Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school district, defunded school police in 2021. Months after removing school resource officers (SROs) from campuses, the district experienced its first school shooting in history — at Magruder High School, when 17-year-old Steven Alston Jr. shot his 15-year-old classmate in a school bathroom that was usually along an officer’s patrol route. A security guard eventually found the bleeding boy, who had to undergo ten surgeries and spent two months in the hospital.
Instead of admitting that it prioritized social justice over student safety (which the Democrat-run jurisdiction has a habit of doing), the school district brought police back into schools and then instituted a weak program creating “community engagement officers” (CEO), who are allowed to patrol around schools, not on school campuses. The district has the new program in place because of a Maryland law, the Safe to Schools Act, which requires public schools to have “adequate law enforcement coverage.”
In the first year that SROs were removed from schools, on-campus arrests went down by more than 50 percent, Department of Juvenile Services referrals went from 162 to 39, and civil citations went from 69 to five. But the schools have been beset by vandalism, hate crimes, gun sightings, fights, and bomb threats for the past couple of years.
So, ever since that debacle, MCPS has been walking a line between an equitable approach to school safety (i.e., no cops) and safety itself. The kicker? At a board meeting last week, MCPS’s newly appointed superintendent (the previous one left after the Washington Post revealed that her administration promoted a principal after multiple women accused him of harassment) announced that MCPS is enlisting the help of recently retired Montgomery County chief of police Marcus G. Jones to “chart and lead a strategic and focused approach to school safety and security to support the ever-expanding needs of our district.” Jones is now MCPS’s head of security.
Jones will help clarify what exactly the role of a CEO is, Superintendent Thomas Taylor said.
“I am not seeking to expand the CEO program, but in collaboration with MCPD to clarify key areas and ensure fidelity of implementation,” Taylor said. “Specifically, the focus will be on establishing clear communication of roles for school staff and CEOs, reviewing shortfalls in the current Memorandum of Understanding regarding clarity, and reviewing program effectiveness for the school year. These efforts will promote high expectations, reduce variance, and cultivate a safe and welcoming environment.”
This means, optimistically, that the school district wants to improve school safety and will explore how to best use police and security officers in order to do so. But MCPS took police out of schools years ago. It’s taken the district this long to clarify the role that school security has in protecting children?