Let’s start here: Republicans have an overwhelming supermajority in the Kentucky legislature. We also have a record surplus. If a Republican-sponsored bill is a priority, if leadership wants it, there is nothing to stop them from fully funding and passing that bill.
In 2019, the year after the deadly Marshall County High School shooting, our general assembly passed legislation asking public schools to have armed school resource officers (SROs) onsite, a request that subsequently became a requirement. Despite that requirement, five years later, hundreds of our schools do not have an SRO because of lack of funding, lack of workforce participation or both.
Enter Senate Bill 2 — the “guardians” in schools bill that is quickly moving through the legislature — which proposes to fill the gap though it does not contain a request for funding.
Even as Sen. Max Wise, sponsor of SB 2 and chairman of the school safety task force that met in 2023, stated in his opening comments on March 11 on KET, “We’ve demanded funding, but we have not seen that funding.”
Wise made it a point to say the proposed guardian program is not a mandate. School boards would have the autonomy to decide if they want to hire a guardian — which is not an SRO but could be a retired law enforcement officer or honorably discharged veteran — and that the expenses associated with a guardian would be decided by school districts “if they wish to have a stipend or not,” said Wise. “We are looking at a volunteer base for this.”
This is a budget year for the General Assembly. If having qualified SROs in every Kentucky school is a top priority, why are we asking for volunteers? Why is there no funding?
There are Kentucky school districts that have their own police departments, funded by the counties in which they serve. Joining Wise on KET, for instance, was Chris Barrier who serves as director of law enforcement for Montgomery County Schools.
Woodford County has a dedicated SRO program funded by the district. Its website lists a school police chief and six officers.
As a law enforcement officer recently told me, police officers are not one size fits all. In the same way you would not send an algebra teacher to teach a Latin class or a dentist to do a knee replacement, there are officers who are a perfect fit to be SROs and there are officers who are not.
So while the idea presented by Wise sounds good on the surface, being retired law enforcement or an honorably discharged veteran does not, in itself, make someone the right choice to carry a gun in a school setting.And let’s consider chain of command. One of the contributing factors to the abject failure in Uvalde, where 19 students and two teachers were shot to death and 17 were injured, was that dozens of officers from various agencies stood in the hallways for over an hour, reportedly confused about chain of command. If a school district has guardians, what is the chain of command with SROs, the police, etc.?
At the 43-minute mark of the KET interview, a school shooting survivor submitted a question that host Renee Shaw read on air, ending with, “What assurances can we have that retired military and law enforcement, even with training, will be able to adequately handle this type of situation if they are faced with it?”
Wise answered, “There is no piece of legislation that can combat evil.”
We can’t legislate evil. I hear this talking point regularly from Republican lawmakers, to which I say: Please stop repeating this falsehood. You are lawmakers. Murder is evil, rape is evil, child abuse is evil. Lawmakers make laws to combat evil every day.
Your literal job as lawmakers is to “legislate evil.” Do your job.
Which brings me back to the beginning. Republicans have an overwhelming supermajority in the legislature. If school safety is a priority, there is nothing stopping leadership from passing a bill to fund SROs for every single school in Kentucky. So why aren’t they?
Meanwhile, these same lawmakers refuse to address the herd of elephants charging through the room: gun violence.
School shooters often exhibit warning signs. There are currently two bills filed with the General Assembly that could keep guns out of the hands of a school shooter. SB 56, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Gerald Neal, asks for safe storage of guns in the home. SB 13, sponsored by Republican Sen. Whitney Westerfield, allows for temporary removal of guns from someone experiencing a mental health crisis.
And yet both of these bills are languishing, unheard, in the Senate Veterans and Military Affairs committee, even as data indicates that 72% of veteran suicides are by firearm.
In the Judiciary Committee discussion this week on House Bill 5, a sponsor argued that saving even one life was worth the 10-year, $1 billion price tag on that bill.
Kentucky has the funds to fully fund our SRO program for all of our schools. And yet, I predict SB 2, with all of its flaws, lack of funding and obvious questions, it will pass as is. It checks all of the right boxes of not doing anything.
Meanwhile, Republican leadership in Frankfort, in the face of increasing gun violence, continues to bury their heads in deep, wet sand, refusing to talk about guns and address the root causes of gun violence.
If only our Republican supermajority had an ounce of our first responders’ courage.
This commentary was originally published by the Kentucky Lantern and republished here with permission.
