Feds keeping an eye on school deputies is a good thing, sheriff says

Oversight by the feds as the Richland County Sheriff’s Department upgrades its school resource officer program is a good thing, the sheriff said Thursday.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott during a news conference disputed the notion that an agreement between the sheriff’s department and the U.S. Department of Justice means federal officials are taking control. Though an incident at Spring Valley High School put the sheriff’s department under scrutiny in October, the review began before that, in May 2015.

“The Spring Valley incident is something we have to live with,” Lott said. “It was an incident that doesn’t define our program or any school resource officer program.”

The sheriff also addressed a lawsuit filed Thursday by one of the students arrested in the Spring Valley incident and the American Civil Liberties Union. The suit targets the state of South Carolina and several law enforcement agencies, including the sheriff’s department, in an effort to have the state’s “disturbing schools” law declared invalid.

Lott provided reporters with a copy of an email from the ACLU of South Carolina, in which Director Susan Dunn writes, “We are aware that your office has been and will continue to address the issue of disturbing schools in your county. We applaud those efforts. We, however, see this as a statewide issue and are challenging the underlying statute.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the ACLU say a law enforcement officer or an agency did anything good,” Lott said. “They’re actually congratulating us on the efforts that we have to make sure the disturbing schools law gets changed – and we will work with them because it does need to be changed.”

The sheriff pointed to the Spring Valley incident as an example of something that should have been handled at a disciplinary level rather than a criminal one.

Over the next three years, federal officials and the sheriff’s department will work together to overhaul the department’s program with an emphasis on making sure officers don’t get involved in “classroom management or school discipline matters that should be appropriately handled by school staff,” according to a public statement by the Justice Department.

The sheriff’s department was already working last year to make several of the changes that are outlined in the agreement, Lott said Thursday. The main thing to change after the agreement is a expanding the advisory group that reviews training procedures – and the hiring of an outside consultant on the matter.

Deputies will also have to learn to formally identify students with special needs, Lott said. In the past, he said, officers might not have known when a child had special needs – which brings the risk of not making required adjustments when handling such a student.

If the sheriff’s department had not cooperated with the agreement, Lott said, the feds would likely have taken away federal funding for the school resource officer program. But he emphasized that much of the program is funded locally anyway, so it wasn’t fear of losing money that prompted the agreement.

Last year, the school resource officer program received $694,203 in federal money, according to the sheriff’s department. This year, it received $53,648.

Though the feds will keep an eye on the sheriff’s department to make sure the program is upgraded correctly, Lott stressed that the agreement is not a punishment.

“We were not told that we had any violations,” Lott said.

This story was originally published August 11, 2016 at 5:56 PM with the headline "Feds keeping an eye on school deputies is a good thing, sheriff says."