BY KEITH CHESTER

The County Council pushed back hard, and rightfully so, against members of the school system’s administration who came before them asking for county tax dollars to help pay for additional school resource officers (deputy sheriffs) for Creekside Middle School in Port Orange, Deltona Middle School, Galaxy Middle School in Deltona, Heritage Middle School in Deltona, Holly Hill Middle School, and Silver Sands Middle School in Port Orange, all within city boundaries, and Southwestern Middle School, in the county.

Here are just a few of the issues members of the County Council brought up:

The request is coming in for this budget year that started Oct. 1, thus the County Council would have to make budget adjustments to accommodate the $342,905.11 requested. Florida law puts the responsibility of school safety on the school boards in the state, and the Volusia County School Board’s budget exceeds the County of Volusia’s general fund budget.

Additionally, the City of Daytona Beach provides nine officers in schools, with a 50/50 split for funding between the school system and the city.

The City of DeLand provides two officers in schools, with a 50/50 split.

The City of New Smyrna Beach has one officer in a school, with a 50/50 split.

The City of Orange City has one officer in a school, with a 50/50 split.

The City of Ormond Beach has one officer in a school, with a 50/50 split.

South Daytona has one officer in a school, with a 50/50 split, and here, the School Board is asking the County Council to use county tax dollars to fund deputies in six schools that are located in cities at a 55-percent School Board/45-percent county split. This is not fair to those who pay taxes to the county’s general fund and pay taxes to the School Board. That would be two different taxes on the ad valorem tax bill and an additional half-cent sales tax on most things we purchase.

And it is not fair to those taxpayers in the cities that also help provide school resource officers in their cities. If this proposal were approved, people in those cities would have been forced to help fund school security in other cities that refuse to help fund school resource officers in their locale.

Additionally, as was brought to you by County Council Member Troy Kent, the Sheriff’s Office, in most cases, is charging almost twice the hourly rate for a deputy as the cities are charging the school system for an officer. And know this, there are already armed school guardians in all of the schools mentioned.

Our County Council hit it out of the park this time with their pushback against the School Board’s request, a School Board that just keeps wastefully spending and dipping into our pockets anyway they can find.

Again — great job on this one, Volusia County Council, and thank you, Council Member Kent, for taking the School Board’s staff to task over this and looking out for the taxpayers.

To watch the entire discussion the County Council had, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4ScykXWybk and go to the 2:24:45 point in the video.

— Chester, a former police chief of Lake Helen, is a DeLand resident.