For the first time in more than a decade, Jefferson County Public Schools will start the 2019-20 school year without a single resource officer from the Louisville Metro Police Department.

That unit of the department was eliminated last month — a casualty of cuts made by a city walloped with a $35 million budget deficit and no new revenue to fill the gap.

As a result, more than a dozen JCPS schools, including some that serve kids as young as 5, have been left in the lurch when it comes to school security just weeks before the new year begins.

Deanna Thomas was one of 17 resource officers told to head back to the streets. She worries, in their absence, students will miss out on making connections with law enforcement officers willing to gain kids' trust.

"All of us are passionate about what we do," she said. "Whenever people hear SRO, they’re thinking, 'Oh, a retired police officer.' It’s always the older cops. But it was me and several other fresher police officers. ... This is what we want to do."

Thomas, 28, and her fellow SROs were told of their move from the schools as the department faced a staffing challenge. The budget problem led to the cancellation of a police recruit class that would have started in the spring. Even with the reassignment of SROs, department leaders expect to have 60 fewer officers protecting Louisville this time next year.

From April:These JCPS schools would lose LMPD officers in city's budget cuts

JCPS, meanwhile, hasn't yet presented a plan for how it plans to keep students and staff safe at the schools without the LMPD officers.

The district last year started work to create its own police department, but those plans have slowed. Superintendent Marty Pollio has since floated using night-shift security officers to cover security gaps during school days.

The decision comes at a critical time.

In Kentucky, all school districts, including JCPS, must work to meet the requirements of a new school safety law, including a target for having a resource officer in every school.

Advocates nationally have pushed for more police in schools, in the era of mass shootings, while critics have blasted officers for their role in the school-to-prison pipeline.

And locally, police are facing a wave of violent crime — with many of the incidents involving youth.

As for Thomas, she won't be headed back to patrol.

After just one year as a resource officer at Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Newburg, she knew she loved working with kids and could see she was making a difference.

She was the trusted adult able to calm a student down. She heard tips about neighborhood conflicts she could share with officers on patrol. And she could talk some sense into kids on the verge of making life-altering decisions.

"They knew, 'If we’re talking to Officer Thomas, we’ve got to change our mentality or do something different, or it’s not going to be good,'" she said.

So, faced with mixed messages about the future of her job, she lined up a backup plan: She would become a teacher.

She'll be teaching sixth grade science to T.J. Middle students beginning in August.

"I don't think anyone wanted to go back to the streets," she told the Courier Journal. "It's a specialty unit for a reason. ... You have to interact and do all these things on a daily basis to get to where you want to get to, and then they're like, 'Oh, we're sorry. Your unit isn't valuable enough.' That's how it feels, being an officer in that position."

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'It was a roller coaster'

For Thomas and her fellow LMPD resource officers, the 2018-19 school year was riddled with uncertainty.

The confusion started on their first day, she said.

That was when the officers were presented with JCPS' plan to — beginning the following year — create its own security force. With an in-house contingent, the LMPD officers would no longer be needed.

Thomas, who had just joined the resource officer unit, was stunned.

"I did all this work to get on this unit, and you’re telling me that it might not even be around next year?" Thomas recalled thinking. "So I start freaking out and having a panic attack, and I’m like, 'Oh my god, why even go through the effort of doing all this if I’m going to get put back on the streets?'"

Thomas, though, had put years into getting the chance to work with kids. She stuck with the assignment.

By late fall, JCPS had backed down on its timeline for creating its own police department, pushing the plan to an undetermined date. But new concerns arose within a few months, as the city announced it was facing a $35 million shortfall.

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The LMPD resource officers, Thomas said, knew their jobs were on the line. They began advocating for their unit, explaining to their supervisors the impact they had every day on Louisville's kids. They sent information up the chain of command, listing, for example, how many weapons they'd safely retrieved from students and how many sports teams they coached, she said.

The officers never received a response.

"It was a roller coaster," Thomas recalled. "I didn’t know where it was going to go or what was going to happen."

As they awaited answers, Thomas and the other officers continued showing up to school. When days were called off because of teacher protests, the officers worked patrol in the divisions where their schools were located.

Then, in March, Louisville Metro Council rejected a tax hike that would have spared the city millions of dollars in cuts. Around that time, Thomas said her sergeant emailed the resource officers asking where they would prefer to be reassigned.

They knew their time was up, she said.

Looking back, Thomas is still troubled by the outcome.

"I felt undervalued as an SRO," she said. "When I know that I was making a clear and obvious difference."

'Set in their ways'

It's still unclear how JCPS will cover the security gaps left by the departing LMPD officers.

Officers from the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and the St. Matthews and Jeffersontown police departments will remain in their assigned posts at some JCPS schools this upcoming year.

But at least 17 schools won't have a returning resource officer.

To cover the vacancies, Pollio has said the district could use night-shift security officers — typically retired cops. District documents show the Jefferson County Board of Education will discuss school safety at a July 30 retreat, before voting on a safety plan Aug. 6.

Thomas said she's worried about replacing younger resource officers with retirees.

As part of her teaching program requirements, she's taking classes this summer at the University of Louisville on topics including racial disparities in classrooms and what it means to be culturally proficient.

It's important to have people that want to relate to kids, she said.

"If you’re going to go with older, retired people that are set in their ways, and they’ve already served their time and they’re out, I doubt that they’re really trying to be culturally relevant and proficient," she said. "... And it worries me because these kids really respect when you can be on the same level and know what’s going on in their lives."

Previously:What could a JCPS police force look like? Here's what to know

District spokeswoman Renee Murphy said many security officers already employed by JCPS who are being considered to replace resource officers have been trained and "at times have already worked in schools during the day with students."

"If they haven’t had training, there would be a plan to offer them additional support," she said.

When the idea of pulling resource officers from schools was first proposed in Mayor Greg Fischer's budget proposal, he explained that JCPS has the capability to fund and staff its own school safety strategy, pointing to a budget that triples Louisville Metro's.

And Louisville Metro Police said that though the officers are dedicated and important for school safety, they had to be moved.

"We will be in such a shortage that we will need to get those officers back into patrol divisions," spokeswoman Jessie Halladay said at the time.

Still, Thomas said, not having LMPD officers in JCPS buildings could also hamstring efforts to prevent violence in the community.

As a resource officer, Thomas said she would often be tipped off about ongoing neighborhood issues. When she would hear "rumblings" of off-campus conflicts, she would call the Sixth or Seventh divisions to give patrol officers a heads up.

"That’s another job SROs have: still staying in contact with beat officers and letting them know," Thomas said. "... (SROs) help prevent juvenile crime outside the school as well as in."

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Some of her fellow resource officers, she said, planned to retire rather than returning to beat patrol. Most have been temporarily reassigned to community services, which includes the outreach-focused community policing unit and, previously, the SRO unit.

It's not clear how long the temporary assignments will last.

Asked how many of those officers planned to retire later this year, a spokesman said one sergeant had planned to retire prior to budget troubles.

The department wouldn't know about any others until they turn in retirement paperwork, which police policy states should be at least 30 days prior to their scheduled departure, LMPD spokesman Lamont Washington said.

Nicolai Jilek, president of the union that represents LMPD officers, said he'd heard at least three officers who were SROs last year plan to retire and two others are set to leave for other departments.

"The SRO program was a good program, and the officers were highly trained and had great relationships with schools, staff and students," Jilek said. "As far as I'm aware, we have no other equivalent or better plan in place. That's what's concerning to me."

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From Officer Thomas to Ms. Thomas

When Thomas talks about the difference she made during her year as a resource officer at T.J. Middle, she always comes back to the same word: relationships.

As an officer on patrol, she was interacting with new people every day. But at a school, she was around the same kids all the time. She could dig in and find what makes them tick, she said.

And, according to Thomas, the time spent building those relationships paid off.

She bonded, for example, with a boy known around the school for his involvement in the juvenile justice system.

"When I came in, security told me, staff told me, 'Officer Thomas, he’s been arrested before,'" she said. "'... You need to keep an eye out for this kid.'"

By the end of the year, Thomas and the boy were "best buddies." The boy was more likely to break up a fight than be in one, she said.

Students "went from calling me Officer Thomas to Ms. Thomas by the end of the year, just because of that relationship," she said. "They saw me as more than the police officer in the school."

As her relationships with students strengthened, Thomas said she issued fewer citations. During the final days of school, she volunteered to sit in a field day dunk tank, letting students dunk her — uniform and all — as much as they wanted.

But Thomas said she's also aware of her role in what's become known as the school-to-prison pipeline — the link, backed by research, that zero-tolerance discipline, including the presence of police in schools, increases the chance a student will end up in the criminal justice system.

Related:After a steep increase, JCPS continues its drop in elementary suspensions

The school-to-prison pipeline is especially harmful for black students, who are involved in a disproportionate amount of police-involved incidents at schools in JCPS and nationwide.

Though black students make up roughly 40% of JCPS' enrollment, they accounted for 72% of the school-based arrests reported to the state for the 2017-18 school year, the most recent data publicly available.

Still, with increasing violence in the community, officers play a valuable role in keeping schools safe, Thomas said. In April, for example, a resource officer at Valley High School intercepted a student walking toward campus with a loaded gun and a box of ammunition.

"The amount of shootings that are happening outside of the school, and the amount of violence that these kids are exposed to and seeing outside of school ... they’re internalizing that and taking that to school, " she said, adding that a major concern is students' access to weapons.

Thomas said last year she cited students as young as the sixth grade — a part of the job she said she hated to do.

"It hurts your heart and your spirit, because you’re like, 'I failed. I wasn’t able to talk them out of this or prevent this from happening,'” she said.

Thomas said her approach to the job isn't unique. She and her fellow resource officers worked under a triad model for policing in schools: teacher, counselor and law enforcement officer.

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Many of her LMPD colleagues took their roles as counselors seriously, she said.

"It’s definitely not just me that thinks this is necessary, these relationships," she said. "That’s what a good SRO does."

Moving forward, she's excited to interact with more kids: "I just want to be able to have an effect on a larger population, rather than just a smaller one," she said.

"I want to teach science to these kids — I want to be one-on-one with them in the classroom, and I want it to never end up where I need to call for support or security."

She'll likely have some advantages, thanks to her training, in areas including deescalation and communication. But she said she doesn't think any of that will be as useful as getting to know the kids in her classroom.

"Most of the relationships I formed with the kids went from negative to positive, which is what I was hoping would happen," she said of her year as a resource officer.

"Which is another reason I was like, 'OK, I’m ready to be in the classroom,'" she said, smiling. "I want to be working with these kids, more than just like when s--- hits the fan."

Mandy McLaren: 502-582-4525; mmclaren@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @mandy_mclaren. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/mandym.

Darcy Costello: 502-582-4834; dcostello@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @dctello. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/darcyc.