BEL AIR, MD—The Harford County Sheriff’s Office this week announced the addition of four new School Resource Officer (SRO) positions to the Sheriff’s Office School Policing Unit.

As a result of recruiting challenges and manpower shortages, the city of Aberdeen Police Department cannot continue to fill essential SRO positions at Aberdeen High School and Aberdeen Middle School for the 2023 – 2024 school year. Beginning in January of 2024, the Harford County Sheriff’s Office School Policing Unit will provide deputies at each of these schools located within the incorporated municipality of Aberdeen.

Under Sheriff Gahler, the School Policing Unit has significantly grown over the last ten years. Following the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida in 2018 and a subsequent Town Hall community meeting hosted by Sheriff Gahler, then County Executive Barry Glassman, prior School Superintendent, Dr. Barbara Canavan, and the area’s municipal police chiefs, the community’s desire to see an expansion of the SRO Program in Harford County was clear. Since that time, the SRO Program has expanded from not only providing SROs in the high schools to covering all Harford County middle schools and providing roving coverage of our public elementary schools, outside of the three municipal areas. With the addition of the four new positions, that the County has pledged to fund, the School Policing Unit will continue to build on the 10 personnel protecting our schools a few years ago to an operational strength of 25 sworn deputies.

Sheriff Gahler has been and remains a strong advocate for placing SROs in schools. During the 2020 and 2021 Maryland General Assembly sessions, he fought against legislation that would have severely limited the ability for SROs to keep children safe in Maryland schools and other measures that would have removed police officers from schools altogether.

“With soft-on crime policies from our state and national leaders, violent crime continues to be unnecessarily out of control in so many places. As your Sheriff, I will do what is necessary to keep our community safe and nothing is more important than keeping our children safe in school. Together with the leadership of Dr. Sean Bulson and Harford County Public Schools, we will make our schools a safe place for our children to grow and learn,” said Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler.

The HCSO is currently accepting applications for lateral law enforcement officers to meet this need. Interested parties may apply at https://www.harfordsheriff.org.