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School officer pleas continue

Fredonia resident Maureen Blackburn asks the school board to revisit the resource officer issue.

A dedicated police presence at Fredonia Central School will not return in the near future, but that does not mean all hope is lost.

Board of Education President Michael Bobseine recently sent a letter to the Fredonia Village Board informing them that the school district has rejected the latest counter proposal for a school resource officer. Mayor Athanasia Landis expressed her disappointment in the school’s decision at the latest village board meeting.

“I take this as a personal failure,” she stated. “When I was campaigning, I promised students, I promised parents, I promised myself that I’m going to do whatever I can, and I didn’t even think it was a possibility that this was not going to happen.”

Landis explained the village accepted “pretty much what they gave us” at the end of the day. She conceded she has no idea what else can be done to put a resource officer back in the school.

“I remember last year, when the school board had decided to cancel the football team, parents got together and they went there and they demanded that this was not going to happen, and they were successful,” Landis added. “The only thing I can say is I would encourage this to happen again. This is much more important, especially with the drug problem that we have in the community, with the psychological, psychiatric issues going on in the school and the whole community in general.

“This is the end of this road for me, but if something like that happened, I would be there with you as a parent, first of all, and as a mayor.”

Trustee Kara Christina pointed out Bobseine’s letter did not detail a reason why the school board rejected the village’s latest proposal.

While the discussion ended there at the Village Board meeting, it picked back up at the school board meeting the next day. Fredonia resident Maureen Blackburn – whose grandchildren go to school at Fredonia – asked the school board to revisit the school resource officer issue.

“I believe it to be one of the most important auxiliary positions that you can have in this district, for not only the physical safety, but the emotional safety of our young children and young adults,” Blackburn said during the public portion of the meeting. “You don’t put a price tag on the relationship that is built and carries over from a young grade all the way up through. Whatever the barriers are, whatever the difficulties are, I think that each of the two boards needs to rise above whatever the financial pieces are that seem to be roadblocks.”

With the school district beginning its budgetary process for the 2017-18 school year, the OBSERVER asked Bobseine and Superintendent Paul DiFonzo about the position after the meeting. Both of them agreed an SRO is an asset and added they would be open to another contract proposal from the village – if officials there are still willing to talk.

“It’s not anything relative to the substance; it’s really the finances of it,” Bobseine noted.

DiFonzo pointed out the village’s contract proposal for the remainder of the school year carried a much higher price tag than the school expected to pay. In other words, the cost did not make sense to the school.

“There’s just quite a gap between what we’d be paying this year, which would be significantly more than what we would pay next year,” DiFonzo elaborated. “The remainder of the school year, we expected to be prorated to reflect the number of days the officer was here. Obviously, there has to be some reason behind the amount we pay and we feel that we made a significant step upwards.”

DiFonzo mentioned the district had offered a compromise of $35,000 annually, which was between the $30,000 the school budgeted and the $40,000 the village asked for. The last figure the district had actually paid was around $22,000.

With negotiations for the remainder of this school year all but ended, Bobseine said it is an entirely different story if the village proposes a contract solely for next school year, rather than a single contract for both this and next school year, which is what the district rejected.

“We had actually, in our proposal (to the village), had (prorated everything out),” Bobseine remarked. “If they were accepting of everything we had offered, then they would’ve signed our contract.”

The school and the village have gone back and forth on the officer issue for over a year now. The school has gone without an officer after the village pulled the plug on the partnership during sticky budget discussions in 2015. Talks between the village and the school to restore the SRO position commenced back in October 2015.

Email: gfox@observertoday.com. Twitter: @gfoxnews

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