LYNWOOD — “Chaos” is how one parent is expecting the Lynwood Unified School District’s first day of school to be on Monday, not just because some classrooms still won’t have teachers or because budget cuts and low district-wide scores hang over the district.

The parent is concerned because schools will be opening with less than half of a campus safety department.

The campus safety department has gone from 64 campus safety officers in 2008-09, to 54 last year, to a mere 18 this year.

“Anything is bound to happen,” said the parent. “There are nearly 17,000 students in this district, and [the district is] opening with 18 security guards. And on top of that, the guards are worthless. … They don’t know how to handle elevated situations. I’ve been at the high school and lunches are out of control.”

Approved by the school board, the number of campus safety officers at each school is as follows: Lynwood High School, 3; Firebaugh High School, 3; Vista Continuation High School, 1; Hosler Middle School, 2; Cesar Chavez Middle School, 2; and Lynwood Middle School, 1.

Along with three supervising campus safety officers, the rest of the officers will be deployed to their designated elementary schools on Monday. Additionally, three officers also have been designated to the graveyard shift.

Elementary schools have always had a campus safety officer on site, but according to a former officer, this year, the remaining officers not assigned to a secondary school will be shared between all 13 elementary schools.

Jackie Espinoza, president of Lynwood Save Our Students, and a parent of a Lynwood Middle School student, calls the cutbacks “a big problem.”

“They told us at an orientation meeting for parents that we would be getting less than three officers,” she said. “But it’s obvious they did that so that parents wouldn’t get scared. … What we’re getting is one, not three … and of course parents are upset. This is our kids we’re talking about, our kid’s safety.”

Espinoza said she knows that complaints to the school’s on-site administrators will fall on deaf ears.

“It’s not because they don’t want more security, too,” she said. “It’s going to be because all of this falls back to the district and its decisions. School administrators don’t have anything to do with how many officers schools are getting. We have to take our concerns to the district. There’s going to be 1,700 students at Lynwood Middle School this year and only one security guard. It’s scary.”

Lynwood Middle School is also the largest middle school in terms of actual campus size, Espinoza said.

“In my opinion, not only do they have to take the number of students into consideration when appointing officers, but they also have to take into account the size of the school. … This is a huge campus that one officer won’t be able to monitor alone,” she said.

Lynwood Middle School’s configuration also includes three grades — seventh, eighth and ninth grades.

While she doesn’t like what’s happening at the district, her eldest child is a student at the school, and Espinoza plans to recruit and be proactive about the situation with the officers, than react angrily.

“As parents, we’re going to have to step up, but it’s also going to take the district to give us more campus monitors, too,” she said. “The bottom line is that our kids need to be watched. So as soon as school starts, parents, not just at [Lynwood Middle School], but at every school, should volunteer in the mornings, throughout the day, after school. We’re going to need to volunteer more hours to make sure our kids are safe.”

School Superintendent Ed Velasquez likes the sound of parents being proactive. It falls right into place with his school site plans regarding campus safety officers.

Because of his experience as chief of school police for five years in the Montebello Unified School District — his previous employer — Velasquez also has assumed the role of overseeing the district’s campus safety department.

“Security is everyone’s responsibility,” he said in an interview late Wednesday. “If people are looking at an individual, such as a security officer, as a police officer, to secure a campus … that’s a false sense of security. It’s a reaction because they can’t do much in terms of prevention. However, with that being said, while I’m looking at reorganizing and restructuring, I’m looking at building a Character Counts Program … that focuses on behavior.”

Velasquez said he is looking at bringing to the district more intervention or prevention type programs that focus on student behavior district-wide.

To save money, because there was no chief position, Velasquez — 40 days into his job — will be overseeing all of the school district’s safety officers.

When asked how he plans to keep 17,000 students safe with 18 campus safety officers, when there used to be 54 last year, Velasquez said, “My question is let’s look at the data, how safe were our children with 54?”

The bottom line is that kids are going to have to keep themselves safe, he added.

This year, he said, there will be a greater focus on intervention and prevention and suppression and a fourth, he calls, “diversion.”

“What I want to do is have children understand their roles and responsibilities and behavior is one of them, and it’s every adult’s responsibility, too, that we’re behaving in a proper manner, by us setting the example number one,” he said. “The other thing is the training of the staff, how the concepts work, because you don’t want a staff that is reactive.”

The Character Counts Program also includes training students to greet each other in the morning and being polite and respectful.

“You have to bring things to a conscious level, where people realize that the first thing you notice is the culture of people by greeting people,” he said. “It’s everyone’s business in terms of children’s safety. So instead of having a deficit model, we’re going to do an asset model.”

Velasquez said schools had more campus safety officers in previous years, but from what he has heard, the schools weren’t deemed that safe then either.

“So I need to change that culture and climate, that’s what I’m working on right now,” he said. “Security will be everyone’s business: Students, parents, teachers, administrators, volunteers. … At the same time, you don’t want a police state. You want people to monitor themselves.”

Velasquez is also talking to school board members about installing a hotline where students, parents or teachers, can anonymously call and report a crime.

“We all have to take the responsibility,” he said. “It’s not a security officer’s job to make sure that everything is going to be safe. I mean what are they going to do if a fight breaks out, everyone knows you can’t jump in to try to break it up. You can get yourself into a melee and things could get worse. So, that’s where the professional development comes in.”

The district also is contracting with the Sheriff’s Department for two patrol officers for the entire district. They will be stationed at Firebaugh and Lynwood high schools.

Along with that support service, which costs the district about $300,000 a year, there is also a school-based probation officer at Lynwood High at all times, whose authority is probably more effective than anything else, Velasquez said.

The superintendent also said that 18 isn’t the final number of campus safety officers in the district. He said he is still looking at the budget to see how the district can bring back more officers for the school year.

First, he said, he wants to do more site analysis once school starts.

Developing a school police department in the district like Montebello’s will depend on cost analysis, he said.

“If we can afford something like that, obviously school police is more effective,” he said. “Because they focus more on the school site aspect and not the community, but I don’t think Lynwood at this time is ready. It’s a very lengthy process to establish, but one thing you do get with school police is the professionalism, from the background to the psychological, the academy, school police officers have to go through the same training as sheriff’s [deputies] and LAPD, with an additional school site training.”

So far, campus safety officers in the district are only fingerprinted and do not undergo a full back ground check. But that’s something that Velasquez inherited, he said.

“Now I have a double dilemma. I don’t know the background of some of the security officers, but on top of that, now they’re tenured sort of through the union, so there’s a seniority list,” he said.

In order to change that, the board could establish a new policy, but the union would still have to allow current employees to undergo a background check and “I doubt the union will ever concede to allow them to do that,” he said.

When school starts on Monday, Velasquez said he wants to assure parents that their kids are going to be safe.

“I want parents to know that there is a plan of action. … Of course, security is at the same level of importance as academic achievement [is] for me,” he said. “As a parent myself, the last thing I want to have in my mind is that my child is in danger in any way at a school that I entrusted.”