Oconee County Schools and the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office have been talking about installing school resource officers in the system’s schools for 10 years and intensely for the last five years, Sheriff James Hall said at the meeting of the Oconee County Republican Party on Monday night.
As a result, he said, now that the Board of Education has voted to develop an agreement with the Oconee County Sheriff’s Office to install deputies in the schools, it should be possible to move forward with those plans quickly.
The difficulty, Hale said, is that he currently is short-staffed by seven people, and hiring 12 deputies and their supervisors is going to be a challenge and time consuming.
“Nobody wants to do this job,” he said, and many of those who are police officers “are getting out because they just don’t want to deal with the scrutiny.”
Hale said he has deputies now who are interested in moving their assignments to become school resource officers, but he will need to replace them to keep the county patrols staffed. And it takes about a year to hire someone new and train them to be a school resource officer, he said.
Hale didn’t offer any time line for when all 12 Oconee County schools would have resource officers, which is the stated goal of the Board of Education, but he did ask for patience.
Hale also told the group gathered for the party meeting that his office has charged five Oconee County Schools students aged nine to 15 with terroristic threats and acts committed after the Sept. 4 mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Barrow County.
The charge is a felony, Hale said, and all five were detained by the Department of Juvenile Justice between Sept. 5 and 13.
Three Speakers
Hale was one of three speakers at the session on Monday in the Lobby Meeting Room of the Piedmont Oconee Health Campus, 1305 Jennings Mill Road. Just more than 50 people were in attendance.
He was preceded by Angela Elder-Johnson, current Clerk of Courts, and followed by Kevin Epps, substituting for Kalki Yalamanchili, who could not attend because of a death in the family.
Hale and Democrat Reginald Wade are on the ballot in the Sheriff race in November, and Elder-Johnson is opposed by Laura King, running as a Democrat but without party support.
Yalamanchili is challenging incumbent Democrat Deborah Gonzalez for District Attorney as an Independent. No Republican is on the District Attorney ballot.
Hale provided an overview of the operation of his office before turning to the plans for the school resource officers near the end of his opening comments and mentioned the felony charges against the Oconee County Schools students only in response to a question from the audience.
Five Students
At the meeting on Monday, Hale said seven students had been charged, but he corrected that to five students in an email exchange with me on Tuesday.
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| Hale 9/23/2024 |
One of the students is nine years old. Two are 11, one is 12, and one is 15, he said.
Hale said the arrests were between the day after the school shooting in Barrow County on Sept. 4 and the 13th.
“Due to them being juveniles we are not privy to what sanctions the juvenile courts placed on them,” Hale said in the email. “I am pretty sure that all of the children are now back in the custody of their parents and are awaiting school disciplinary hearings.”
He said in the email exchange that he did not want to provide details about what had led to the arrests.
In response to a question at the meeting on Monday, Hale said “One of the first rumors out of Apalachee was that the one that they caught was one of the four.”
“There was a kid that claimed he was the third shooter,” Hale said. “And he was 11. He claimed he was the third shooter and that if he were to do it at Oconee he wouldn’t get caught.”
What Happens Next
“Two weeks ago we had a tragic event at Apalachee High School,” Hale said in his introductory comments leading up to his discussion of school resource officers.
“I was there. I saw it first hand,” he said. “I was there for 12 hours that day. And probably for two days after the fact dealing with stuff here–the fall out, so to speak.”
“I am going to be straight forward with you,” he continued. “I sat in my office last Thursday with my face in my hands like this screaming at the wall. What in the hell are we doing?”
“There are people out there that want the schools to raise their kids,” Hale said. “They want law enforcement to raise their kids.”
“Law enforcement only has one avenue of recourse,” he said. “They get out of line we send them to juvenile justice. That’s all we do. I can’t keep them in my jail.”
“The charge is a felony terrorist threat charge right now,” Hale said. “But it will probably be reduced to a misdemeanor charge, and yes, those kids are probably right back into school.”
“Whether they will be in the classroom or in an alternative space I don’t know,” he added.
Lead Up To School Safety
“It has been the honor of my live to be the Sheriff of his county,” Hale said as he came to the front of the room to speak on Monday. “My kids are ninth generation Oconee.”
Hale said he has 99 employees in the Sheriff Office, 67 of whom are sworn deputies, with the remaining 25 being civilians.
Only 35 of those deputy positions are in the patrol division, he said.
“I have seven total openings right now between the jail and patrol divisions,” he said. “Down four positions in patrol and three in the jail.”
“As a whole, this world that I live in, nobody wants to do this job,” he said. “That is because of the last four years, or five, six years, of just beating up on the law enforcement throughout the United States.”
“If they can make more money doing heating and air somewhere, or building houses, or wiring electrical stuff,” he said. “That’s what they are doing. And they are getting out of law enforcement not to go to work somewhere else for a dollar or two more an hour.”
“They’re getting out because they just don’t want to deal with the scrutiny,” he said.
Discussions In Past
“I love the schools,” Hale said. “I’ve had four kids come through the Oconee School System. Never a single time have I been afraid to send my kids to school. But I know what I know and you don’t know what I know.”
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| Hale 9/23/2024 |
Hale said that the Centegix crisis alert system with the wearable safety badges “that everybody’s touting up in Barrow County–we’ve had it for five years...It has been upgraded every year since it was implemented five years ago.”
He said the school system and the Sheriff’s Office “work as a unit, one symbiotic unit” in dealing with school safety.
“We’ve been talking about SROs for the last five years, solidly,” Hale said. “Ten years talking about it, but the last five years every year at the end of the school year the question is brought up. Are we ready to do it now?”
“Up until last week or the week before last, we’ve not been ready to do it,” he said. “I thank the School Board for voting for that and getting it going.”
“We have good plans in place. We have a great working relationship. We’ve been working on his a long time together.”
An Oconee County Grand Jury Report in March of 2018, after meeting with Oconee County Schools Superintendent Jason Branch, recommended “To have Resource Officers onsite at all schools.”
Personnel Requirements
“Here’s the deal,” Hale said. “We have 12 Oconee County School System schools and we have three private schools and a college campus. The college campus has its own police department.”
“Remember me telling you I’m seven positions down in the Sheriff’s Office?” he asked. “I can’t fill them.”
“I’m trying like crazy to fill them, but I don’t want some jake off the street come in and put in an application in the Sheriff’s Office and then next week he’s beating up on somebody at the side of the road,” Hale said.
“We’ve got to make sure he is a quality candidate to come to work for y’all,” Hale said. “We turn away a lot of them.”
“It is not just the 12 positions for each school,” he continued. “You have to have a command staff to run that. We don’t have enough people to do that.”
“So obviously in this plan going forward with the school system it’s going to be an incremental situation,” he said. “We’ve got to get the people hired. Got to get them trained.”
“So we’ve got probably eight or 10 that currently work in the Sheriff’s Office that are interested in doing the job,” he said. “But I can’t just put all of them in the schools and not have nobody to patrol the county.”
Patience Needed
“So we are definitely wholeheartedly into it,” Hale said. “We’re going to work on it really hard.”
“We currently have one deputy assigned to the Oconee High School and they are responsible for everything on the blue side,” he said. “We’ve got one at North Oconee for everything on the red side.”
“And they’re going to have to go between the schools throughout the day,” he said. “That’s what their assignment is.”
“I hope that is something that everybody can understand,” Hale said. “It is not somewhere where we are going to be able to just flip a switch and everything is going to happen.”
“The plans are there,” he said. “The people aren’t. We’ve got a great plan as to how to implement it. I think it’s going to work well. It is just going to take some time to get it in place.”
Metal Detectors
An audience member asked about plans for metal detectors at each of the schools.
“Remember, we were talking about 12 law enforcement officers to be at 12 county schools,” Hale said.
“If you’re going to put a metal detector at every door that metal detector can’t stand there by itself,” he said. “It takes two people to run metal detectors.”
Those people need to be trained, he said.
“So where does this go?” he asked. “How far are we willing to go with it?”
“If you give me the money, I’m willing to do it, if I can find the people,” he said.
Elder-Johnson
Elder-Johnson used her time to provide an overview of the operation of her office.
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| Elder-Johnson 9/23/2024 |
“I am the custodian of all of the court records for Superior, Magistrate, and Juvenile,” Elder-Johnson said, referring to the county’s courts.
“We do criminal and civil cases,” she said. “We do divorces, name changes, child support, criminal cases, felony and misdemeanor.”
“I’m also the custodian of all of the deed records,” she said. “I have the deed records back from 1875 to present. All of our deeds are microfilmed.”
Oconee County split from Clarke County in 1875.
Elder-Johnson said all deeds from 1875 to present are scanned “And they are backed up on four different systems.
At present, the county is using Deed Records book 1,788, with each book holding approximately 800 pages, she said.
“I do have a Democrat that is running against me,” Elder-Johnson said. “I have been in the office for 37 years. I’ve been clerk for 24.”
“I do ask for your vote,” she said. “I do love my job. And I want to continue to do my job for the next four years.”
King, who qualified as a Democrat but has never been active in the Democratic Party, told the Conservatives of Northeast Georgia that the “primary reason” she is running for the Clerk’s Office is because Elder-Johnson “is not keeping property records in a hard copy form since 2017.”
Epps For Yalamanchili
Epps, who has been a persistent critic of District Attorney Gonzalez and an advocate for Yalamanchili, stepped forward when Party Chair Kathy Hurley announced that Yalamanchili was unable to attend because of a death in his family.
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| Epps 9/23/2024 |
Epps, an attorney in Oconee County, spent most of his time reviewing ongoing performance problems in the District Attorney Office.
“If she is re-elected, I promise you something,” Epps said as he concluded. “If she is re-elected, someone in this very room in 18 months will be touched by a very serious crime and they will get away with it.”
“We can’t let what happened three-and-a-half years ago happen again,” he said, referring to Gonzalez’s election.
“And so I’m asking--I’m begging you,” Epps said. “Walk in a neighborhood. Tell a neighbor. Do something. Get this message out...10 people. I keep challenging you. Send an email. Send a text.”
“It is not about D. It is not about R. It is not about I,” Epps said. “It about victim’s rights.”
1 comment:
Not gonna lie, Hale comes off as overwhelmed here. Reginald Wade has a ton of experience running SRO programs in Augusta and I'm sure he can find quality people to hire.
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