Charlottesville City Schools staff presented a revised memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a proposed school resource officer program and summarized recent community engagement, saying the version now planned for a pilot would place two SROs in the district rather than four and include new reporting and privacy safeguards.

The updated MOU, staff said, reduces the number of SROs to two — one based at Charlottesville High School and one at the middle school — and specifies that the Charlottesville Police Department will repurpose two vacant positions to fill the roles so there is "no request for additional funding" for new police hires. The presenters said the MOU now includes stronger language around accountability, public reporting, and an automatic pause provision if the police department comes under federal operational control or enters into agreements with federal immigration authorities that would affect students.

The board heard that the MOU incorporates language modeled on recommendations from the New York Civil Liberties Union to protect student rights and limit routine law-enforcement responses to typical school disciplinary matters. The document also adds a requirement that SROs receive specialized training covering areas including de-escalation, child and adolescent development, working with students with disabilities, implicit bias and systemic racism, and special-victim protocols. The MOU will be finalized after the accompanying standard operating procedures (SOPs) are completed and reviewed by the city attorney.

Staff also described changes to how the program will be evaluated. The MOU requires the school and police to jointly log and review every instance of "official contact" between an SRO and a student — defined in the draft as student questioning for law-enforcement purposes, detention, citation, or arrest — and to publish quarterly aggregated data. The draft says qualitative feedback from students, families and staff will be part of evaluation along with quantitative incident and school-climate measures.

Board members and staff emphasized that the MOU is still under review and that the SOP will provide the operational detail community members asked for. Critics at public comment and some members of the public have questioned whether the MOU as written matches community expectations; staff said the document was revised in response to more than half a dozen community information sessions, student-focused conversations and survey responses. Staff said the SOP is expected to be published around Oct. 15 and that the online survey remains open at the district website.

Student representatives and other speakers at the meeting urged clearer explanation of how armed officers would function in schools. Solly Schwartzman, the student representative, told the board he had surveyed students at Charlottesville High School and found consistent concern about officers carrying guns: "Every single student I talked to without fail said that if SROs were implemented, they'd prefer them without guns," Schwartzman said. He recommended the district explain why officers must be armed, stress that weapons would not be used in "normal circumstances," and detail security measures for weapons storage.

Staff said the SOP will address daily role descriptions and use-of-force thresholds and that body-worn-camera policies and student-privacy protections will be clarified consistent with police policy and federal privacy law. Staff also said officers will be jointly selected by the district and CPD and that supervision and evaluation responsibilities will be shared.

Board members asked for a specifically documented evaluation rubric for both the program overall and for individual officers assigned to schools; staff said they will survey existing models from other jurisdictions and build a collaborative evaluation tool that uses both program metrics and site-specific feedback.

No final board vote on adopting the MOU occurred at this meeting; staff said revisions are ongoing and further community feedback will be accepted while the SOP is completed.