MCPS CEO Program and Discipline Report in the Spotlight at County Council Committee Meetings

Last week the County Council staff put a very detailed (156 page) report on CEOs, SROs, and restorative justice in anticipation on the Monday 3/20 meeting with the Public Safety (PS) and Education & Culture (EC) committees.

You can attend the meeting at 9:30am or watch the meeting live on YouTube here.

Use this link to email all County Council members at once with a pre filled short email in support of SROs – don’t forget to sign your name at the bottom, click here to email them with your own personalized email or our longer form email text, or use this form to contact them on the official website.

In preparation of this meeting, there is a new extremely detailed report to the County Council which can be viewed here which we will go over key components of in this piece. The report has tons of information about the CEO (formerly known as SROs) and restorative justice programs and also a lot of discipline information including a school by school breakdown.

For this article we will focus on the CEO and some discipline information and will do future pieces on restorative justice and other aspects.

Background

With rising public safety issues in MCPS which we began to explore in the previous article (from discipline to fentanyl to hate crimes), the meeting gives us a good reason to look at current policies and their effectiveness. Here is a brief history of SRO/CEO program from that article:

CEOs/SROs

SROs were removed from schools in 2021 and violence (second article) and drug use has skyrocketed since in MCPS. Some community members say MCPS was safer with SROs. Following the in MCPS school shooting at Magruder HS, MCPS reconsidered this and eventually came up with CEO 2.0 and brought Community Engagement Officers back into schools. In fact, there is recent data showing that Black and Hispanic students percentage of suspensions for discipline has actually increased since SROs were removed (which is part of the problem removing them was supposed to solve). That article did not go into the violence or other types of suspensions but the full Maryland report can be see here.

https://moderatelymoco.com/taxes-up-services-down-why-accountability-matters-more-than-ever/

Report Summary

“This year, there has been growing concern among parents, students, and other school community members about overall school safety, including opioid overdoses, bias incidents, violence, and weapons. Some students have expressed concern about “bathroom culture” at schools, and MCPS recently issued guidance on current efforts to address this aspect of school safety. Additionally, parents and students have expressed grave concern about the increase in bias incidents in the school. Further, recent disciplinary data show that 2021-2022 disciplinary rates showed increased racial and ethnic disparities.”

https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/council/Resources/Files/agenda/cm/2023/20230320/20230320_PSEC1.pdf

To start, the report shows the breakdown of services calls. You can see that the % of service calls resulting in reports has more than doubled this school year (so far) over last year.

Here is the High School incident report breakdown for the 2022-2023 school year (so far).

“Of those reports, Police or CEOs have conduced 13 arrests and 15 referrals to Department of Juvenile Services (DJS).”

Even though the 2022-2023 school year is not yet complete, the number of bias incidents this school year already dwarfs all previous years dating back to 2017 with two consecutive years of massive increases.

On Restorative Justice outcomes, the report notes gender disparities in both where students are sent for their wellness referrals and suspension rates.

When looking at Disciplinary Outcomes, the report notes that the infraction suspensions overall are low compared to 2,392 for school year 2021-2022, but that racial and ethnic disparities remain.

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School by School Breakdown

There is a massive school by school breakdown of all incident reports by the type of incident starting on page 9 of the report.

The total school by school breakdown is way too much to post here but you can easily look up your school.

Here is a table that shows where different parts of this can be found:

Description	Sub Report Page	PDF Page
2021-2022 Incidents and Reports	2	10
2022-2023 Incidents and Reports	44	52
Summaries	72	80
CEO Demographics	81	89
CEO Selection and Training	85	93
MCFRS Incidents at Schools (by school)	91	99

You can see the summary of the differences between 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 in the summary chart from earlier labeled “School Service Calls”

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