CAPE CORAL - Cape Coral will keep paying for police officers to work in the city's schools. Despite tight budgets right now, the city council says the school resource officer program is too valuable to stop funding.

"Bascially just to bond with the kids, it's a different form of policing," said Albert Arroyo. He's one of 14 police officers walking the halls of the schools in Cape Coral. It's the job of school resource officers to maintain safety, but also work with kids; from organized efforts like the d.a.r.e. program, to simply having a conversation in the hall.

"Speak a little into their life, find out what they're doing, maybe help them make some good decisions," Arroyo said.

Already this school year, resource officers have had more than 11-hundred calls for service; that saved a call from an outside officer.

"High schools particularly are like little cities," said councilman Tim Day. "They're like self-contained cities, there's several thousand kids running around..."

But this isn't an inexpensive program. In Cape Coral alone, the cost for next fiscal year runs nearly one-point-six million dollars. The school district pays about 425-thousand of that. But even with the city budget in a crunch, council members say school resource officers are too important-- and too successful-- to stop funding.

"You look at other areas of the country where bad things have happened, we don't want that," Day said. "And if something does happen we want to be able to respond to it quickly."