Evesham Township officials used the March 8 meeting of the Evesham Township Council to once again go on the record with the township’s belief that the Evesham Township School District need only pay $200,000 to continue the current arrangement that assigns police officers to the district’s K–8 schools.
Debate surrounding the cost of the program started when district officials recently held several community budget meetings and said the district might need a public referendum to raise nearly $700,000 to fund the program for the upcoming 2016–2017 school year.
Evesham township manager Tom Czerniecki disagreed with that figure, and said the total cost of the program is currently $500,000, of which the township pays $300,000 and the district pays $200,000.
“In their proposed budget it’s less than three-tenths of 1 percent,” Czerniecki said.
Regarding the nearly $700,000 figure, Czerniecki said that number was what the district would need to expand the program beyond its current configuration and hire additional employees.
Due to safety concerns, Mayor Randy Brown said he did not want to divulge the exact numbers of officers currently assigned to the district and the number of hours they work.
However, he did ask Evesham Police Chief Christopher Chew if he was comfortable with the current configuration of the program, to which Chew said he was.
“It’s been working great, and we’ve been getting great feedback from everyone involved including the staff, and we have more than adequate coverage from beginning to end throughout the day all different hours all over the place,” Chew said.
Czerniecki also said he wanted to clear up a comment made at one of the meetings where a district employee spoke negatively about the program by indicating that an officer assigned to one of the schools spent his time playing games on his phone rather than protecting the school.
Czerniecki said the township had an obligation to look into the statement, but when officials approached the employee after the meeting the employee said she had no direct knowledge of any actual incident and was only making a generality.
“She was just making a generality, which was extremely unfortunately because it happened in front a few hundred residents of ours, so I just wanted it to be on the record that we looked into that, there’s no truth to that what so ever, but if there was we would have addressed it,” Czerniecki said.
Chew used his monthly police summary at the meeting to also give more specifics on what officers were doing during school hours.
From Dec. 16 through Feb. 26, Chew said officers assisted in classroom instruction 28 times, conducted 23 well-being and truancy checks, conducted 17 criminal investigations into incidents such as bullying, handled three motor vehicle violations and conducted three security briefings.
“That’s just the beginning where we’re sitting down and looking at every inch of the school and working with school staff on how we can improve school security,” Chew said.
Chew said the department is constantly getting positive feedback from parents concerning the program, and Chew said he believed having police reach children at a young age will allow them to grow more comfortable coming to police about important issues as they grow older.
“It’s part of the culture in the schools and that’s where I think we’re going to see the value of this program for years and years to come,” Chew said.
