Scott McDaniel is the new school resource officer for officials with Southern Hancock. He is a full-time school employee who will handle safety for the district schools.
NEW PALESTINE — For the first time, officials with the Southern Hancock school district have made their school resource officer (SRO) a full-time school employee. The district hired former longtime Department of Natural Resources conservation officer Scott McDaniel, a local community member whose children attended the district, as their head SRO.
McDaniel is also currently a reserve police officer with the Lawrence Police Department, but his main job will be as the head SRO for Southern Hancock. McDaniel will be one of three SROs the district plans to use daily this upcoming school year, community relations and communications director Wes Anderson said.
In addition to years of experience in law enforcement, McDaniel just wrapped up training through the National Association of School Resource Officers, NASRO.
Prior to hiring McDaniel, the district had a partnership with the New Palestine Police Department and basically shared an officer while also relying on other off-duty officers to fill in and cover other shifts within the district.
While the district will continue to use off-duty officers throughout the county to cover shifts in all their schools, McDaniel will be full time and work with the administrative staff. That includes the district’s head of security, Miles Hercamp, and NPHS assistant principal Craig Moore, who also specializes in security measures, to keep district students and staff safe.
“I think a police presence is always important in the schools,” Anderson said. “We want them to always be visible, and we want our kids to know who they are and to have relationships with them.”
Anderson and Hercamp are hoping McDaniel, with his deep ties to the community, can bring his law enforcement knowledge and personal relationship values in to help keep kids and staff safe.
“I think he’s got the type of connections that will help make our schools safer,” Hercamp said. “We’re excited to have someone who is as well connected to the community as he is.”
That includes meeting with the county’s head law enforcement officials to make sure Southern Hancock is on the same type of safety plan as other county districts.
Hiring McDaniel is just one of the pieces of the safety puzzle Hercamp is constantly working on, he said. The district, thanks to a yearly safety grant they match, have earmarked $200,000 this year for school safety. While Hercamp noted much of that will be used to pay SROs, there is enough left over to add some new cameras.
“We updated the camera system at the high school,” Hercamp said. “It’s a web-based, new system.”
They’ve also been able to add more cameras throughout the district’s other five buildings with all of them expected to be up and running when school starts in a few weeks.
The district will also conduct new safety training for every school within the district. Each building is always locked and people entering must be buzzed in. McDaniel will train those doing the buzzing in on what to look for and danger signs to be aware of before allowing anyone to enter a school building.
“We’re also up grading all our school safety plans, making them much more user friendly,” Hercamp said.
District officials say they are on the same page with other county school districts in their approach to school safety — uniformed so county law enforcement can approach an emergency at any school and handle it the same.
“We are unified across the county,” Hercamp said. “We all use the same terminology and process.”
County school officials and law enforcement officials work through a program called, iloveuguys.org which helps them better prepare standard response protocol in the chance of something happening.
“Most of our normal drills, our teachers know what to do,” Hercamp said. “It’s just in those rare circumstances we want to make sure everyone is on the same page.”
Educators and administrators have roles in the event of an emergency, and the district also has a reunification plan in place to reunite families in the event of an emergency.
Hercamp noted one of the reasons they hired McDaniel was because he stressed that, should an emergency situation arise in a Southern Hancock school, he would without hesitation engage a perpetrator right away to make sure anyone out to hurt a student or staff member would be dealt with immediately.
