5 things to know about the security guards coming to Beaufort Co. elementary schools
After two years of discussion, Beaufort County School District’s elementary schools are getting private armed security guards — and the details of what they’ll be doing and how they’ll be hired are now available to the public.
The school board approved a contract Sept. 21 with S & S Management Group LLC, doing business as GuardOne Security, to provide security guard services for the district.
Each of the district’s middle and high schools has a school resource officer from either the Bluffton or Beaufort police departments or the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office. That was also the case in 2019.
The district’s elementary schools have been sharing five community resource officers who also police the county’s private schools. In total, the five officers patrol more than 30 schools, which has led to infrequent campus visits in past years. The exceptions: Red Cedar and Port Royal Elementary School, which each got its own school resource officer during the 2019-20 school year.
Here’s what you need to know about the new security guards.
What’s in the contract?
Under the contract, obtained by The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette, the district will get 18 security guards, a supervisor and a “roamer” who fills in for other guards. Each of the guards will be assigned to their own elementary school, and cover any early childhood centers on the same campus.
This will cost about $950,000 annually. The contract is for one year, with the option to extend it each year for up to five years. After that, the district superintendent will need to approve an extension.
What will the security guards do?
The guards will serve essentially the same function as school resource officers, according to Grissom. That includes patrolling school grounds, serving as a first responder, operating security cameras and radios, reporting student misbehavior to school administrators and confronting trespassers.
The guards will be armed with guns. They won’t have the power to make arrests, but they will be able to detain people until law enforcement officers arrive, district security chief Dave Grissom said.
The guards will not have the power to discipline students directly, and won’t “perform duties reserved for teachers, administrators and other staff members,” such as monitoring classrooms when a teacher is absent.
Training and background checks
GuardOne will have to develop its own training curriculum for the guards, which then must be approved by South Carolina’s State Law Enforcement Division. Grissom will also review the curriculum, he said.
Guards will come to the school district for training, which will include the SLED-approved curriculum, along with active shooter training and hours logged at the gun range if they aren’t already certified to carry a gun.
Guards will also have to submit to a national background check through GuardOne, which will be reviewed by the school district.
“They’ll be thoroughly vetted before they’re allowed in our schools,” Grissom said.
When do they start?
Grissom said that as of Friday, GuardOne had received six applicants for the guard jobs. But the timeline to get the guards in schools depends on how much training they need.
“You may have some in schools before others. If they’re prior law enforcement, they’re already qualified to carry a weapon, like myself,” Grissom said. “Some of those may be able to go within weeks. Some others, it may take a couple months. It just depends.”
He added that GuardOne representatives are coming to the district Thursday and Friday to tour schools and meet principals and Superintendent Frank Rodriguez.
Why’d it take so long?
The request for security guards at each elementary school was originally made in 2019 by school board member Rachel Wisnefski.
In October of that year, the school board unanimously voted for the school district to hire private security guards with the intent to gradually replace them with school resource officers from local police departments.
According to Grissom, the school district moved forward with that plan and had selected a company to provide security — but the COVID-19 pandemic intervened.
Schools moved entirely remote for the end of the 2019-20 school year, and by the time students returned to buildings, enough time had passed that the district had to re-bid the contract, Grissom said.
As for the plan to phase in school resource officers, Grissom said that that would be “the ideal thing.”
“But in this day and age, getting police officers to fill those positions is increasingly tough to do,” he said, citing a national shortage of police officers.