SROs set for five high schools

by Krystal Paco

Guam - The New Year will bring a new face to each of the island's five public high schools. According to student support services administrator Chris Anderson, an initiative between the Department of Education and the Judiciary of Guam allowed for the hiring of school resource officers to provide law enforcement presence on school grounds.

He told KUAM News, "I think having an SRO on campus just prevents serious violence that could possibly happen. We see it in schools across the United States with students bringing weapons on campus; shootings were students have been seriously injured or killed, and so having a law enforcement personnel on campus will deter and neutralize the threat is a good thing for our schools."

Anderson hopes SROs will help deter school break-ins, adding, "So we're hoping that our SROs will be able to interface very well with GPD to be able to be a source of intelligence for GPD in terms of any kind of criminal activity that may happen. They're not going to be necessarily camping out overnight trying to catch people who are trying to break into schools or vandalize, but in terms of being able to gather intelligence."

DOE has had versions of the SRO in the past, as Anderson notes, "This is not completely new to the Department of Education - we've had versions of SROs in previous years, the challenge was there was only one."

The five SROs will also work with their assigned high school's feeder middle schools. The SROs are scheduled to be sworn in December 16 and will begin their assignments when students return from Christmas Break.