Stanly County Schools to use off-duty police officers, sheriff’s deputies while search for full-time SROs continues

Board recognizes Endy Elementary 4th graders for reading achievement

Photo courtesy of StanlyTV

ALBEMARLE – The Stanly County Schools Board of Education met Tuesday, March 7, with a few recognitions and committee updates on the agenda. 

The board recognized Endy Elementary at their meeting for being the READBowl Elementary Conference state champions. 

The READBowl is a program that former NFL player Malcolm Mitchell puts on, and its purpose is to get students to be passionate about reading. 

The competition offers quarterly contests in multiple different categories, and students tally up how many minutes they read over the quarter. Endy Elementary’s 4th graders ended up winning by reading for a total of 362,588 minutes, according to the school’s Facebook. 

The board then approved Pinnacle Architecture to design a plan for the Classroom Expansion Project at Endy Elementary.  

“We met with two architects and discussed plans for the expansion of the program there, and the committee felt that Pinnacle was the best of the two that were presented,” said Vice Chair Carla Poplin. 

The board was then presented with an update from the Safety and Security Committee on the status of full-time SROs. 

“We’re still searching for some funding and some SROs,” said board member Dr. Rufus Lefler. “We have about six schools that don’t have full-time SROs, and we had a long discussion about it. What we’re going to do until we can get our funding straightened out is that we’re going to use off-duty policemen and sheriff’s deputies to cover our schools just when they have the time to do it. We hope to get full-time SROs as soon as we can.” 

Director of School Safety and Security, Jennifer Flowe, went into further details on the plan. 

“For the five schools that don’t have SROs and Central Elementary as well, what we have done is we are working with the Sheriff’s Department and Albemarle Police Department to use off-duty officers to fill those slots,” Flowe said. “We hope to have officers in the school every day. They may be split to where they rotate through, but just to have the presence of those officers on the campuses as much as possible. That is our plan for the remainder of the school year. Our SRO funding did roll over for next year, so we will have that funding; we just have to find the additional part of that in order to fund the full-time SROs.” 

The Stanly County Schools Board of Education will next meet April 4.