Moorhead Police Staffing Shortages Force Them To Pull School Resource Officers For the Fall

MOORHEAD, Minn. (KVRR) — Due to lack of officers, Moorhead Police Department is withdrawing all school resource officers from Moorhead Public Schools.

That’s for at least the first half of the academic year.

Moorhead Public Schools each have stationed a school resource officer within their building, but due to staffing shortages those titles have been stripped.

“Going back to 2014 when I used to handle our hiring here, we used to get one hundred and fifty applicants every time we had a job posting. And now we are lucky if we see you know half a dozen applicants when we have a job opening or multiple job openings,” said Moorhead Police Chief Shannon Monroe.

Monroe states that with recent incidents in the past few years, many have shown less interest in joining the police force due to concerns over safety.

“You had he worldwide pandemic right after the George Floyd incident and then we have a large number of current police officers that are approaching retirement age. They’re estimating at about a quarter of our workforce in Minnesota will retire between 2024 to 2025,” said Monroe.

Although there are shortages within the department, Steve Moore Executive Director of Operations in Emergency Management at Moorhead Public Schools believes that with the training they have received they are prepared to handle the upcoming school year.

“We’ve trained with the police department constantly and our emergency response plan is an integral part of what we do to the emergencies and contingencies. So what they’ll have patrols, every beat has a patrol officer and we have schools within those beats, so there’s a patrol officer within minutes of every one of our schools. So if something were to happen, they would response just like they would under normal conditions,” said Moore.

While the school will not have a school resource officer for the fall term, police officers will be available to patrol the school grounds.

Moorhead Police will most likely return school resource officer after the fall term.