There is growing momentum toward finding a way to place school resource officers in all 36 of our county schools, making the question of how deep would property owners dig in order to make that happen no longer rhetorical.

School officials, including Superintendent Shanita Wooten and Rikki Bullard, director of school safety for the Public Schools of Robeson County, are essentially going door-to-door and asking local governments for matching dollars to qualify the local system for grant money they would use to put officers in all the schools.

Some municipalities, such as Lumberton, are well-positioned and able to do so; others are not, and had to say no. They simply don’t have the dollars without raising property tax rates.

We don’t think the level of protection afforded school children in this county should be based on their street address, but that is the case now. Schools, it should be noted, are essentially the safest place for a child to be, but that doesn’t mean another layer of protection isn’t prudent, especially given what has happened in recent years with school shootings, and the potential for mass carnage.

On Monday night, Wooten and Bullard were at the Robeson County Board of Commissioners meeting asking for what they said was just a $16,000 match for each resource officer to place in the 14 schools without one — Deep Branch, Union Chapel, East Robeson, Long Branch, Green Grove, Piney Grove, Oxendine and Union elementary schools. Schools sharing a resource officer are Parkton, Rex-Rennert, Fairmont Middle, Orrum, Littlefield, Magnolia, Prospect, Townsend and South Robeson middle schools.

Past school administrations have talked about the need for additional school resource officers, but it is the current one that is now forcing the conversation.

But $16,000 is not reality, a fact pointed out by County Manager Kellie Blue, the county’s former finance officer who is good at math. Blue fixes the cost closer to $100,000 an officer, pointing out that the match covers part of the salary only, but not benefits, a vehicle and equipping an officer.

This might surprise a lot of people, but our county government is not flush with cash. The commissioners are afraid to raise taxes because they don’t want a revolt on election day, and the tax rate and the tax base have remained essentially the same while the cost of providing services goes up, as well as the need for additional services.

This, as we told the commissioners in 2012 and reminded them often since, is just one of many reasons that their pay and benefits are so egregious, but they have done little to redress that — and taxpayers have not held the culprits accountable. We can afford to pay them richly, but not to put officers in schools.

In fairness, however, if the commissioners worked for free and didn’t each have a $30,000 discretionary fund, that would barely free up the money needed for those resource officers — about $1 million should the grant money be fully secured.

What would? A tax hike of about 2 cents, which would bump it from 77 cents for every $100 of property to 79 cents, adding a $20 burden — the cost of lunch for two at most restaurants — to the owner of a $100,000 home and raising about $1.2 million. So the question: Would most property owners be willing to pay a few extra dollars a year to make sure there is an officer in every school?

Most probably would when presented in those terms, but we know others might not.

We can think of pretty much nothing that would take precedence over the safety of our children, and the commissioners now find themselves with a problem. Are they willing to look hard enough to find these dollars, perhaps by demonstrating the courage to raise taxes, or do they have the ingenuity to find and redirect dollars?

A lot of folks will be watching closely, as will we.