The 2022 Jefferson County Public Schools policing plan was considered an innovative compromise on one of the district’s most divisive issues.
School board meetings leading up to the vote devolved into shouting matches. Lawmakers and city officials wanted more police in schools after the shooting death of 16-year-old Tyree Smith at his bus stop. Some wanted an officer in every school. Others feared putting more law enforcement in schools would lead to the criminalization of kids, especially Black students.
Threading the needle, the Jefferson County Board of Education decided to hire 15 additional school safety officers – doubling the size of the unit. The officers would be sworn law enforcement and trained to work with students. They’d assist school staff when needed, but they wouldn’t regularly patrol school buildings or enforce discipline. District officials would provide regular reports on the unit’s work to the board and a community monitoring team would review data trends to combat the disproportionate policing of Black students.
The cost: $2 million.
At first, the district struggled to get officers on board. Then, former Louisville Metro Police Department Maj.Todd Kessinger took over and started a hiring spree.
Today, the district’s police force has 55 officers, 10 commanders, eight security monitors and is on track to cost more than $11.2 million this year — $5 million more than the board of education budgeted.
As the force has grown, so have interactions between police and students, according to district records obtained by the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. In the first six weeks of this school year, district police made more than 2,700 runs to schools — more than half the number of runs throughout all of last year.
Opponents of school policing feared that if JCPS expanded its police force more students would end up facing criminal charges. They were right, since the board expanded its internal police force, the district has tallied hundreds of school-based arrests in the past two years. Still, the number of arrests is half what it was five years ago when JCPS contracted with LMPD and other outside police. Racial disparities persist. Black students — which make up about a third of the district’s student body — account for all but three of the 11 arrests this year, a disproportionate trend that mirrors past years.
Despite school board promises in 2022 to monitor racial disparities with regular reporting and quarterly meetings, KyCIR found that’s not happening as planned. District officials have publicly briefed the board twice and the community review team has met three times — less than the district’s policy requires.
JCPS refused to grant multiple KyCIR requests for an interview with Todd Kessinger, the executive administrator of the district’s Security and Investigations unit.
JCPS spokesperson Carolyn Callahan admits it “took some time” for officials to develop a system for gathering police data and meeting the district’s own reporting requirements.
“We will continue to make adjustments as needed to ensure efficiency,” she said in an email to KyCIR. “We are pleased with the growth and support that JCPS PD provides our schools and students.”
The reason the police force is over budget and bigger than planned is because the district needed additional officers to “effectively implement” JCPS’ multimillion dollar weapons detection system, Callahan said.
“The Board was informed they would need to add officers to support the weapons detection implementation prior to the vote to implement,” she said in an email. Records show the board approved an initial expansion of the police force at a March 2024 meeting with no discussion. That meeting was focused on the eye-popping findings of a transportation audit.
At a board meeting in July, Kessinger gave board members an overview of the department’s new structure. He said he’d hired 40 officers and planned to add 15 more. Later that evening, without any debate, the board approved a new organizational chart, making room for 18 more officers.
JCPS Police Department — and its costs — grow big time
In 2018, JCPS employed nine security officers — a handful of law enforcement who primarily worked at night guarding buildings, and another few who oversaw district investigations.
At the time, the 28 school resource officers patrolling schools during the day were contracted through agreements with local law enforcement agencies. But after the Louisville Metro Police Department pulled its officers from schools over budgetary concerns in 2019, the school board opted not to renew contracts with other local agencies. That led to the board’s January 2022 decision to create its own official internal police force.
Now, the 85-person unit — including officers, commanders, radio dispatch operators and civilian staff — is 80% over budget this fiscal year, district records show. Under the tentative budget the school board approved in May, JCPS set aside $6,228,203 for the Security and Investigations unit. Later budget documents show that by September, those annual costs were expected to rise to $11,235,919, an increase of over $5 million.
Callahan said the added costs will come out of the district’s $1.5 billion general fund.
Officer salaries account for some of the overspending, records show. A budget document provided to the board ahead of their approval of the 2022 safety plan estimated the average salary at $55,211.31. The actual average salary is $74,408.23, according to Callahan, with some earning nearly $78,000 annually — more than the maximum salary allowed under the district’s salary placement rules.
An October 2023 email obtained by KyCIR from JCPS Chief of Human Resources Aimee Green-Webb shows Kessinger and JCPS Chief of Staff Katy Deferrari asked for special dispensation to pay experienced officers more.
“[Deferrari] and I acknowledge the difficulty in attracting experienced law enforcement and appreciate [Executive Administrator] Kessinger’s recruitment efforts,” Green-Webb wrote in her email approving the salary hike.
Callahan said the board was aware “efforts would be made to attract high quality and experienced officers to get the department off the ground.”
‘Out of necessity’
Jefferson County Board of Education Chair Corrie Shull said he didn’t remember how many officers the board aimed to hire when they approved the 2022 school safety plan. He said he didn’t think the number of officers was a sticking point for those opposed to adding police in schools.
Opponents, he said, were “people who, by and large, had a lot of reservations about police being in school — period.”
Asked about the growing costs, Shull said he would need to “go back and review” budget documents before commenting.
“The growth has occurred out of necessity,” Shull said in an interview with KyCIR. “In some schools they need more officers than others.”
Dispatch records show the Academy @ Shawnee is the most frequent stop for JCPS police this year, with almost 95 runs in the first six weeks of school. Marion C. Moore School, duPont Manual High School and Doss High School follow, each with around 80 calls. Most high schools had between 40 and 80 calls.
Meanwhile, 95 other schools and educational facilities had fewer than 10 each. Most are elementary schools.
The reasons officers are dispatched to schools is not always clear in records obtained by KyCIR. The most common reason listed for dispatch is “security event/deployment.” KyCIR attempted to obtain incident reports connected to this category of events, but JCPS denied that request, saying criminal records of minors are shielded under open records laws.
In an email, Callahan said that category can cover a wide range of issues, including assaults, threats, narcotics, weapons, campus disruptions, and “escalated” students or parents.
Callahan said the next-most common category, “school visit/any” can refer to contraband pickup, trespassing, traffic-related support, or a meeting.
The third-most common reason JCPS police are dispatched to schools is for a “student out of control.” JCPS police responded to schools 1,434 times for an “out-of-control” student since August 2022.
Limited narrative documentation made available from the 2024-2025 school year shows that police called in for “student out of control” responded to a variety of incidents. They assisted school-based security with physically restraining high school students and removing students from campus who refused to leave after they were suspended. They responded to fights and sometimes were called to handle students who staff described as “not following directions.”
“Principal requested [assistance] with student who will not follow directions, runnin[g] all over building,” the dispatcher wrote regarding an Aug.15 call from Conway Middle School. Records show JCPS police went to the school, picked up the child and transported her to a residential address.
Sometimes officers took “out-of-control” students to a hospital for mental health treatment. In a few cases, dispatch records show officers arrested a student or referred the child to a court designated worker. Arrested students were taken to the Jefferson Regional Juvenile Detention Center.
In many cases, records showed the “out-of-control” student was de-escalated by staff by the time officers arrived.
“Evolv detail” is another top reason officers are dispatched. Under a district plan for using Evolv’s multimillion dollar weapons detectors, sworn law enforcement are supposed to be nearby in case a weapon is found.
In the first six weeks of the 2024-2025 school year, officers were dispatched for Evolv detail over 1,050 times. JCPS did not track Evolv detail as its own category until this school year.
District 5 school board member Linda Duncan declined multiple interview requests, but sent an email saying, in part, “We asked Todd [Kessinger] to build a real police department, with all the positions that that requires. He has done that, and we are benefiting greatly from that.”
“Students have learned that there are legal consequences for hurting or threatening to hurt other people and that we do have adults prepared to take control of threatening situations,” she said. “We are in a much better place.”
Consistent messaging means student arrests are down
Even though JCPS has more officers than ever, data shows that far fewer students are being arrested compared to the 2018-2019 school year, when LMPD and other local law enforcement agencies were patrolling schools.
That year, police made 251 student arrests at district schools. Last year, the district’s internal police force reported 130 student arrests.
While overall arrests are down, Black students are still disproportionately represented among those arrested by school-based police.
Black students make up about 37% of JCPS students, but they made up 67% of students arrested by JCPS police last year. Arrested students were also disproportionately low-income, male, or in a special education program.
Data analysis by KyCIR shows schools with a higher proportion of students of color tend to have more frequent visits from JCPS police.
For example, last year The Academy @ Shawnee, which is 84% students of color, had police dispatched 217 times. Meanwhile, at Jeffersontown High School, which is slightly larger but has 65% students of color, police were dispatched 73 times.
Shull said the decline in overall arrests suggests that JCPS is accomplishing the vision it set out when the force was officially created.
“That was one of our goals: We were trying to provide security without, you know, creating more instances of justice involvement on behalf of our student population,” he said.
In an email, Callahan, attributed the reduced arrest rate to consistent messaging throughout the district police department on law enforcement practices. That’s a consistency that was not achievable when school police came from a myriad of local agencies, each with their own cultures, practices and policies.
“We reinforce our strategy not to criminalize bad behavior,” Callahan said. “When we respond to an out of control student type of run, our officers fall into a support role and are trained in de-escalation. We assist the school staff with resolving the issue on site without the incident ending with an arrest in most cases.”
Callahan also said the district continues to train officers and school administrators in de-escalation and when it is appropriate to involve law enforcement.
“Officers are dispatched to the school when called, so they do not control their involvement with a situation. We continue to train school administrators on when to involve support from the JCPS [police department],” she wrote.
A new state law is also playing a role, according to Callahan. She noted that certain provisions of a sprawling 2024 law enforcement bill known as HB 5 requires schools to contact law enforcement in cases that previously could have been dealt with by school administrators.
HB 5 requires school employees to call law enforcement if they believe someone is carrying illegal drugs, a deadly weapon, or if they become aware of property damage or an assault resulting in serious injury.
Lyndon Pryor, the president of the Louisville Urban League, said a lot of the disproportionately has to do with “root cause” issues: Black students and other students of color are more likely to be coping with poverty, homelessness, trauma and gun violence, which can trigger challenging behaviors.
At the same time, schools that serve students from the city’s poorest zip codes are some of the least well-equipped. The Academy @ Shawnee and Hudson Middle School are two majority-Black, West End schools Pryor calls “wildly under-resourced, wildly understaffed, wildly overpopulated.” They also have some of the highest rates of police interaction.
“And then you add to that, you know, a largely white educator population … and just the bias that is built into that system … you're going to have disproportionality,” Pryor said, noting that research shows evidence of unconscious racial bias among educators.
But Pryor has been pleasantly surprised by information district officials shared with him so far regarding the new police force. For one, about 40% of the officers are Black, according to district officials.
The diversity leads to better policing, Pryor said.
“You have officers who understand, or at least have a bit more cultural understanding, of the population that they are serving,” he said. “And therefore are more willing to be understanding of what's going on and less likely to want to throw students into the system.”
