After years of debate, the Alexandria City school board approved an agreement with the city’s police department to staff the school system’s middle and high schools with police officers.
The two-year agreement, which takes effect July 1, comes after ongoing discussion with city leaders and community members, along with feedback from an advisory group formed to reimagine the partnership.
At one point, the city council voted to end the school resource officer, or SRO, program entirely, then reversed course and reinstated the officers after a run of safety incidents at some campuses.
The decision to fully reinstate the partnership is part of a reversal of the movement by major school districts around the country to reduce or eliminate the presence of police on campus. The D.C. city council this week repealed a measure that would have gradually removed school resource officers from campuses by 2025. That policy will go to a second vote this month.
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The Alexandria school division has traditionally sent five SROs into its three middle schools and one high school at an annual cost of $800,000. The SROs are funded by the city council.
In 2020, the school system began evaluating its relationship with the police department in response to mass protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and calls across the country to rethink approaches to policing in communities and schools.
Officials worked through at least 10 drafts of the agreement with police at the time before passing a final version in October 2020 that included clarifications about student rights and required the school system to begin publishing data on discipline and policing of students broken out by race, sex, age and disability.
Then in May 2021, the city council voted in a surprise reversal to stop funding the program, effectively ending it and starting the 2021-2022 academic year without SROs.
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The change lasted until October 2021, when Alexandria City High School went into lockdown when a student had a firearm at school. The lockdown followed a run of incidents in which police were called to the school over fights at least four times. About a week after the lockdown, in a dramatic 1 a.m. vote, the city council decided to temporarily return police to the schools.
In spring 2022, the city council extended SRO funding for another year at ACPS’s request, allowing for more time to discuss the program’s future and receive feedback from the advisory group. Around the same time, school officials presented data showing that police had been called to schools 96 times in the first half of the 2021-2022 school year and made 18 arrests. The data also showed that Black students at the middle and high school levels were significantly overrepresented in the arrests — comprising nearly two-thirds of the arrests despite making up about one-fourth of the student body.
Data from the first half of the 2022-2023 school year shows that there were 74 calls for service and seventeen student arrests. Black students made up about 64 percent of arrests.
In March, the school board voted to add weapon-detection systems to middle and high schools as part of a pilot program designed to limit risk and address rising concerns about weapons and safety in schools. There were 28 reported incidents of weapons during the 2021-2022 school year.
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