Lehighton Area School District will use a recent Safe Schools targeted grant to pay for its two police officers, but one director asked for a discussion regarding their arresting powers.

Walter Zlomsowitch said Monday night while he’s fully in favor of any measure that ensures the protection of students and staff, he doesn’t want one mistake to cost a student opportunities down the road.

“I was young and dumb and I just think if a kid has a bad day and does something wrong one time, having a police officer there in school with the ability to arrest them could impact the rest of their life,” Zlomsowitch said. “Having officers there to protect students from a shooter or something like that, I think that’s great, I just wonder if there is another way to do this without them having arresting powers. If something rises to the level where it requires an arrest, we can always call the borough officers in.”

Board President Joy Beers said she welcomed the discussion, which could take place at the April 11 board workshop.

Lehighton first hired two police officers to cover its district in 2018. It also used grant money at that time to make the initial hires of Ronald Kazakavage and Peter Salerno.

Kazakavage resigned from his position effective Nov. 18 and the district hired John Orsulak on Feb. 28 at $27.50 per hour for an average of 25 hours per week as his replacement.

The current “two-year grant agreement is split up between $39,960, which can be used for costs incurred from July 1, 2021, through Dec. 31, 2022, and $19,980, which can be used for costs incurred from July 1, 2022, through June 30, 2023.”

“When we first hired police officers, I went to a Pennsylvania School Board Association conference and they had a talk there about how officers were not one of the best ways to ensure safety within the student body,” Beers said. “They had other suggestions about more organizational types of things we could do. We brought that information back to the board at the time, but the decision was made to hire officers.”

Role for superintendent

While Beers entertained a discussion on the officers, she cautioned that Lehighton will be hiring a new superintendent who will be looking at all aspects of the district.

“My attitude right now is to keep the status quo and allow those officers to continue and then it will be researched in the future,” she said.

Josiah Kimmel, a Lehighton junior, said it’s beneficial to have officers on site.

“Our security is actually inferior to many other schools around the area,” Kimmel said. “In my opinion, if you’re doing something illegal in school, you’re doing something illegal in school and it should be handled in that fashion.”

Middle School Principal Steve Ebbert said officers are not out looking for problems. Most often, he said, they are dealing with truancy issues which used to be handled by an attendance officer.

“We no longer have an attendance officer,” Ebbert said. “Years ago, they would make home visits and keep up on filing the truancy citations with the magistrate, which we are required by law to do. Our police officers are probably doing more truancy citations than breaking up fights and those kind of things.”

Officers, he added, are not involved at the outset of a situation with school buildings.

“If we have reasonable suspicion for a search, we can do that and we don’t get the officers involved in that,” Ebbert said. “If there is a fight, most times someone else is breaking it up and the officers are helping to make decisions on discipline. We have very strict guidelines on how we handle things.”