The Summit County Sheriff's Office's request for five new school resource officers make up a big chunk of Summit County’s proposed 2025 budget increase because they’ll be full-time positions.
“During the summer, I can augment the patrol division and the investigations division with the deputies not in the schools,” Summit County Sheriff Frank Smith said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” last week.
The net price tag for five new officers is nearly $489,000 for the 2025 budget year because the school districts would reimburse the county with $80,000 per officer annually. That means the total cost, with benefits, is over $2 million.
It’s to comply with a new law the Utah legislature passed earlier in the year requiring an armed guardian at every school in the state. The state is providing each guardian with a one-time stipend of $500.
Guardians can be everything from sworn law enforcement to a volunteer or regular school staffer.
“How do I tell the parents at an elementary school you have a guardian, but Middle School has a police officer?” the sheriff said.
Smith says placing a trained deputy at each school will keep kids safer.
“But on the other side of it, it gives children a view into the police officer, that the sheriff's deputy is not a bad person,” he explained. “That person is my friend, and it opens the doors to great communication.”
The sheriff’s office is only asking for five school resource officers because some schools already have them. Smith says South Summit’s SRO has been well-received by parents and the Kamas Valley community.
It’s up to the Summit County Council to approve or deny the new employee requests when it adopts a budget this December. Chief Deputy Kacey Bates said they have to comply with the armed guardian law by the start of the 2025-2026 school year.
“Our pay is somewhere in the middle. So I have to be able to attract folks that are going to drive by five police stations or five sheriff's offices that pay more than we do,” Smith said. “But so far, we've been very successful.”
County staff say that the proposed 2025 budget is balanced thanks to a new sales tax Summit County voters approved last week.
The “emergency services sales tax” can be used to pay for law enforcement, and it’s projected to raise the millions needed to cover the budget, which includes several new positions across multiple county departments.
