‘We do have to look at this as a budget matter,” Amos Quick said during a meeting of Guilford school and law enforcement officials last week.

Guilford County Board of Education members remain divided over the value of school resource officers and the controversy that has arisen over stun guns.

Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes, High Point Chief of Police Jim Fealy and Greensboro police Assistant Chief Gary Hastings adamantly support keeping SROs in middle and high schools while including Tasers as part of standard equipment. Some school board members are just as stubbornly opposed to SROs carrying and possibly using Tasers to quell disturbances or subdue a person who becomes unruly, resists arrest or attacks someone (especially a police officer) on school campuses. Using cost – $2.9 million for the 39 assigned officers – as added ammunition in their arguments, board members opposed to the use of Tasers seriously are considering replacing SROs with security guards, at least at the middle school level.

Let’s hope, should the get-rid-of-the-SROs crowd prevail, that the school board isn’t being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

We agree with Barnes, who declared at last week’s meeting that SROs “are more expensive, but you get more and the children are better off,” and even more so with Fealy, who said, “it would be a colossal mistake to remove the SROs.”

Even with SROs on site, school officials have a difficult time providing a safe environment for students, in keeping order and in quickly, efficiently and as safely as possible mitigating disturbances major and minor. Security guards in the schools most likely would get no more respect nor be able to prevent and/or control dangerous behavior inside the schools or deal effectively with threats and/or actions from outsiders than they do at Oak Hollow Mall or a variety of other locations around the county.

As we noted in this space in November, the record contains plenty of reports of fights among students and violence in our schools, including injuries to school administrators assaulted by students. Officers must be armed sufficiently to provide for students, teachers and administrative personnel the protection they are assigned to give.

Granted, officers must be thoroughly trained in how and when to use Tasers and clear rules should guide their use. But we see keeping SROs and them reaching for a Taser instead of the standard firearms officers carry on our streets if forced to take action as extremely necessary to keep safety a priority in our schools.