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By Ryan Tarinelli, Arkansas Online
The Little Rock School District was a bit of an oddity when it came to elementary school security -- for every school, one security officer.
But with the anticipated loss of annual desegregation funding, the district's Safety and Security department had to find a way to do more with less, said department director Ronald Self. That led the department to look at how they approached elementary school security, and prompted Self to reach out to larger schools districts such as Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas.
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"Nobody had security officers inside their elementary schools, and nobody in the state of Arkansas had them," Self said. "So we made the decision to pull all security officers from the elementary schools."
At the beginning of this school year, the Little Rock School District rolled out its new mobile security system that allows security officers to drive to multiple schools to do security checks, instead of being stationed at each elementary school.
Instead of having 33 security officers at its elementary schools, the school district now has a 12-officer mobile patrol unit equipped with 2016 Ford Taurus vehicles they use to drive to multiple elementary schools.
After the 2017-18 school year, the school district will no longer receive $37.3 million a year in state desegregation funding, according to previous reports. Self estimates the new mobile security system will save approximately $750,000 a year for the school district.
The mobile unit's focus is on elementary schools and monitoring bus stops, Self said, but they can also be used to respond to middle and high schools, which continue to have security officers on campus.
In September alone, the department conducted more than 1,900 "school checks," where officers checked doors, walked through schools and talked with school administrators.
"When they leave that school, they are directly going to another school," Self said.
Ira Nicholson, 48, who has spent 10 years with the security force, said it's been a relatively smooth transition to the new mobile system, with a few adjustments.
