Under House Bill 84, the armed presence can be provided by a school resource officer, a licensed private security guard or a school guardian. An SRO is a sworn law enforcement officer and a guardian is a school employee who has firearms and first aid training and a concealed carry permit.
School guardians cannot be a principal, teacher or other individual whose responsibilities require them to be primarily in a classroom to teach or interact with students and they must undergo a mental health screening. They get a one-time stipend of $500.
The estimated price tag for the armed presence in schools, along with other safety measures, is steep. Matt Hymas, the Utah State Board of Education (USBE), put the overall price tag at $500 million.
Hymas asked legislators on Feb. 7 for $50 million for school safety — a drop in the bucket, he said — and wondered where $450 million more would come from to pay for the improvements.
“I don’t know why this is coming from public education when we use education dollars to strengthen teachers, to strengthen students academically, and then we’re looking at the infrastructure thing where we say, ‘OK, we need this, this and this to increase safety,’ ” Hymas told the Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee.
He said school safety is important to everyone in the state and asked, “Where does this money need to come from and does it need to come from a USBE pot?”
Rep. Ryan Wilcox, H.B. 84’s sponsor, had an even higher estimate of the cost of implementing the law’s mandates.
“I think the numbers are going to be closer to $800 million,” he said at an October meeting of the School Security Task Force.
In addition to the armed presence mandate, the minimum safety requirements for schools include limited entry points; video surveillance of entrances; ground-level windows protected by security film or ballistic windows; internal classroom door locks; readily available bleed kits designed to stop or slow blood loss and first aid kits; exterior cameras in parking areas and campus grounds; wearable panic alert buttons; and fencing around playgrounds.
Wilcox said schools have to look a little bit differently at security than they did in the past.
“The good news is it’s a lot of simple stuff,” he said at a House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice meeting last month.
H.B. 84 made a one-time appropriation of $100 million for security enhancements. In 2023, House Bill 61, also sponsored by Wilcox, included $72 million for School Safety and Support grants.
This legislative session, Wilcox is the chief sponsor of House Bill 40 that, among other provisions, would establish a nonprofit foundation to purchase or facilitate a donation of school safety products.
Utah schools had until Dec. 31 to conduct an annual safety needs assessment that identifies security gaps. Grants are based on that information, which is confidential, and the schools have until June 2026 to use the money.
The Park City School District chose the school resource officer option. Park City Police Department officers and Summit County Sheriff’s Office deputies provide armed security at the schools.
The Summit County Council included the hiring of five additional school resource officers in the 2025 budget, which began Jan. 1, and four of them will be assigned to the Park City district. The district and the county will each pay half the cost for the officers, according to Mike Tanner, Park City School District chief operating officer.
The Park City Police Department is seeking funding from the Park City Council to add another SRO in the fiscal year that begins July 1 and the district anticipates having a 50-50 funding arrangement, Tanner said. He said the average cost for each officer — including training, salary, healthcare and other benefits — is about $150,000 a year and sometimes more.
Having school resource officers on site gives students the opportunity to view police as a partner in their education, Tanner said. In addition, the officers can learn about potential threats through their interactions with the students, he said.
The North Summit and South Summit districts have SROs, and the North Summit District also has a private security officer who has a concealed carry permit. Wasatch School District has SROs at its schools, all of them Heber City Police Department officers or Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office deputies.
The safety effort also establishes some reporting from SafeUT to the state’s intelligence databases. The crisis line includes a feature that allows users to report tips confidentially.
In fiscal 2024, 8,958 tips were submitted to SafeUT and 758 of them pertained to a potential school threat or acts of violence, Rachel Lucynski, director of community crisis intervention and support services at Huntsman Mental Health Institute, said at a meeting last month of the Legislature’s School Safety Task Force.
“Partly because of SafetyUT but certainly many other efforts across the state, we have not seen any mass casualty events in Utah schools and we hope to continue that positive trend with many of these enhancements coming out of House Bill 84,” Lucynski said.