Deputy on patrol
Spokane County Sheriff’s Deputy Andy Buell pulls up in front of West Valley High School in his marked patrol car and backs into his spot ready for duty each day. As he walked into school one morning this fall, a student pulling out of the school’s parking lot hit the gas, the engine in his Honda Civic revving high. Buell stopped in his tracks and turned toward the street, just in time to see the student let off the accelerator and sheepishly wave at the armed, uniformed officer. Busted.
“I know him pretty well; he’s a nice kid,” Buell said, shaking his head at the student. “I’ll have to have a little chat with him later.”
As the school resource deputy, Buell is not only a traffic enforcer, he is the eyes and ears of the West Valley community. He knows the students, and they know him.
When teachers need the assistance of law enforcement to deal with student issues, they don’t have to call 911. They just walk down to Buell’s office in the high school and knock on his door.
He is regularly called on to help handle fights, thefts, and students with weapons or drugs. He ventures out into the community and talks to neighbors about student activities.
“A lot of problems that come into a school don’t begin or end at the schoolhouse doors,” said Gene Sementi, West Valley High School principal. “(Buell) doesn’t just work for the schools; he works for the community. He understands what it takes to make our schools, and our communities around the schools, safer.”
Buell is one of six deputies and officers with the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office and Spokane Valley Police who are based in seven Spokane-area high schools.
In addition to West Valley, each of the Central Valley high schools has a deputy or officer in-house. The school resource officers also roam to elementary and middle schools as needed.
Other Spokane County school districts that have resident deputies on patrol in their schools include Freeman, Liberty and Mead.
“It’s really hard to measure the safety they provide,” said Mike Pearson, Central Valley School District superintendent. “They have a great relationship with the kids, and provide a great resource for staff and teachers. We want to be able to keep them around for as long as possible.”
In the Spokane Valley school districts, the cost of salary and benefits for each school resource officer or deputy hired through the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office is shared by the city of Spokane Valley and Spokane County. Some of the costs are picked up by federal grant money that comes through the state for help with school residential deputy programs, said Sheriff’s Lt. Steve Jones.
To help offset the remaining cost, the districts pay $15,000 for each deputy, Jones said.
“If (the districts) were to pay the total cost of a deputy, it would be well over $100,000 with salary and benefits,” Jones said. “So it really is a good deal for them, and we are incredibly grateful that they continue to help fund it.”
The city of Spokane cut the Spokane Police Department’s school resource officer program from Spokane Public Schools in August, to save the city $338,000.
Six officers and a sergeant were based in middle schools but also visited high schools and elementary schools.
Spokane Police Chief Roger Bragdon stated in a previous interview with The Spokesman-Review that the officers stopped a lot of weapons and drugs from coming into the schools.
“The situation the city is in is drastic,” Jones said. “We’ve taken pretty good care of our money in the county, and we’ve worked hard to do that.”
He said incidents like the shootings at Columbine, Colo., continually force school districts and law enforcement to take a look at safety in the schools. Overall, incidents of violence nationally are down, in part because of programs set up like the school-based officer programs, Jones said.
“We have definitely seen the value in and around our school campuses with the school resource deputies, and don’t want to cut those programs any time soon,” he said. “But our first commitment is to the street, and if we couldn’t afford to take care of those priorities there, we’d also have to start pulling some of the programs.”
In addition to law enforcement training, the school resource officers and deputies are specifically trained to handle school-related violence and situations.
On Tuesday, Buell and other school resource officers went through the Fire Arms Training Simulator, better known as FATS.
The simulator puts the officers through a series of situations by using an interactive video system. Officers must decide which weapon is appropriate for the scenario and act quickly with verbal commands or decide to shoot a suspect. The system can also fire back small foam balls at the school resource officers.
Tuesday’s training was provided by Canfield and Associates, a risk management and insurance consultant out of Ephrata, Wash. Canfield works with several school districts and police officers to offer school-related scenarios. The firm travels around with a trailer that houses the simulator.
Buell worked through several scenes, such as a student in a library with a knife, and a student with gun.
“These are worst-case scenarios,” said Larry Yount, a retired Grant County deputy who works with Canfield. “The key is to get the officers to communicate with the students, try to talk them down.”
Buell said while that training is helpful, being in the schools is the best training you can get. Buell travels around quite a bit, because he has more schools to visit and isn’t always in one school all day long.
“But the students know that whenever I am in my office (at the high school), the door is always open anytime they want to talk,” Buell said. “They know that they can come in here, sit down and talk about anything.”
Because it’s much bigger in size, Central Valley High School Resource Officer J.D. Bailey spends most of his day at the school. He routinely patrols the parking lot on foot, where several cars were stolen a few weeks ago.
He also has cameras in his office that scan the entire school parking lot, and walks the perimeter of the school regularly checking for unsecured doors, students skipping class, or smoking.
“There’s no way you could call a deputy in off the street to deal with what (the schools) deal with on a daily basis,” Bailey said. “What we do here is more preventative than enforcement.”
He will also hang out in the hallways at lunch, chatting with the kids to see what’s going on.
“It’s mind boggling how much they will talk about in the open,” Bailey said. “But I’m usually able to hear about things before they happen.”