Manatee County Schools is following through with its plan to tighten security at its schools. 

  • Manatee schools steps up law enforcement presence
  • Law enforcement officer at every school; 2 at county's 6 high schools
  • Manatee County School District

Every school in the county is seeing some type of change with a law enforcement officer stationed at every school. 

At Palmetto High School, students were greeted by two officers Monday. That is the case at all six high schools. 

All totaled, 34 officers were dispatched to Manatee schools across the county. 

Both the school board and law enforcement agreed having every school staffed is necessary. It is also expensive at about $600,000. 

About 25 of the officers are from the sheriff's office with the rest coming from the Bradenton, Palmetto and Holmes Beach police departments. 

Sheriff's Office officials said not all of the officers will technically be school resource officers since that requires a special type of training but instead will use off-duty deputies and those that have recently retired. 

"This is a tremendous amount of hours all of a sudden just thrown in there," said Dave Bristow with the sheriff's office. "So we’re going to use reserve deputies, those are deputies that have recently retired but they are complete certified deputies. Some of those might wanna come back and work this."