Montgomery County’s public school system and the Montgomery County Police Department have privately drafted an agreement to bring armed police back into school buildings, angering student activists and criminal justice advocates who successfully pushed county leaders to remove the officers last fall.
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The proposed contract between the two agencies, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, has been shared with County Council members and County Executive Marc Elrich (D), but not with members of the public who say they should have a chance to review the document before it is finalized.
“It’s wildly inappropriate that they’ve excluded students,” said Kyson Taylor, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School.
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Student activists such as Taylor have pushed since 2020 to remove police from schools, citing the disproportionate rates with which police arrest students of color and students with disabilities at county schools. While student activists were alarmed in February when interim superintendent Monifa McKnight proposed reinstating police in school buildings, they were under the impression they still had time to intervene, Taylor said. As recently as last week, they were organizing protests and sharing testimony at school board meetings to oppose McKnight’s proposal.
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At-Large County Council members Will Jawando (D) and Hans Riemer (D), who both oppose the return of police to school buildings, said students and activists should be allowed to weigh in on the contract, called a memorandum of understanding or MOU.
“There should be a public discussion on it, definitely,” Riemer said. “It seems inappropriate that there wouldn’t be.”
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But Chris Cram, a spokesman for the school system, said that the draft document is “not public” and that officials do not intend to release it until it is signed, which is expected later this week. Earl Stoddard, Elrich’s assistant chief administrative officer, said last week that the agreement would be shared when finalized.
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These statements mark a stark contrast from the approach taken by county leaders last year, when, in the wake of racial justice protests that swept the country, the Elrich administration set up an interagency committee to review and recommend changes to the agreement, and actively called for “community stakeholders” to provide input. Brenda Wolff, president of the county Board of Education, said at the time she was “pleased to support” the work of the committee.
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In a statement Tuesday, after this article was published online, Elrich’s spokesman, Scott Peterson, said county officials have consulted “with students, teachers, administrators, and police” on the new agreement, but are “moving more expeditiously” to implement changes now than before.
“MCPS has been clear that they need additional flexibility in the short-term,” Peterson said, adding that Elrich would like to see the document made public but "cannot make such a decision alone.”
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Danielle Blocker, president of the criminal justice activist group Young People for Progress, said the remarks from elected officials are “hypocritical.”
“For them to go from saying last year that this [document] is something that students and teachers and administrators and community groups should have eyes on to saying now that they’re fine with no student input … it’s striking,” Blocker said. “How do you even begin to justify this process as legitimate?”
The draft document shows school and police leaders are considering several changes to their operating procedure, including having police partially stationed inside school buildings, allowing school administrators to contact officers directly, and requiring that police “engage” not just with public high schools, but also middle and elementary schools.
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Police will “check in daily at every high school” but stay out of school discipline procedures, Police Chief Marcus Jones said in a statement. School principals, who said unanimously in December 2020 that they supported keeping police in schools, “will have more flexibility to request the [community engagement officers] to provide police services as needed,” Jones added.
In August, Montgomery schools opened for the first time in 19 years without police stationed in schools. Twenty-three officers were still assigned to patrol the areas around schools, but administrators were asked not to contact them directly and to seek police help when necessary through 911. The arrangement was meant to help bridge yawning disparities in the diverse county, where in the 2018-2019 school year, Black students made up more than 4 in 10 of all school arrests despite being only a fifth of the student body.
Debate over the issue returned this year amid an uptick in physical attacks on campuses and a broader, regionwide increase in violent crime. After a shooting at Magruder High School in Rockville left one student critically injured, calls for administrators to beef up school security intensified, though some Magruder students have explicitly said that what they want is more mental health support, not the return of police.
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Elrich, who faces reelection this year, has in recent months backed away from his commitment to remove police from school grounds, saying instead that he is deferring the decision to McKnight. At a news briefing Monday, County Council President Gabe Albornoz (D-At Large) toed a similar line: Lawmakers have posed questions and recommendations to the school system and police department on the new draft agreement, he said, but it’s up to both agencies to adopt them.
“Several things have changed” since last year, Albornoz said, citing studies showing the impact of the pandemic on students’ mental health. “It’s caused us to have to adjust.”
Jawando said his top concern with the draft plan is the proposal to give police officers “a private designated space” in school buildings. Even though the agreement says officers won’t be “permanently stationed” there, it’s not immediately clear when they would spend time in the building and for how long, he said. Riemer said he worries that allowing administrators to contact officers directly will increase the risk of police being drawn into school discipline like they sometimes were before 2021.
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Cram, the school system spokesman, said both these changes were the result of a “large and significant” review of school security.
Sidney Katz (D-District 3), chair of the County Council’s Public Safety Committee, said that while the issue of police in schools has been divisive, the new agreement strikes a fair compromise.
“Both sides are being listened to,” Katz said. “What’s being suggested is not the same as … what was in place prior.”
Criminal justice activists disagree. Two separate county task forces — the Reimagining School Safety and Student Well-being committee set up by Elrich and the Student Wellbeing Action Group set up by council members — concluded in reports last year that police should not be stationed in schools and that school administrators should not have a direct line of contact with their designated “Community Engagement Officer.”
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“Public input doesn’t matter if it’s being ignored,” said Blocker, of Young People for Progress. “And it’s very much being ignored.”
Taylor, the Richard Montgomery senior, said he and his peers are frustrated with what they see as an about-face from elected officials. They’re increasingly cynical about the possibility of lasting change on this issue, he said, but he wants to keep pushing even after he graduates in May.
“I could never imagine stopping,” Taylor said. “Not after putting so much into it.”
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