After a contentious debate Thursday night, the Clay County School Board voted to create its own police department in order to promote safety and security in a financially responsible way during the 2019-2020 school year.
The debate was the result of a mandate that passed after the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The mandate called for increased security in Florida schools.
In Clay County, voters voted in favor of an extra millage rate that would fund additional security.
Thursday night, the Clay County School Board was tasked with deciding if they should keep Clay County deputies on hand or create their own police department exclusively for the schools.
The decisions were broken up into five options, listed as Options A-E.
After multiple hours of debate, Option B passed 4-1, calling for the elimination of Clay County deputies and Sheriff certified "guardians" by the end of the next school year.
Clay County Sheriff Darryl Daniels said his department would support the school, but alluded to the fact that he felt like they hadn't thought through every aspect of creating a district police department.
“If you have all of these people, who’s going to train them?" Daniels said. "You have a police department that just stood up with no one to train them because the police department doesn’t exist to be in a training capacity."
First Coast News asked why Daniels didn't make his opinions known at the podium. He said "it's not my meeting" but went on to say that he wishes they would have been part of the discussion.
First Coast News asked if the sheriff would be willing to train the new officers hired for the district.
"I would be if they had asked, but we weren’t factored into the equation," said Daniels.
First Coast News asked Clay County School District superintendent Addison Davis why the sheriff wasn't consulted.
"We were provided numbers by his CFO, so the CFO provided numbers we use in Clay County currently and numbers we will duplicate them for next year," said Davis.
Option B would cost $6,102,705.86 in 2019 and is expected to decrease to $4,214,352.06 by 2020.
Other options were as follows:
Option A would cost $4,260,374.66 in 2019 and is expected to decrease to $3,964, 653.26 in 2020.
Option C would cost $6,979,875.98 in 2019 and would decrease to $4,640,834.78 by 2020.
Option D would cost $6,794,809.80 in 2019 and would decrease to $5,421,650.20 by 2020.
Option E would cost $6,029,143.74 in 2019 and $5,888,859.54 in 2020.