By Shelby Stewart-Soldan
Staff Writer
During the regular Monday night meeting, the Brandon Board of Education approved a two year contract for a police liaison officer with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office and Brandon Township.
“I’m recommending a two-year contract for the school year 22-23 as well as 23-24,” said interim superintendent Dr. Gary Richards. “I think it works much better for Lt. Glover as well as the township supervisor for planning purposes, showing that we are committed to a two year arrangement.”
Previously, the liaison contract was approved yearly.
“By splitting those hours over the years, the contract here has always been an issue for our department because it’s always year-to-year,” said OCSO Brandon substation commander Lt. Greg Glover. “It’s always been a question of if we were going to keep a school liaison. This is the only district in the county that it’s a year-to-year issue. It takes a special officer to want to be the school resource officer. When you don’t have a more lengthy contract, that officer doesn’t know every year if he’s going to have a home or bump to another substation.”
The other change to the contract would be that the liaison officer would be in the school full time, 40 hours a week, instead of the previous 20 hours a week.
“Overtime costs would stay the same, we pay overtime costs this year, so if we ask our school resource officer to work a Friday night football game or basketball game, we would pay overtime and that’s what we’ve done in the past,” said Richards. “We’ve committed to paying 50 percent of the annual cost which would include salary, benefits and so-on. I’ve given you the cost to do so, it’s about $20,000 more than we’re currently paying, we’re at about $56,000, so we’d add another $20,000 to have a school resource officer full time.”
The liaison officer would still be with the township substation during school breaks, including summer vacation.
“Thank you to Everybody for working this out because this is very important to us to have your presence in our school buildings as much as you can,” said board president Diane Salter.