The decision of a majority of City Council members to effectively end the School Resource Officer program has some Alexandria parents asking, “What now?” in regards to school safety.
Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) officials are facing their shortest summer vacation ever due to a calendar shift, which means school and city officials have a limited amount of time to figure out how to ensure the safety of thousands of students — some of whom will be coming back to school for the first time in more than a year due to the pandemic.
In early May, the majority of city council members decided during an add/delete budget session to remove close to $800,000 from the Alexandria Police Department budget, which specifically funded the School Resource Officer program.
The money for the SRO program has been set aside in a special fund. City staff now are considering a list of initiatives, primarily related to mental health and teen wellness, for spending that money for programs outside of the police department. A report is due in the coming weeks.
Whether the police department has been “defunded” or their budget was simply “reallocated” to other departments has become a political flash point among city council members up for reelection this year.
The SROs at Alexandria’s high school were busy when they were on duty. An Alexandria resident’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all police calls to the 3300 block of King Street, the address of T.C. Williams (soon to be Alexandria City) High School, revealed:
· From Jan. 1, 2015 through May 5, 2021, there were 1,275 police reports for incidents at or near the school.
· In that time, the report included 733 criminal offenses, and APD opened 649 cases (625 were at the school itself, the rest next to it).
· The report showed 101 instances of assault and battery, 24 weapons violations, 187 larceny (127 were grand larceny) and 18 sex-related crimes.
Not surprisingly, with students away from the school buildings, there were many fewer calls in 2020 compared to prior years — and the majority of those in 2020 and early 2021 were traffic violations.
Those statistics and information about a ‘typical day’ for an SRO were not part of the discussion between council members (or provided by Police Chief Michael Brown) during the add/delete budget session. Brown did say at the time that the police department has many other youth programs and ending the SRO program would not mean that police would stop interacting with youth in positive ways.
"With our students returning from unprecedented circumstances, they will need all the resources we can deploy to them. That is a high priority," said Council Member Mo Seifeldein this weekend, who led the effort to change the funding. "We directed our staff to engage with ACPS to figure out the best way to allocate the money to serve school age children with an emphasis on mental health. Council will have an opportunity to discuss the experts recommendations no later than July, 2021."
Council Member John Chapman, who has spent over a decade working in education and still works in Fairfax County Public Schools, said, "I am chatting with city staff about some measures to ensure safety at our schools, and once those ideas are crystalized with staff, I will bring them forward to the community to seek their input, which should be no later than the end of this month." Students return to school buildings for the start of school on Aug. 24 this year, which means there isn't much time to develop and implement a new safety plan.
Since the budget meeting, “[The Alexandria Police Department] has had some preliminary conversations with ACPS about finding ways to keep a relationship with the schools after the SROs leave,” said Lt. Mike May, who led the SRO program for APD. “APD is not part of the discussion about the mental health support and the ACPS programs called for in the budget. It is up to [the Dept. of Community and Human Services] and ACPS to develop.”
Alexandria City Public Schools School and Community Relations Chief Julia Burgos said days after the add/delete budget session in early May, "We respect the City Council’s decision and will be working with our team to continue to maintain a safe and secure environment for students and staff in our buildings."
That work on ensuring safety is just starting now: “We are still in the early stages of planning next steps,” ACPS communications official Marisa Gilles-Gay wrote in an email on Friday. She did not have specific information on whether or how parents and students would be involved or could contribute to the planning process.
The decision to remove SRO funding in early May was, in part, in response to a movement for police-free public schools that has gained steam nationwide in the midst of conversations about racism, equity and the role of police in our society.
At the time, Council Member Canek Aguirre said he wanted to reassure residents that the decision was part of a way to ensure “a continued conversation of how we’re trying to move forward with reimagining public safety.” Aguirre did not respond to a request for comment about the next steps over the holiday weekend.
Council Member Amy Jackson, who is an education professional and opposed removing SRO funding, said that while ACPS has its own security, those guards cannot easily take the place of an SRO. Officers who work in schools undergo extensive specialized training and have developed long-term relationships with students, teachers and administrators. Even increasing funding for social workers and counselors may not ensure the physical safety of students, Jackson said.
“A social worker or a psychologist would be able to read behavior and maybe be able to talk someone down from the perch they’re on, but the officer may also be needed if there are two or more people in a physical altercation” to avoid putting a teacher or school administrator in physical danger, Jackson said Monday evening.
“I hope that parents would be involved in the conversation,” about how to move forward without SROs. “We should have some community outreach, townhalls — but I think the other part of that is how quickly we can do this. We’re running out of time, anyway (before the next school year starts),” Jackson said. “Our community needs to now be a part of this conversation – our entire community – because this decision was a direct result of a population that was small but had mighty voices in our city.”
Alexandria is not alone in re-evaluating its relationship between police and schools, but it is the only Northern Virginia jurisdiction to remove SROs from schools so far. Arlington County is in the midst of conversations about the future of police in schools, and a report is coming out in June. Fairfax County, the City of Falls Church, Loudoun County and Prince William County all have SROs. Charlottesville, Virginia, removed its SROs from schools after a lengthy and robust community conversation.
In the fall of 2020, City Council (on behalf of the Alexandria Police Department) and the Alexandria City Public Schools Board signed an updated Memorandum of Understanding with the purpose “to establish a mutually beneficial framework that both schools and law enforcement can work within to achieve shared goals.”
Those goals include clearly defined roles and responsibilities, maintaining a safe school environment and growing “a positive and supportive school safety climate.” The MOU, which for several years was routinely updated on a bi-annual basis, was scheduled to be revisited in the fall of 2021. As part of the MOU process, the school board voted 6 – 3 in support of keeping SROs in place and had reached out to the community about the role of SROs to consider the concerns of parents and students.
The City Council overrode the wishes of the majority of School Board members in removing funding for the program.
The School Resource Unit (SRU) started in 1997 as a partnership between Alexandria City Public Schools, the City Manager’s Office, City Council and the Alexandria Police Department. At the beginning, one School Resource Officer (SRO) was assigned to George Washington Middle School. Finding success, the program grew over the past 23 years to both middle schools and the high school.
