Jefferson County Public Schools — Some school safety administrators say eliminating their positions to address the district’s budget crisis will make schools less safe.
School safety administrators currently manage weapon detection systems, conduct threat assessments, and build relationships with students as part of their prevention-focused roles.
On Friday, Feb. 13, the JCPS Board of Education voted 5–2 to approve central office organizational changes that will eliminate hundreds of jobs, including the entire School Safety Administrator program.
“The $3 million that you’re cutting from the budget, really, that $3 million means more than the buildings being safe?” asked Emery Richardson, a 13-year JCPS employee who has served as a safety administrator since the program launched in 2022.
Richardson said administrators were first informed on Jan. 22 that the district would eliminate half of the positions to help close the budget gap. Less than two weeks later, they were told the district would eliminate all school safety administrator roles.
“No one told us that it was a sunsetting position,” Richardson said. “No one told us after year four they would be doing away with us. All the reports that we were getting was, ‘Hey, great job. Keep up the good work.’”
Despite positive evaluations, district leaders decided to cut all 74 positions. Currently, every JCPS school has at least one safety administrator, and some schools have more than one assigned to their building.
Curtis Moss, another safety administrator, said their work centers on prevention. They conduct school-specific threat assessments and oversee weapon detection systems. When a detection system alerts as a student passes through, safety administrators check and, if necessary, pat down the student.
Moss said they also focus on building healthy relationships with students.
“They’re (students) losing an advocate for them that they have come to know and trust, and they understand that job role,” he said. “You’re going to have some students going to principals, assistant principals. You’re going to have others going to a counselor or a mental health practitioner for help with the things that a lot of our current safety administrators deal with.”
Moss added that safety administrators receive extensive training to handle threats and worries about how schools will manage those concerns without them.
“Sometimes these threat assessments span multiple days, multiple hours, because you’re having to interview kids that, if it’s an online one, ‘What was the group about?’,” he explained. “If it was in person, ‘Who heard it? Who are the witnesses?’ We spend hours on threat assessments because, if something does happen, we’re protecting the school, JCPS as a whole from any kind of legal course that someone may take to show that we did it with fidelity and we did it right.”
Moss said assistant principals or counselors will likely assume those duties, which Richardson believes could disrupt classroom learning.
“The teachers don’t come to school to be bodyguards, counselors, mentors,” Richardson said. “I mean, it’s hard enough when you got 28, 30 kids in the classroom, let alone you’re dealing with the behavioral, the mental, the acting out. I think it’s going to take a critical incident for them to realize like, ‘Oh, we might have knee-jerked too soon.’”
In a Jan. 23 interview, JCPS Superintendent Dr. Brian Yearwood said schools will continue enforcing safety protocols under the new budget structure, though not always through safety administrators.
“At the end of the day, our schools will be safe,” Yearwood said. “At the end of the day, we’re not changing protocols and processes. At the end of the day, we are right-sizing and really going into a responsible budget, one that can be sustained. Not one that we were ever going to have to come back to. So, a part of that is ensuring that safety protocols and the safety of our schools are consistent.”
District leaders told school safety administrators they may apply for a new position titled Risk Assessment Coordinator.
However, Moss and Richardson expressed concerns about the new role. They said it would require traveling between multiple schools instead of focusing on one campus. They added that the position would primarily center on weapon detection systems, limiting their ability to build trust with students.
They also said the new role would come with an approximate $30,000 pay cut.
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