District Skeptical of Adding “Floater” to School Deputies’ Ranks and Increasing Contract with Sheriff 20%

The Flagler County School Board has few quibbles with a proposed 10 percent increase in its contract with the Sheriff’s Office for the 12 School Resource Deputies it pays for. The coming year’s budget is $1.52 million, compared to $1.377 million. The figures don’t include overtime costs.

The County Commission picks up half the cost of the base pay (no overtime, no contribution for the deputy the district added last year to cover its alternative school), and Palm Coast adds an SRD at its expense, for a total of 13.

The board is more skeptical about a proposed addition to the contract: a 13th “floater” deputy who would increase the cost of the contract 20 percent, to $1.65 million, in a year when the district is getting no additional “Safe Schools” dollars from the legislature and is facing its own budget challenges.

The addition–counterintuitively–is intended to reduce overtime costs. Whether it will, nobody could say in an hour-long discussion at a School Board workshop this afternoon, leaving the proposal hanging until the board has more answers than questions. The board is scheduled to vote to approve the contract on July 22.

The district pays deputies for security at extracurricular activities, sports events, and on campus when regular SRDs are out sick, on vacation, in training, or occupied with paperwork after an incident. The district paid $57,000 in SRD overtime for extracurricular activities alone this year. It’s not clear how much it paid in overtime overall, when including on-campus costs during school hours. Nor is it clear how much of that $57,000 the floater would be able to erase, since overlapping events would require extra security the floater couldn’t cover simultaneously.

That left school board members uneasy as they discussed the proposal with Sheriff’s Chief Mark Strobridge (on an afternoon sabbatical back to his old job, from his role as Palm Coast’s assistant city manager) and School Safety Coordinator David Bossardet. Board members Janie Ruddy–who asked probing questions about the contract overall–was especially concerned by the inability to weigh the proposal without clear data, while Board Chair Will Furry and Board member Derek Barrs were also hesitant.

“I’m concerned though, that for $154,000 we’re getting a deputy that is going to fill these empty spots, as well as Friday evening” in the fall, Ruddy said, referring to footbal nights. “That doesn’t seem like a full-time role.” She asked Bossardet whether there are plans to maximize the deputy’s time. Bossardet said the district will develop a “matrix” defining security costs ahead of time, so that the district can “plan ahead and not making spur of the moment decisions.”

The district has always drawn a direct line between deputies and safety. That’s what justifies them. Bossardet did not draw that line. “Whether we go with the floater deputy or not, I personally don’t feel it’s adding extra safety to our campuses,” the safety coordinator said. “Our current model, we are safe in, and we provided a safe environment for however many years we’ve been doing this model. That wasn’t the intent to bring the floater deputies, to make our schools safer. The intent is to bring this on a trial basis to see if it will help alleviate some of those costs.”

But the data to back up the proposal simply wasn’t there.

“At the end of the day, this unknown could just magnify the cost here over time,” Furry said. He preferred to pilot the program for a year rather than adopt it permanently. “It doesn’t appear that there’s real hard data for comparison to say exactly how the [overtime] is going to be.”

Barrs, a former SRD himself, had his own reservations. “Being an SRO, I get it,” he said, using the other acronym for the role–school resource officer. “I see the value, I know the value and what they bring to the table, and but we’re also at a at a time where we have to look at what’s good from the dollars and cents, just like the sheriff’s office and everybody else has to do too.”

Ruddy enumerated the “unknowns” ahead, from frozen budgets to concerns over the district’s fund balance. “So there’s a lot of nice things we’d like to have, there’s a lot of nice things we would do, but can we afford them in this time of uncertainty?” she asked. “We need to focus on what do we need in order to maintain a high level of safety and not focus on the extras, because we’re not in a time of plenty.” The lack of data–which the finance department should have provided–was especially troubling to her.

The “matrix” Bossardet spoke of will be provided to the board on July 22. It was less clear whether the board would have clearer overtime data.

Beyond that. The only significant change in the contract broadens access to campus to all sheriff’s deputies. Currently only SRDs are provided access to campus through keys or electronic codes. The agreement will be changed to allow access to any sheriff’s personnel in case of emergency (the district is converting to all-electronic access across the district).

But Ruddy had additional questions about the parameters of the contract itself. In her view, it makes the district responsible for “the entire payroll of these officers,” as opposed to paying a flat fee the way the district does, say, for its legal counsel. “It seems like we’re absorbing financial costs for their sick leave, vacation leave,” Ruddy said. “In addition, we have to absorb [cost of living] increases that are agreed to with the sheriff’s office, as opposed to the budget that were provided, for example, under Safe Schools.” Safe Schools is the state appropriation for security in public schools.

For the nine years that he’s been involved in contract negotiations, Strobridge said, it’s always been a “service provider type of contract.”

Strobridge said state retirement costs increased “considerably,” adding over $1 million to the sheriff’s budget overall, for example. Health costs have also increased. Ruddy said the district has similar cost increases.

Ruddy is interested in tying increases in SRD costs to Safe Schools budgeting. In other words, if the legislature increases Safe Schools funding by 1 or 2 percent, then that’s the percentage increase that should be built into the sheriff’s contract. It so happens that this year, the legislature did not increase Safe Schools funding for the budget year that began July 1. Board member Derek Barrs said the board, the sheriff and the Florida Sheriff’s Association should make it a priority to lobby against “stagnant” Safe Schools money.

That money’s formula is also controlled by the crime index. Safer communities get proportionately less money, Strobridge said. Flagler County has a low crime index. So it gets less.

Ruddy wasn’t willing to settle for that kind of approach. “We have lobbyists. We went, we’ve spoken, and we didn’t get pretty much anything we asked for,” she said skeptically. “So we can’t put all our eggs in one basket that well. We’ll eat it this year. Next year, I’m sure they’re going to listen to us, right?”