The Alexandria City Council voted early Wednesday to return police officers temporarily to the city’s public school hallways, reversing a narrow vote five months ago — over the objections of the school board and superintendent — to defund the city’s School Resource Officer program.

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       The middle-of-the night decision is the latest twist in a contentious debate that has consumed much of the Northern Virginia city over the past several months. The reversal came after several incidents involving students and guns this fall stoked support for the SRO program.

       “I’m willing to take that step back,” said council member John Taylor Chapman, an educator who had initially voted to defund the $800,000 SRO initiative. “We know this program is not a silver bullet, but we have to do something here tonight.”

       Alexandria is removing police from its schools. Some students don’t want them to go.

       The vote capped a tense, six-hour meeting occasionally punctuated by interruptions from parents and others in the audience. Several council members questioned the city’s top school and police officials about the incidents and Alexandria City Public Schools’ efforts to respond to them.

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       Much of the exchange waded into thorny questions of race, policing and safety, as Superintendent Gregory C. Hutchings Jr. and School Board Chair Meagan L. Alderton insisted that school resource officers were necessary to prevent and respond to such incidents, including one in which a student took a loaded gun to school.

       “It has been proven in this short amount of time that we really do need our school resource officers,” Hutchings told the board, saying that Alexandria does not necessarily fit into a “national narrative” about policing and rising crime rates.

       Mayor Justin Wilson (D) — a normally unflappable presiding voice who voted to keep the SRO program — called the discussion a “disaster,” saying the questioning of Alderton and Hutchings was “the biggest waste of time” he had witnessed in his more than 10 years on the body.

       “I’m sorry we had to do this, quite honestly,” he said, at one point raising his voice in frustration. “This has been a horrific process from the beginning.”