During the Feb. 14 meeting of the Dawson County Board of Education, board members voted to approve an intergovernmental agreement (IGA) with Dawson County to add a second student resource officer (SRO) at the high school. 

Currently, the school system has seven SROs, one at each of the district’s schools. Due to the addition of several stand-alone facilities at the high school campus over the past few years and the fact that students travel outside the main building to other facilities for classes, district and county leadership determined that a second SRO is needed at the high school. 

“Both the college & career academy and the new agricultural center are a reasonable distance from the main building where the current SRO is housed,” the BOE’s Feb. 14 agenda stated. “A new SRO would be housed in our college & career academy to provide a layer of security on the end of the campus. Apart from the number of SROs, no additional changes are being requested to the IGA.” 

The school system and the county will split the cost of the new SRO per their current agreement, and the vote on Tuesday approved updating the IGA to reflect the placement of eight SROs rather than seven. 

“As we previously discussed, we’re going to be adding a second SRO at the high school campus, so this is just for us to update the IGA agreement — the county has already approved the partnership with us to do this,” Superintendent Nicole LeCave said. “If you look at the agreement you’ll notice that the only thing that has changed in the current agreement is that we’re going to assign eight instead of seven SROs.” 

Additionally, from now on the IGA will be reviewed each year, she said, in case further changes are needed in the future. 

“This agreement in the past has not been an annual agreement that is reviewed, but from this point moving forward we will review this agreement with the county each year,” LeCave said, “so that will give us an opportunity to work with the sheriff’s department and make any changes that we need year to year, so this change and amendment is for the rest of this school year.” 

Board members voted unanimously to approve the updated IGA with the county for the addition of a second SRO at the high school.