Alexandria school board fails to make decision on forming advisory group to review school police –

Alexandria City Public School Superintendent Gregory Hatching Jr. in August 2020. (Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post)

After a year of debate over the relationship between Alexandria’s public schools and the city’s police department, the school system is considering forming an advisory group to propose changes in its partnership with the police.

This group will primarily be tasked with examining the relationship between the school system and the police, making recommendations to the supervisor on how to reconsider this relationship, and seeking feedback from parents, students, staff, city officials, school board and security experts. .

The school system also released data on Thursday showing significant security incidents and arrests during the school year, when black students, particularly black male students, showed a disproportionately high arrest rate.

However, many details about the advisory group remain unclear, including who will work within it and how it will function and whether the group will be formed. On Thursday night, in an extraordinarily tense school board meeting, Principal Gregory K. Hatching Jr. made a well-thought-out offer to the group, only to have some board members request a different plan. He will give the board more control over the work of the advisory body.

Council member Abdel-Rahman Elnoubi said: “This is such an important issue that … the council should vote for it and have a say.” he said.

But other councilors were deeply frustrated by this resistance, and some said they stayed out of the internal debate before the meeting – and it appears that seeking greater control over a group of police advisers would harm school staff.

At 10pm, Prime Minister Megan Alderton delivered a passionate speech in which she said she neglected the council’s primary mission: to educate children. You said a police advisory group is tired of talking about subjects like masks and details.

Alderton said he wants to work to raise graduation rates and teach phonetics correctly. He said none of the teachers raised issues such as the courtesy of the police advisory group. If we don’t focus, we’ll beat these guys, “she warned.

Soon after, the council rejected a motion proposing the formation of a police advisory group as a school council committee; it was a move that would have empowered the council on issues including the election of working group members. On this issue, the council entered a 4-4 stalemate with one abstention.

The fate of the police advisory group, made up of board members, is still unclear at the meeting, which continues on other issues.

Two Alexandria school leaders face a negligence investigation

The recommended advisory group is the latest change in the proper police role at school in more than a year.

The Alexandria school system began evaluating its relationship with the police department in 2020, with authorities drafting at least 10 memoranda of understanding or memoranda between the school system and the police. The final version, approved in October 2020, clarified student rights and required the school system to begin publishing data on students’ race, gender, age and disability by discipline and police.

Before that, for nearly three decades, small amounts of data were collected or published on school police when school-appointed police officers known as school resource officers or SROs worked in Alexandria. During the October election, five SROs patrolled a public high school and three public high schools in Alexandria and spent most of their time dealing with mundane events such as the theft or loss of a laptop or cell phone.

Unrelated to disciplinary matters, SROs will only take action against a student if they believe the student is involved in a criminal activity, such as threatening a peer with a gun or taking drugs or alcohol at school. In the 2019-2020 academic year, five SROs in Alexandria arrested a total of six people.

But in May 2021, Alexandria’s city council voted to stop funding the SRO program and effectively end it, with a sudden turnaround to protest school officials. The 16,000-year-old school system started the school year without SRO, until early October, when Alexandria City High School was closed because a male student had a gun at school. A series of incidents followed, with police being called to school at least four times for discussion.

About a week after the blockade, with a dramatic 1:00 am vote, the Alexandria city council decided to send the police back to the city’s public schools.

The latest change came in December, when two SROs serving at Alexandria Public School went on leave pending an investigation into a “serious allegation” of misconduct. The Washington Post reported that the investigation was based on a report from a former student who allegedly made speeches about sexual abuse during his time at school.

Alexandria police spokesman Marcel Bassett said the investigation was over and no SROs were serving in the high school, but police were patrolling outside.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for the school system declined to comment or respond to the high school SROs and delayed the basset.

Data on security incidents and arrests presented Thursday provided perhaps the first picture of the impact of the authorities’ decision on abolishing the SROs and their subsequent support this school year. This is the first detailed data on this subject in the history of Alexandria, as there have been no detailed arrests by race, age or sex in the school district.

The data shows 18 arrests and 191 security incidents in the first half of the 2021-2022 school year, an average of 2.1 incidents every 90 school days. During the same period, the police were called to the public schools of Alexandria 96 times.

Not all unrelated security events Police included 41 fights or assaults, 34 cases of injury or medical assistance, 13 shootings (unsubstantiated and unfounded), 12 verbal or Internet threats, and one sexual assault charge.

The data also showed that black middle and high school students were engaged at 67% and 64% respectively, even though they represented only 26% of the total number of students. A black male student, who represented 44% of high school students and 36% of high school students, was arrested at particularly high rates.

“One thing that worries me is the high rate of arrests of black men,” said Councilor W. Christopher Harris. “Put simply, we are reducing the number of black kids in school.”

Hatching said the role of the police in Alexandria schools would not change. “If we’re doing the same thing we’re doing now, then there we are,” the Police Theoretical Advisory Board said after completing his work.

However, the council was unable to agree on how to form a group that would work to reaffirm the relationship of the Alexandria schools with the police.

According to the original proposal, the working group known as the School Law Enforcement Partnership Advisory Group consisted of 12 people. Half of these will be Alexandria school staff, including the principal, teacher, principal, security coordinator and executive director of equality, and the other half will be non-school staff, including two students, a representative of the city government and a representative of Alexandria. Police department.

But some advisers wondered if the group was too small, which led to protection from Hutchings.

“The 12 members are not big enough or inclusive enough,” said councilor Michelle Reef.

Hutchings replied, “You can’t do this job with 20, 30, 40 people,” but said he was ready to seek feedback from the board and incorporate it into future proposals for the advisory board.

The group’s discussions were moderated by “an external facilitator to create an environment of neutrality in the process,” according to a statement presented to the school board this week.

The Group will be divided into three sub-committees, each focused on: Communication and Public Relations; Examine best practices in school-law partnerships at national level; And develop an improved memorandum between the school system and the police.

The group meets monthly, the sub-committees meet twice a month and are tasked with providing initial feedback to the supervisor by the summer of 2022.

Some counselors said they would like to see more parents, teachers, students and mental health staff on the committee. Others said they thought everything was going too fast.

“We want to do it right,” said councilor Ashley Simpson Baird. “We have the ability to join the community and go through a very comprehensive process that we knew would not happen last year.

Alexandria city council member Kanek Aguirre (D), who was the first to propose the idea of ​​removing city funds from the SRO program, said in an interview Friday that he was disappointed that the school council did not had considered a similar working group. template. Arlington County.

Like in Alexandria, Arlington kicked the police out of schools last year, but they did. A multi-month review process led by a team of up to 48 people. A relatively quiet response from parents and residents followed the decision.

“I was expecting a strong and inclusive community engagement process,” Aguirre said. He said. “The chair is a chair for 15 months and we needed something that looked like Arlington. It doesn’t even come close. “

He said the Alexandria study group should be open and supervised by the school board. He argued that Hatching’s proposal offered little space for a 12-person group of students, parents, police, teachers, and administrators and would not represent the city’s population. “Equality is about focusing on the people who suffer the most,” she said.

Three of the seven members of the entire Democratic City Council were elected in the fall and have yet to officially vote for the SROs, although they have all expressed their opposition to the program. Of the other four returning members, Aguirre is the only one who constantly votes to escape police schools. Aguirre said this week that if a group of counselors recommends keeping police in schools, he will respect and support that advice.

Source: Washington Post

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