Area School Resource Officers Participate in Training
By Rick McCann
Blue RAM Media/Gulf Coast News
August 3, 2025
LOXLEY, Ala. While most children in South Alabama got in a few more days of play and fun in the sun before having to head back to school on August 11th, almost 100 police officers who work as School Resource Officers (SROs) throughout the county received an extensive training to help them to be better prepared during this school year.
The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office has a division just for protecting twelve schools throughout the county and their staff was among those who attended the training along with officers from Daphne, Fairhope, Bay Minette, Elberta, Foley, Orange Beach, the Mobile Sheriff’s Office, and other law enforcement agencies.
Baldwin County law enforcement takes protecting our children very seriously, said Baldwin County Sheriff’s Lt. Matt Morrison, who oversees the SRO division.
“Complacency can be an issue in this division because you are dealing with kids,” he explained. “So, we have to keep that edge sharp, which gets encompassed through this training. That’s why we are doing this right before school starts, so it will be fresh on their minds going into the school year.”
School Resource Officers are regular, fully sworn law enforcement officers with all of the same training and authority of any police officer and can be found in schools across the country.
The training consisted of new laws, advanced life-saving techniques, situational awareness, tactics training and various other refresher training.
Mobile County Sheriff Paul Burch said the county has 12 school resource officers. Seven of those were able to participate in the training. He said the Mobile County program was one he wanted to put in place well before he became sheriff. However, he said there is still more room to grow. He hopes municipalities will offer SROs for schools as they do in Baldwin County.
“It’s a necessity in this day and time, so I’m all about training, and I want them to have the best training because they’re our first line of defense for the children and staff at our schools,” Burch said. “There are 12 high schools in Mobile County, the deputies are assigned to each one of those high schools and then they rotate through the feeder schools.”
Burch said he hopes one day every school in Mobile County will have an SRO.
The SROs in our area are both nationally certified with NASRO (National Association of School Resource Officers) and state certified with TAASRO (The Alabama Association of School Resource Officers).
Baldwin County is in the process of updating an app that will allow parents to directly communicate with SROs, further enhancing safety and communication.
Although each school year, there are various incidents do happen on school property, from medical emergencies to disturbances, SROs are on the school grounds and able to respond quickly and take control of the incident.
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