From coronavirus outbreaks to school shootings, parents are more worried than ever about their children’s safety and well-being at school. While Gov. Glenn Youngkin continues to push for school resource officers in all public schools, both Charlottesville City Schools and Albemarle County Public Schools ended their contracts with local police departments in 2020, amid nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Criminal justice reform advocates have long pointed to police in schools as fueling the school-to-prison pipeline—which Black and Latino students disproportionately fall victim to—and failing to prevent school shootings.
CCS and ACPS have replaced armed police officers with trained unarmed community members—referred to as “safety assistants” and “safety coaches,” respectively—tasked with building relationships with students, monitoring hallways, de-escalating conflicts, addressing mental health concerns, assisting with security issues, and upholding the school’s code of conduct. While the school divisions have not yet collected formal data on student arrests due to the new programs only being a year old, administrators say their initiatives have been well received by both students and parents.
When asked what goes into hiring a safety coach, Jesse Turner, director of student services for ACPS, stressed the importance of finding applicants who can build close relationships with students.
Jason Lee, supervisor of facilities, safety, and operations for CCS, echoed this sentiment. “We hire people who are from Charlottesville that love Charlottesville and just have a vested interest in seeing students grow, and keeping our students safe,” he says.
Nate Kuehne, a safety coach at Monticello High School in Albemarle, noted that building trust with students takes time and effort.
“I’m fair and consistent and I speak to people the way I’d want to be spoken to,” Kuehne says. He also emphasized the importance of providing students with structure and ensuring that they attend all their classes.
Due to his consistent enforcement of the rules, Kuehne says students went from seeing him as a “jerk” telling them to go to class, to someone who cared about them. He soon earned the affectionate nickname “stairway wizard” for his ability to seemingly appear out of the blue and find students hiding out in one of the school’s many staircases. By the end of the school year, he says, many of the students he had reprimanded the most became the closest to him.
When it comes to stopping physical altercations among students, CCS’ new safety model focuses much of its effort on preventive measures. “You create a relationship, you learn how to identify situations that may look like they could become a crisis,” explains Lee, “you learn how to identify students who had some kind of a level of trauma, and you try to understand how those things dictate or determine behaviors.”
Having someone in school who students trust is a significant advantage, adds Kuehne. Students often come to him when they hear rumors of potentially dangerous activity.
When safety assistants do have to physically intervene in a situation, the safety of students is always the number one priority. While assistants are trained to de-escalate and avoid physical intervention if they can, there are ground rules for intervention that are strictly followed.
“If you are going to touch a student, you start by saying ‘excuse my touch,’ and explaining why you are intervening,” says Lee. “We do not teach any skills where a student is on the ground … you only restrain when they are upright.”
Last year, the Arlington County School Board also voted to remove SROs from schools, and the City of Alexandria briefly joined them before reinstating the SROs a few months later. While Youngkin’s proposal to require a cop in every public school was struck down in the General Assembly earlier this year, he continues to be a major advocate for SROs—in June, his administration awarded a $6.8 million grant to fund school resource officer programs across the state.