Alexandria School Board fails to reach decision on forming advisory group to review school policing
correction
A previous version of this article misspelled the name of school board member Michelle Rief. The article has been corrected.
After a year filled with controversy over the relationship between Alexandria City Public Schools and the city’s police department, the school system is considering creating an advisory group to propose changes to its partnership with police.
That group would broadly be charged with reviewing the relationship between the school system and the police force, providing recommendations to the superintendent on how to reimagine that relationship, and with seeking feedback on the relationship from families, students, staffers, city government officials, the school board and safety professionals.
The school system also released data Thursday showing a significant rate of safety incidents and arrests so far this school year, with Black students — especially Black male students — having a disproportionately high rate of arrest.
Advertisement
But many details about the advisory group remain unclear, including who will serve on it and what its work will look like — and whether the group will be formed at all. At an extraordinarily tense Alexandria City School Board meeting Thursday night, top school officials, including Schools Superintendent Gregory C. Hutchings Jr., presented a fully fleshed-out proposal for the group — only to see some board members ask for a different plan, one that would give the board more oversight over the advisory body’s work.
“This is such an important issue that the board … should vote on it and have a say in this,” said board member Abdel-Rahman Elnoubi.
But other board members appeared deeply frustrated with this line of objection, with some of them alleging that they had been left out of internal discussions ahead of the meeting — and seemingly implying that seeking more control over the police advisory group amounted to undermining school staffers.
Advertisement
Near 10 p.m., Meagan L. Alderton, the board chair, made an impassioned speech in which she alleged that the board had lost sight of its fundamental mission: to educate children. She said she was tired of having conversations about topics such as masking and the finer details of the police advisory group.
Alderton said she wanted to work toward increasing graduation rates and teaching phonics properly. She said no teachers ever raise issues such as the niceties of the police advisory group. “If we don’t get focused, we will fail these children,” she warned.
Soon after, the board deadlocked on a motion proposing the formation of a police advisory group as a committee of the school board, a move that would have given the board power over matters including task force member selection. The board voted 4-to-4 on the issue, with one abstention.
Advertisement
The meeting continued to other topics, with the fate of a police advisory group made up of board members still unclear.
The suggested advisory group is the latest twist in a more than year-long argument over the proper role of police in schools.
The Alexandria school system began evaluating its relationship with the police department in 2020, when officials worked through at least 10 re-draftings of the memorandum of understanding, or MOU, between the school system and police. The final version, approved in October 2020, clarified 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.
Until then, in the roughly three decades that Alexandria employed school-assigned police, known as school resource officers, or SROs, little data on school policing was gathered or released. At the time of the October vote, five SROs patrolled Alexandria’s one public high school and three public middle schools, spending most of their time dealing with mundane incidents such as laptop or cellphone theft or misplacement.
Advertisement
The SROs, who are not involved in disciplinary matters, take action against a student only when the student is thought to be engaged in criminal activity, such as threatening peers with a weapon or having drugs or alcohol at school. In the 2019-2020 school year, Alexandria’s five SROs made six total arrests.
But in May 2021, the Alexandria City Council voted in a surprise reversal — over the protests of school officials — to stop funding the SRO program, effectively ending it. The school system of 16,000 began the academic year without SROs — until early October, when Alexandria City High School went into lockdown because a male 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 Alexandria City Council decided to return police to the city’s public schools.
Advertisement
Another twist came in December, when the two SROs serving Alexandria’s public high school were placed on leave pending investigation of a “serious complaint” of misconduct. The Washington Post reported that the investigation stemmed from a report by a former student about allegedly sexually inappropriate conversations that occurred during her time at the school.
That investigation has ended, and no SROs are serving at the high school but police patrol outside, according to Alexandria police spokesman Marcel Bassett.
A spokeswoman for the school system declined to comment or answer any questions about the high school SROs on Thursday, deferring to Bassett.
The data on safety incidents and arrests presented Thursday offered perhaps the first snapshot of the impact of officials’ decision to remove SROs and then bring them back this academic year. It is Alexandria’s first-ever detailed set of data on this topic, as the school district has never before detailed arrests by race, age and sex.
Advertisement
The data show 18 arrests and 191 safety incidents in the first half of the 2021-2022 school year — averaging out to about 2.1 incidents for each of the 90 instructional days. Police were called to Alexandria public schools 96 times in the same period.
The safety incidents, not all of which involved police, included 41 fights or assaults, 34 instances of injuries or medical assistance, 13 weapons incidents (founded and unfounded), 12 threats made verbally or online, and one sexual assault allegation.
The data also showed that Black students at the middle and high school levels accounted for about 67 and 64 percent of arrests, respectively, despite being only about 26 percent of the overall student body. Black male student were arrested at especially high rates, making up 44 percent of middle school arrests and 36 percent of high school arrests.
Advertisement
“One thing that jumps out at me is the high rate of arrest for Black males,” said board member W. Christopher Harris. “To put it bluntly, we’re failing Black males in our schools.”
Hutchings said that the role of police in Alexandria schools cannot remain unchanged. “If we’re doing the same thing we are now” — after the theoretical police advisory committee concludes its work — “then we’ve failed,” he said.
But the board could not reach a consensus on how to structure a group that would work to reimagine Alexandria schools’ relationship with police.
Under the original proposal, the task force — which would have been known as the School Law Enforcement Partnership Advisory Group — would have consisted of 12 people. Half of them would have been Alexandria school staffers, including a dean, a teacher, a principal, a security coordinator and an executive director for equity, and half nonschool personnel, including two students, a representative from city government and a representative from the Alexandria Police Department.
Advertisement
But some board members wondered whether the group was too small, leading to a defense from Hutchings.
“The 12 members does not seem to be large enough or inclusive enough,” said board member Michelle Rief.
Hutchings responded, “You can’t have work completed with 20, 30, 40 people,” although he said he is willing to take the board’s feedback and incorporate it into future proposals for the advisory committee.
The group’s deliberations would have been led by an “external facilitator to create an environment of neutrality within the process,” according to a memorandum presented to the school board this week.
And the group would have been broken into three subcommittees, one each focused on communication and community outreach, researching best practices in school-law enforcement partnerships nationwide, and developing an improved MOU between the school system and the police.
The group would have met monthly, with subcommittees meeting twice monthly, and would have been tasked with giving initial feedback to the superintendent by this summer.
Some board members said they wanted to see more parents, teachers and students on the committee, as well as mental health personnel. Others said they thought everything was proceeding too quickly.
“We want to get this right,” said board member Ashley Simpson Baird. “We have one chance to get community input and go through the very thorough process that we all know didn’t happen last year.”
Alexandria City Council member Canek Aguirre (D), who first broached the idea of pulling city funding from the SRO program, said in an interview Friday that he was disappointed the school board did not consider a task force model similar to the one followed by Arlington County.
Like Alexandria, Arlington pulled police from its schools last year — but did so based on a months-long reconsideration process led by a work group of up to 48 people. The decision garnered a comparatively muted response from parents and residents.
“My expectation was to have a robust, inclusive community engagement process,” Aguirre said. “The chair has been chair for 15 months now, and all we needed was something that looked like Arlington. This doesn’t even come close to it.”
He said Alexandria’s task force must be open and should have oversight from the school board. He argued that Hutchings’s proposal for a 12-member group offered too few seats to students, parents, police, teachers and administrators, and would not be representative of the city’s population. “Equity is about centering folks who are most impacted,” he said.
Three of the seven lawmakers on the all-Democratic city council were elected in the fall and have yet to formally vote on SROs, though all have expressed their opposition to the program. Of the four other returning members, Aguirre is the only one who has consistently voted to keep police out of schools. If an advisory group recommends keeping police in schools, Aguirre said this week, he would respect and uphold that recommendation.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLKlwcKaq6KnnmR%2FcX6RaGdsZ2FmfKK4xLGYp5yinq5uv8Khpqiko2K9sLjInJxmmZSrtrS70bJkoKqfqr1w