PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD) — At Monday’s meeting, Peoria Public Schools Board of Education unanimously voted to “direct the administration to hire additional Campus Safety Officers as necessary to staff all District schools.”
Board member Gregory Wilson introduced the item to his colleagues. He said you can’t put a price on school safety.
There are 27 schools in the district with 32 officers on staff. However, some schools are assigned multiple officers. The high schools can have three to four officers at a time.
Wilson said introduced the idea as a way to combat bullying. He said with the recent crime in the community, schools are a safe haven for students and he want to further the district’s opportunity to be a safe haven.
“If we have a situation and there’s no SRO inside the building and someone’s getting bullied, I want to make sure we have an SRO in the building,” he said. “So, not only for outside threats but for inside threats as well because we really need to do things to prevent bullying and I think putting a school resource officer in each building will kind of mitigate that.”
Wilson said the administration’s next steps are to figure out what it will take to get an officer in each school and come up with a road map to achieve that goal.
