big number,” Kurtenbach said. “There's no doubt about that.''
No school, no threats: Democratic Rep. Laura Terech introduced legislation to block school blueprints from being covered under Arizona’s public records law, hoping that her second attempt at the legislation will fare better, the Yellow Sheer Report reports. Neither blueprints nor safety will be an issue at four Paradise Valley Unified School District schools if the school board follows through with its proposal to close the schools amid declining enrollment, per AZFamily.
Go Kari!: Kari Lake is still in the running for Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, per Axios’ intelligence, which puts her right alongside a pretty wild cast of characters like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, who is apparently Melania Trump’s favorite of the bunch.
With an election cycle this weird, Arizona is gonna need some more reporters.
Odd numbers are better: The Arizona Supreme Court case over which abortion law governs Arizona — the full ban from 1906 or the more recent 15-week ban — will be decided by only six of Arizona’s seven Supreme Court justices. The court won’t replace Justice Bill Montgomery, who originally didn’t want to recuse himself, then decided to recuse himself, from the case, per the Republic’s Ray Stern. If the remaining six members of the court deadlock, the decision would default to the Appeals Court decision, which said the 15-week ban, not the total ban, is the law of the land.
The clock is tiktoking: As state and federal lawmakers increasingly set their sights on Chinese-tied short-video platform TikTok, the company is stocking up on state lobbyists across the nation, per Pluribus News, which noted that OpenSecrets shows eight states where the company had recently hired lobbyists. Arizona wasn’t on that list, but a quick review of the lobbyist registration database shows Tiktok retained a local lobbying firm this summer, after Gov. Katie Hobbs had signed an executive order banning the app from state-issued devices, and after she had vetoed a bill that would have done much the same, saying it was duplicative.
It’s turning into Tucson: Former Republican state lawmaker Adam Kawasman, who represented Oro Valley back in the day, is running for the Scottsdale City Council for one of the three seats up for election citywide, he announced on “the Conservative Circus with James T. Harris.” He complained about crime and homelessness and that the city isn’t as pretty as it once was.1
“It’s starting to look a little dingy. I mean, that’s not the city we know,” Kwasman said.
Happy 50th birthday!: The Tucson Unified School District is about to celebrate its 50th year of court battles over desegregation. The district was finally released from federal oversight in its longstanding desegregation order last year, but plaintiffs appealed, noting that test scores are still lower and incidents of discipline higher among students of color in the district, and now they’re at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Courthouse News’ Joe Duhownik reports.
Work smarter, not lazier: Arizona Universities are trying to find the line between making students “AI literate” and having artificial intelligence do everything for them, KJZZ’s Bridget Dowd reports. The Arizona Board of Regents hasn’t set a specific policy about AI, but ASU and UA have created some guidelines.
Stay off the feeds: CNN caught up with the son of Mark Rissi, the Iowa man sentenced to 30 months in prison for threatening Maricopa County Supervisor Clint Hickman. Rissi was a great dad until he started “getting lost in his news feeds,” while taking care of his ailing wife, the son said. Eventually, the father left a threatening message for his son, and many threatening messages to Hickman.
“Where I started to realize wow, this is a serious problem was when he bet me $100 that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton would be hung in the next 30 days,” he said.
This story about a local fox stealing not one, not two, but three security cameras from a Marana home is pretty adorable.
Look at its little legs move as it flees the scene of the crime with the evidence in its mouth!
So cute!
The homeowner had spotted the fox on the cameras a few times over the last year, but she thinks it became super interested in her security/wildlife cameras because she had used vanilla-scented lotion on her hands before touching the cameras the day the fox stole them, the Daily Star’s Henry Brean writes.
“I’ve tried to go find them, but I can’t,” local crime victim Esmeralda Egurrola told Brean. “He owes me $200.”
Speaking of former lawmakers on the “Conservative Circus,” former Republican Sen. Steve Smith joined the show yesterday and is apparently in charge of the T.W. Lewis Foundation, whose founder pulled funding from the ASU’s T.W. Lewis Center, causing the center to fold, after faculty protested some of their speakers.
More armed untrained people on scool campuses, what could go wrong.
Aw c'mon you guys. And I guess I do mean "guys." Yet another AI-generated illustration of males? No girls in the schools? Only one or two women in the classrooms or in the legislature? What kind of prompts are you giving that thing? GIGO, my friends. Disappointing.