Chesley Finds Funding For SRO At VV Elementary

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

The Mesquite Police Department will be funding a new Student Resource Officer (SRO) position to be assigned at Virgin Valley Elementary School. The Council approved the new SRO position during the Mesquite City Council meeting held Tuesday, Sept. 13.

Mesquite Police Chief MaQuade Chesley told Council members that his department had found a way to fund the new position internally without any additional funding from the city.
“By circumstance, my full time administrative assistant is vacating his position,” Chesley said. “So long explanation short, we are going to fund that position with our budget that is already in place.”

Chesley said that he had previously contacted the Clark County School District Chief of Police asking for help in funding the position. The answer back had been a firm ‘no,’ he said.
“They will not fund either our middle school SRO or the elementary SRO,” Chesley said. “That is not something that they are doing in Las Vegas currently. So I was told they wouldn’t be able to do that here either.”

Currently CCSD contributes partial funding for an SRO at Virgin Valley High School, with the city chipping in the rest. The City of Mesquite alone is funding an SRO at Hughes Middle School.
MaQuade said that they will begin the hiring process for the new SRO immediately. “We will try to get them in the school as soon as possible,” he said.

Councilman Wes Boger, who has been working for a long time on getting this position, expressed gratitude to the Chief for finding a way to make it work.

“I appreciate very much that you have found a way to do this,” Boger said. “It is really important to be proactive when it comes to the safety of our kids. The school district is more reactive when it comes to safety it seems.”

Boger had brought the item to the City Council at its Aug. 23 meeting. At that time, he had told the council that he had been pushing for an SRO at the elementary school ever since the Uvalde, Texas shootings. He acknowledged that across the nation it is uncommon to have SROs in elementary schools. School districts have elected instead to base those positions around volume of emergency calls for the school. And those tend to be more frequent at high schools, he said.

“But I feel like there is more to it than that, as we saw at Uvalde and at Sandy Hook,” Boger said. “I feel like the kids that are most vulnerable with the young ones are the ones that we should be protecting the most.”

“As a parent, I thought that elected officials should be seeing to this a long time ago,” Boger added. “And after Uvalde, I realized we can do something. I can do something. I am an elected official and I am going to go for it.”

In the Aug. 23 meeting, Chief Chesley explained what the role of an SRO entails. One of the duties of the position were to ensure that students arrive to school in safety. This includes traffic safety around the campus. The SRO also supervises the crossing guards at the school.
In addition the SRO is charged with developing a strong, positive relationship with the kids in the school.

“Before the first bell rings, our SROs are in the schools, giving high fives to arriving kids and talking with the teachers, speaking with administration as to what they need in order to have a safe, productive day,” Chesley said.

Even though Mesquite is a small town in an outlying area, the danger of active shooter incidents is still out there, Chesley told the Council.
“We know that Mesquite can be impacted by active shooters,” Chesley said. “Especially with the October 1 shooting. That offender was living right here in our city. So to say that it can’t happen in Mesquite is crazy.”

The mayor and the other council members expressed support for the idea in the Aug. 23 meeting. But there were questions about where the funding for the new position would come from. That source of funding had not been determined by city staff at that point. So council members voted, at that time, to table the issue to the next meeting until the funding issues could be resolved.

In last week’s meeting, Boger made the motion to approve the new SRO position under the proposed existing funding. The motion was approved with a unanimous vote.