Since a bunch of cops screwed the pooch in Uvalde back on May 24th 2022, every school district in Texas must now spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on MORE “School Resource Officers” to placate the nervous nellies.
Never mind that the disaster in Uvalde had nothing to do with “not enough officers” and everything to do with about a half dozen missed opportunities, ignored warning signs and major fuckups on the part of those very officers.
Mayor TJ Monroe made it clear who is to blame for her budget being wrecked. Her bony finger is pointed squarely at the Lampasas school district who “never got in touch with us all summer” and which is headed by a guy who makes roughly $220,000 in salary and benefits.
Go to the 33:00 mark:
“Immediately after the incident this summer, we did ask for a session with Chief Cummings ….and at that point it would have been the right time for the school district to say “we need some help” …but they DIDN’T come forward and ….we spent all summer working towards what we think is a balanced budget and now itmay be as much as three or four hundred thousand dollars“
Four hundred thousand dollars??? What in hell planet do these people live on? Also, why do we need to spend $400k when we have THIS?
That’s a question for another post, but I have a few ideas on how you could pay for this to save your precious “balanced budget” – one of which the overpaid Nerf Job Holders like Ryan “Dwight Schrute” Ward will not like one bit.
(1) Claw back the 3% COLA raises you just handed to everybody who works for the City. Why not? Finley already admitted on August 8ththat salaries are going up over SEVEN PERCENT from last year’s budget! Don’t you care about the kids, you selfish meanies? Oh what’s that? That’s YOUR money and you don’t like it being grabbed for a super expensive boondoggle of questionable usefulness? Now you know how I feel when I see you blow $1.4 million on the fucking Hostess House.
(2) Charge every parent $125 per kid for their protection – 3,200 students x $125 is $400,000. If you have three kids, that’ll be $375 per school year – due on the first day of class (payable by personal check or money order, please!) or your child cannot attend class. I don’t want to hear any complaining – you spend more than that on new clothes and shoes. Don’t you care about the kids? The money has to come from SOMEWHERE – why not the parents?
(3) Fire $400,000 worth of useless parasites like Kathy Staruska and any other Nerf jobs that pay princely sums but which educate nobody. Maybe chop Rascoe’s salary by $40,000 too – that’s 10% of what you need right there. Use THAT money to pay for more “resource officers”. Surely your child’s safety is more important than employing a useless paper pusher! Cost = $0.
(4) Get a group of about 20 retired MALE military veterans and have them each volunteer to guard the school one day a month. Kind of like doctors are “on call” at a hospital. One thing we have no shortage of around here is veterans. I even have a “disabled” veteran down the street who gets a HUGE break on his property taxes because he is “disabled” – which is funny, because he ALSO works for the Harker Heights fire department! Amazing what some of these “disabled” veterans can do. Maybe they can “give back to the community” since they get such nice perks like massively reduced property taxes? Just a thought. They should ALREADY know how to handle a gun and take down another human, right? Cost = $0. Or maybe buy them breakfast and lunch.
(5) If you DO pay to hire and equip these “resource officers” for the six-figure sums you are talking about, they must sign an affidavit opening themselves up to criminal and civil charges and lawsuits if they should turn chickenshit (like Uvalde) and run away or fail to engage some scrawny, pussy kid with tattoos on his face who is shooting up a school. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t get paid like a brave soldier who knows his shit but then bungle the job. Sorry.
It is crazy that a mere four months ago, the City of Lampasas and the LISD presumably had a school shooting response plan that was acceptable to everyone. But then some morons in Uvalde screwed the pooch hard in May of this year, and now we have to hire MORE officers? I’m sorry, but a lack of SROs wasn’t the problem in Uvalde. The problem was they didn’t execute properly. There were a LOT of well-paid bodies there standing around twiddling their thumbs.
More SROs are not the answer.
Fact: the odds of your child being killed in a school shooting are about 60o MILLION to one. The odds of you winning Powerball are about 300 million to one.