>>When my son began his base pay was barely 20,000 annual. He is up a little bit. He has his part time jobs as security and his wife works. He was in a school -all day all week for about a year; they moved into another area recently.
Where I live, starting pay for a cop is about 1 1/2 times that, and then add the cost of benefits and pension. But if you put a cop in every school, it would go to seniority and you’d have $50k/yr cops standing around chatting with the school secretary all day. We hire security guards to protect our power plants because they are considerably cheaper than a LEO.
Another reason to use armed security guards and not LEOs is to stop this from turning into another case of “only cops should be trusted with guns around children”. Even off-duty cops cost a lot more than armed security guards.