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Gwinnett Daily Post WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2015
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75 cents ©2015 SCNI
Vol. 46, No. 37
$1.5B county budget focuses on raises, safety By Curt Yeomans
its key focuses are a 4 percent pay raise and longevity pay for employees, and new Gwinnett County leaders personnel and body cameras are proposing a $1.5 billion for public safety and crimifiscal year 2016 budget that nal justice departments. puts a heavy focus on workIt will all be done without force retention, public safety county officials expecting to and criminal justice. raise the millage rate. Chairman Charlotte Nash “There’s lots of good stuff and Chief Financial Officer all throughout the budget,” Maria Woods unveiled the Chairman Charlotte Nash budget on Tuesday. Among said. “While it brought a
curt.yeomans @gwinnettdailypost.com
different sort of conversation about what you fund versus what you don’t fund, it’s also nice to be able to satisfy some of those needs we knew existed but just didn’t have a way of addressing (during the recession).” The county set aside $8 million in the budget for the pay raises and about $3 million for a one-time longevity payment. The longevity
payments amount to $75 per year for employees who have been with the county for at least three years. This is the second year employees have gotten some form of pay adjustment. The 2015 budget included a 4-percent step increase for public safety workers and a 4-percent pay-for-performance increase for other county employees.
But the county also plans to make a heavy investment in public safety. The budget includes money for 82 new positions, including a new magistrate court judge, 30 new police officers, 12 part-time deputies, six new animal welfare staffers, nine emergency medical services employees in the fire department, and a six-person special victims
unit and an investigative analyst in the District Attorney’s Office. Additionally, the county plans to unfreeze 25 vacant patrol officer positions in the police department, meaning it could gain a total of 55 new officers in the next year, if the commissioners approve the budget.
See BUDGET, Page 7A
Seeking balance
Latest GCPS redistricting to affect 6,800 students at seven clusters, 31 schools By Keith Farner keith.farner@gwinnettdailypost.com
Georgia Gwinnett College students walked on campus Tuesday a day after the school was on a campus-wide lockdown for several hours because a person of interest in a murder near campus was not yet in custody. (Staff Photo: Keith Farner)
Crisis control GGC applauds, reviews policies in wake of lockdown By Keith Farner
keith.farner@gwinnettdailypost.com
LAWRENCEVILLE — At orientation every year, Stas Preczewski reminds parents and students what he considers his No. 1 job. On Monday, he was thrust into that job nearly the entire day. “Bar nothing else is to provide for the safety and security of the campus,” said Preczewski, the president of Georgia Gwinnett College. “Any president that tells you their campus is ‘perfectly safe,’ call them Pinocchio. You can’t make them perfectly safe.” That safety was threatened Monday for several hours as Lawrenceville police and other agencies searched for a person of interest who later turned into a murder suspect. Because the murder happened near campus, there was a suspicion that Sheldon Soyer, 47, later arrested on Tuesday morning, would flee on foot toward the college. “What you can do is take best practices and incorporate as many best practices as you can,” Preczewski said. “Have a plan, practice the plan, and then learn from that practice, learn from real events to improve that process for the next time.” Everything on campus falls behind that job, Preczewski said. While some critics have said GGC has too many police officers, Police Chief Terry Schneider said he heard feedback on Monday that people wanted more. “This is a small city, and so we have to run a small city secure, and a small city in a confined area,” said Preczewski, who added that he heard positive feedback from students on Monday night in the residence halls and at a faculty luncheon on Tuesday.
“Some decided, the doors were locked, blinds were pulled, they ran class,” Preczewski said. Inside a board room next to Preczewski’s office, top college officials huddled to monitor the situation from every aspect of the campus. They monitored social media to snuff out any false information spreading about the event. Six telephones were also set up for emergency medical situations such as diabetic students, or students with children to pick up from school. Two people with special needs children were escorted off campus by police. Inside instructor Jenna Kriegel’s art classroom, Kriegel said she and her students discussed campus weapons policies and how she initially didn’t know how to lock her classroom. “I told them all, ‘If something goes down I know you’ll probably look toward faculty for guidance, but I can’t help you,’” she recalled saying. “‘The plan is call 911 and don’t be a hero. Because I’m the only one standing and in view of the door that I can’t lock, I’ll be the first one to go down.’ I also implored them to seize their roles as young leaders and please fix this world.” As information spread through traditional and social media, Kriegel kept repeating to her students that, “‘I know as much as you do.’ It was a while before information was corrected and we were told the crime had not occured on campus. So we turned off the lights and shut the door,” she said. Another professor grabbed a fire extinguisher and a few art hammers in case they needed to break out a window. See CRISIS, Page 8A
Murder suspect arrested after search near Ga. Gwinnett By Joshua Sharpe
joshua.sharpe@gwinnettdailypost.com
LAWRENCEVILLE — Police arrested a man Tuesday morning accused of gunning down his wife Monday in an apartment near Georgia Gwinnett College. “Rest easy Lawrenceville,” the city said in a post on Facebook, alerting the public of resolution to the Vanessa search that had sent the Soyer school into lock down. “Due to all of your help and the assistance of the surrounding Law Enforcement Agencies, this suspect has been located and is in police custody.” Sheldon Capt. Jeff Smith of Soyer the city police told the Daily Post the department learned before 8 a.m. that 43-year-old Sheldon See ARREST, Page 9A
SUWANEE — On Monday, for the second straight year, Gwinnett County Public Schools rolled out an initial plan to re-balance enrollment across the district in the form of redistricting students to new schools. Overall, 31 existing schools, seven clusters and more than 6,800 current students will be affected. This process will create the attendance zone for the new Baldwin Elementary School and a new middle school in the Duluth cluster, both of which will open in August. Redistricting will affect the Duluth, Lanier, Meadowcreek, Mill Creek, Mountain View, Norcross and Parkview clusters. “The overall feeling is that nobody wants to leave the school they’re at, and the principals don’t want to lose their students,” said Steve Flynt, the district’s chief strategy and performance officer. “They’re comfortable where they’re at and they like where they are, and that’s a good thing.” Maps with the ability to zoom to the street level are available at the district website. It’s the second straight year Peachtree Elementary is involved in redistricting, and this time the moves are expected to remove trailers from the campus so all classrooms will be inside the building. Every elementary school in the Norcross cluster except Simpson is being redistricted. Patrick Elementary will move from the Mill Creek cluster to the Mountain View cluster. District officials delayed those moves to coincide with building new schools in central and western Gwinnett and further growth in the Mill Creek cluster. Some of the criteria district officials have said they use in redistricting are current enrollment, enrollment forecasts, enrollment histories, existing identifiable boundaries, school locations and student transportation. “This is balancing it with the schools that are built today,” said Flynt, who added that aside for some small tweaks, he doesn’t expect to have redistricting for a couple of years. “But obviously once we start to build schools, we’ve got to fill those classrooms, or when we complete an addition, we’ll have to fill those classrooms.” For the most part, district officials did not split neighborhoods between two schools, but Flynt said that can be a challenge at times if a neighborhood crosses a major road. “In the case when they’re very large, that’s not always possible, but we certainly try to (keep them intact),” Planning Director Greg Stanfield said. The process is considered the second phase of an enrollment re-balancing effort that began last year with about 14,000 students from 34 schools and nine clusters, including the new Discovery cluster in Lawrenceville. Starting boundary maps and input forms were released to local schools and
See SCHOOLS, Page 9A
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