SALISBURY — The Rowan-Salisbury Schools Board of Education on Monday will review details of new school resource officer agreements.
The meeting will meet at 4:30 p.m. at Wallace Educational Forum, 500 N Main St. If you can not attend in person, the meeting can be seen via live stream at vimeo.com/rssboe.
The district contracts with local municipalities and Rowan County Sheriff’s Office to furnish officers to serve each school. The agreements are a regular process ahead of each school year.
RSS covers the cost of all the resource officers. The largest of the contracts is with Rowan County Sheriff’s Office for $344,639. The district will pay Salisbury $211,409 for three officers, China Grove $137,690 for two officers, Landis $127,594 for two officers and Spencer $120,358 for two officers.
The agreement includes background checks on officers to ensure they appear on no sex offender registries, meeting training requirements that apply to all normal officers. Also included in the agreements are provisions that SROs should be excluded from disciplinary enforcement that do not involved violated laws and should serve as positive role models.
In other agenda items:
• The board will discuss athletic eligibility for Rowan County Early College students. The district could allow the students to participate in athletics at their home schools, but it opted not to do so in the past due to scheduling differences between the Early College and other high schools as well as the mission of RCEC.
Included in the agenda packet is the 2022-2023 application for the Early College as part of the state’s High School Innovation Project.
The recommendation listed on the agenda item is for the board to “review the information and provide additional direction for administration.”
• The board will review a two-year lease agreement with Reaper’s Realm Wrestling Club. The club is interested in using a small building on a piece of property the district owns in China Grove but does not use. The club has offered to perform upgrades and repairs to the building in exchange for the first year’s rent on the property.
The board advised administration to move forward negotiating a lease with the club at its previous meeting. The club, per the agreement, intends to pressure wash the floors and walls, fix any issues with the building, install a propane HVAC system with a licensed contractor, repair the plumbing with a licensed plumber, gravel the parking lot, paint and clean the building
• The board will discuss returning to school in August.
Carl Blankenship has covered education for the Post since December 2019. Before coming to Salisbury he was a staff writer for The Avery Journal-Times in Newland and graduated from Appalachian State University in 2017, where he was editor of The Appalachian.
