Examining the Role of the CEO in Public Safety and Education: A Council Committee Meeting

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By Dana Noga

Background

We recently wrote about the Community Engagement Officer (CEO) program and Discipline report being in the spotlight at County Council committee meetings.

This piece is a follow up to that which will cover CEO the portion of the meeting. You can view the entire meeting here.

The Joint Public Safety & Education and Culture committee met Monday 3/20/23 on Restorative Justice, the Community Engagement Officer program and bus safety. In attendance at the meeting were Council Members: Dawn Luedtke (district 7); Sidney Katz (district 3); Will Jawando(At Large); Gabe Albornoz (At Large); and Kristin Mink (District 5).

History

“School Safety is the utmost concern for all of us.” Katz stated. He continued into the history of the two previous competing legislations that were never brought to a vote: banning SROs from schools and allowing them in schools as requested by super intendent. During this time, the Board of Education was conducting a thorough review of the SRO program, including multiple stakeholders that were slated to provide an update in June of 2021. Before the update happened, County Executive Mark Elrich pulled the SROs out of school. Under the Maryland Safe to Learn Act of 2018, there is a requirement for “adequate law enforcement coverage at all schools.”

Without any type of legislation, the resulting compromise was a change from a best-practice nationally recognized School Resource Officer (SRO) program to a made-up CEO (Community Engagement Officer) program which decimated the best practice triad model. Officers who had previously functioned as teachers, mentors, and law enforcement were replaced with a reactive law enforcement program. This shattered the ability for police officers to engage in positive relationship building with students, which demonstrably helped avert potential violence in both schools and the community, including violence with firearms.

At the same time, MCPS implemented a program of restorative justice practices, meant to avoid the overcriminalization of black and brown students, and help reduce the school to prison pipeline. (Yet the county’s own 2016 OLO report states “Montgomery County’s School-to-Prison Pipeline is smaller than most other jurisdictions and appears to be shrinking. Less than two percent of MCPS students are suspended annually and the juvenile arrest rate has fallen by 60 percent over the past five years.”

Discussion

Jawando Statement

In Councilmember Jawando’s opening statement he noted, “We all agree that all of our kids need to be safe, and all of our faculty and staff need to be safe in their schools. I’ve just recently started as the chair of the Education and Culture committee and I started doing a tour of all the 25 clusters,” stating that to date he has only “made it to three so far and have seen the CEO program in its current iteration working in various ways, depending on the high school or the school that I was at, so it will be good to get an update on the data and on where things are and as we said we would when it went into effect…..” Without knowledge of how the county’s best-practice SRO program worked before it was eviscerated and renamed, he has nothing to compare it to.

Luedtke Statement

Councilmember Luedtke started by mentioning the Maryland Safe to Learn Act of 2018, “When Montgomery County made the change to call SROs CEOs and remove them from the schools, it was the only county in the state of Maryland to do so right at a time students were coming back to school, in person, after experiencing the trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic and virtual learning environment. I need to be clear because no matter what Montgomery County calls “them”, under state law they are still SROs and no matter what the county calls them, the county cannot change the way the state statue defines an SRO.”

Pandemic Removal of SROs

The removal of the SROs from schools coupled with the start of the implementation of the restorative justice practices, created chaos, for multiple reasons. Kids were coming back from pandemic isolation, and many had missed out on critical socialization development. Community violence had increased across much of the nation, including locally, and youth crime trends tend to follow adult crime trends. As noted by MCPS in the work session, restorative justice takes five years to fully implement, and for larger jurisdictions, like MCPS, can take longer. Like many professions, MCPS had staffing challenges for teachers and support staff. Removing SROs removed another adult who could provide guidance and supervision in the schools.

Albornoz statement

Councilmember Albornoz opened by stating he has been looking forward to this discussion as there is nothing more important than the safety and security of our kids. “The numbers that are on this data just jump off the screen…. They are sobering, to say the least, but they don’t tell the whole story. It is important to note tremendous efforts being made, in addition to law enforcement and security officials, to address the issues that we are seeing in the schools, but there are a number of other organizations that are trying their best to support our children and youth in a variety of other ways.

What’s clear is that more needs to be done and I look forward to digging into this data, acknowledging, again that it doesn’t tell the complete story and we need to be open to all and every solution that is out there. As Council member Jawando noted, all of us have heard from parents, from students, from faculty, from staff from these schools who in numerous instances have reported feeling unsafe. And that is unacceptable. We are going to have this session today, but this is by no means the end of this conversation…..”

MCPS First School Shooting

Montgomery County had its first school shooting on Jan 21, 2022. MCPS and MCPD retooled the CEO program to help bring CEOs back into schools on a limited basis, if invited by administrators. The MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) for the CEO 2.0 program was effective April 4, 2022.

Mink Statement

Council member Mink’s opening statement noted that “we have a lot of different tools in our toolkits, from the CEO program, we have restorative justice programs, a number of different mental health programs, and we have been very focused in the education culture committee on data and driven by results.” Ironically, she was concerned that MCPS is implementing a best practice Restorative Justice program while promoting a made-up, not-best-practice Community Engagement “CEO” program.

What has all this brought for the current school year? Varied implementation of restorative justice practices across schools, varied presence of CEOs in schools, and growing concern among parents and others about opioid overdoses, violence, weapons, and bias incidents.

Analysis

As Council Member Luedtke pointed out, there are various reports from parents and student that there are no clear expectations of behavior and there is a disconnect because many don’t see any rules being enforced. While restorative justice might be working well at some schools (which has yet to be determined), it is clear it hasn’t been implemented thoroughly or uniformly across all schools.

Councilmember Jawando made a point to show school service calls were down this year, but he neglected to mention that the reports, police actually wrote, are up. While there were 1,170 police reports written last year, if this year’s number stays on its current pace, we will end the year with around 1,700 reports. If that holds true, that represents a potential 50% increase this year over last.
There was not enough data to say what those school service calls and reports were for, exactly, but of the 13 arrests so far this year, there have been 5 assaults, 3 robberies, 4 drug charges, and one weapon offense. Two of those arrests were at middle schools. Of the 15 referrals to the Department of Juvenile Services (DJS), there were 8 assaults (3 with a firearm), 3 robberies, 3 drug related, and one weapon.

Racial Disparities

And while racial disparities in school discipline were a primary reason in removing SROs, those disparities have only widened. Note, that at the MCPS Board of Education meeting on Feb 24, 2022, while being presented with data concerning racial disparities Ms. Silvestre confirmed that the data was from July 2021-Feb 2022 and no SROs/CEOs were in school, she stated “I just want to point out that the disproportionality still exists. It is OUR problem, we have to own it and not say ‘oh it’s the police officers doing this, causing us to have these disproportionality in our schools…..”

MCPS needs to prioritize school safety over disparate outcomes. School suspensions have consistently been the lowest in the state. In some cases, suspension might be the most appropriate way to ensure school safety.

This is not the end of the conversation. The Education & Culture Committee plans to meet again on restorative justice. Council Member Luedtke requested a triple joint committee with Health & Human Services/Education & Culture/Public Safety committees to discuss behavioral threat assessment. The Public Safety Committee will bring CEOs back as well. All of these will likely take place this spring or summer, after the requested data is received and after the budget session.

Meeting Data requests:

Jawando requested:

Can the Emergency Communication Center break out the number of non-emergency number calls from the 911 calls? If not, why? Why can’t the non-emergency call be distinguished from 911 calls?
Requested a breakout of arrest and referral demographics to include race, gender, disabilities, ethnicity.

Katz requested:

What is the number of students that are disciplined that do not repeat the infractions?
What is the number of students that are disciplined that do not repeat hate-bias infractions?

Leudtke requested:

What is the percentage of referrals to the Department of Juvenile Services that come from parents verses police?
What is the number of security staff that were not trained, by the state, before the beginning of the school year?
Has “Handle with Care” been implemented? **The school implements individual, class and whole school trauma-sensitive curricula so that traumatized children are “Handled With Care”. If a child needs more intervention, on-site trauma-focused mental healthcare is available at the school.**
Out of the number of “medical/EMS calls” how many were for typical student injuries (like a sport injury during a game) verses injuries sustained from fights or students in distress?

Albornoz requested:

What were the suspension numbers from 2018-2019 (prepandemic)?
How often do security staff call for the CEOs assistance?

Mink requested:

The data on what type of incidents and frequencies, the school calls the Mobile Crisis Outreach team rather than the police or EMS. ** (General for mental health issue) The Mobile Crisis Outreach team is an alternative response to police are staffed with licensed clinicians.**

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Examining the Role of the CEO in Public Safety and Education: A Council Committee Meeting

Background

History