OC Law Enforcement Committee hears about ASAP

Oconee County Sheriff Mike Crenshaw presented the Armed School Alliance Program (ASAP) to the Law Enforcement Committee Tuesday night. This is the same plan that he presented to the Board of Trustees for the School District of Oconee County (SDOC) on Monday night. It proposes training and arming as many as 50 school personnel. However, Sheriff Crenshaw says he would first like to hire seven more School Resource Officers (SRO). “Just at a bare minimum would be an additional seven SROs and if there is any consideration that you want to give to the new Tri-County Technical College Oconee Campus as well as the Hamilton Career Center that will be moving would be an additional need as well. In what we have been discussing, every school shooting we try to look and analyze what can we learn from this to make our schools safer, it has me thinking if we truly want to stop school shootings in our society we’ve got to take an additional step at some point in time other than an SRO. That lead to our discussions of possibly arming certain school personnel. I’ve never been a fan and I’m still not a fan of arming a teacher and expecting them to leave a classroom full of students by themselves and go look for a shooter. Some additional concern was when we get there how are we going to know the good guy from the bad guy. In discussions with the SDOC, we feel pretty good about a possible plan. We are not trying to rush into anything. I told the school board this doesn’t exist in South Carolina and I don’t know that it exist in the southeast.” Sheriff Crenshaw told the Committee that the estimated first-year cost of adding an SRO is $95,000. The proposed Armed School Alliance Program would be voluntary and involve selected school personnel who would receive 40-60 hours of training including a Concealed Weapons Class and proficiency test. The Board of Trustees for the SDOC will hold further discussion on the plan at an upcoming meeting.