New year, new improvements for Columbia County school police

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - As students head back to the classroom, safety is always a big concern.

We sat down with the Columbia County School District Police chief to hear what new plans they have in place to keep your kids safe.

The Columbia County School District Police is heading into its second school year of being a separate police force.

Now, they’re separate from the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office. Over the summer, they reviewed how their first year went.

“You always sit down, you go okay, what can I do better? What can I do better? You look at events throughout the United States in the world, and you look at those events, but you look at yourself and go: Where can we improve,” Chief Gary Owens questions.

Looking at areas to improve, they added parking lot attendants in all high schools.

“Look at the high schools. One high school is over 2,000 enrollment. That’s a lot of people to try to get into confined space at one point or another,” he says. “So we felt that having that extra set of eyes and ears to just kind of help us mitigate the parking lot and allows the school resource officers to be more engaged in the schools with other duties that they do.”

They also added more secure entrances to schools that may not have had them in the past to limit access to common areas from visitors.

“We’ve added some security measures like vestibules in some of the schools that didn’t have them before, you know, secure entranceways that were never there before,” said Owens.

When it comes to school safety, some parents feel safe dropping their kids off.

“It’s been safe. We’ve only been here for two years, but so far, it’s been safe for us, thank God,” said Grovetown Elementary Parent Marlene Hampton.

As her son is ready for the first day.

“He’s all excited,” she says.

Owens says to keep everyone safe includes everyone, not just resource officers. It’s a combination of trust between the officers, teachers, students and parents like Hampton.

“We can do it together. We can all be safe. At the end of the day. I want your kids to go home more educated, but safe, very safe,” Owens says.

The district says they are staffed to have one school resource officer in every school and two in every high school.

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