More than a year after the Maple Run Unified School District’s board of directors voted to end a program that stationed police officers in its schools and replace it with a model that has on-call police based off-campus, the board is again grappling with questions about school safety amid a flurry of input from parents.
Last month, Amanda Giroux, a St. Albans Town resident, told administrators she had been gathering signatures from parents who want to vote on bringing the old program back. That has prompted lengthy discussions at recent board meetings about whether the board should put such a question on the school district ballot on Town Meeting Day.
Maple Run covers St. Albans City and Town, as well as neighboring Fairfield.
Giroux said last month she doesn’t believe “all voices were heard” ahead of the board’s August 2021 vote to end its school resource officer program, and that some residents’ opinions have changed since the current liaison officer model launched that fall.
The district has not yet received a petition about the issue, Maple Run Superintendent Bill Kimball said in an interview, and the board’s attorney wrote in a recent memo that members have no legal obligation to put such an article before voters.
Over several hours of debate that at times turned contentious, some board members — and parents — questioned why the body was even discussing the resource officer program again. They noted that a parent-led committee spent six months studying the model in 2021, after which board members took several meetings to reach a decision.
In voting to end the school resource officer program, some board members said they wanted to better protect district students from marginalized backgrounds who could be more likely to feel unsafe around police. Survey data collected in 2021 found that about 56% of Maple Run students in grades 7 through 12 supported having police in schools, though about 45% of those opposed identified with a minority demographic.
“This was a long process. It didn’t just happen overnight,” said Reier Erickson, who was a vocal advocate for ending the school resource officer program before he was elected to the board, at a Dec. 7 meeting. “It’s been talked and talked and talked about.”
A handful of Vermont school districts, including Burlington and Montpelier, have taken police officers out of their buildings in recent years. Maple Run’s program came under scrutiny in 2020 after a report found that a year prior, one of its school resource officers pinned a student with disabilities to the ground, mocked him and arrested him. The City of St. Albans later settled a civil rights complaint for $30,000 over the incident.
Nilda Gonnella-French, the board chair, said she invited Giroux to speak to the board because she felt any discussion about policing in schools deserved “extra attention.”
Under the resource officer model, Maple Run had three full-time police officers working in its schools. The “liaison” model is set up to fund the hourly equivalent of 1.5 officers, though officers are stationed at the St. Albans Police Department headquarters.
When they come onto school campuses, the liaison officers generally don’t wear a full police uniform, but they are armed and have body cameras. In recent months, district data shows officers have responded to a wide array of incidents, including drug use, harassment and physical assaults, and provided security for school events.
Kimball said in an interview that, while the district’s agreement with the police calls for a 1.5-officer equivalent, the department has actually provided “much less” coverage for most of the time the liaison program has been in place because of staffing challenges.
The superintendent referred questions about how many hours police are currently providing to the department. In an email, St. Albans Police Lt. Paul Talley — who is the program’s supervisor — declined to provide a number of hours, though he maintained that his department is meeting its obligations.
“Other than a handful of days thus far (military duty, training, vacation) we (Officers with specialty training) have been available to respond to the schools when called,” he said.
According to the most recent school district report on the liaison officer program, which covers Aug. 31 to Nov. 30, 2022, a liaison officer responded to 41 calls, the largest number of them at Bellows Free Academy-St. Albans, the district’s main high school. Across all schools, it took a liaison officer an average of nine minutes to respond.
At meetings last month, some board members voiced concerns with one particular data point in the recent report: about 21% of calls last fall involved a student who identifies as Black, indigenous or a person of color, while those identities account for only about 14% of the overall student population. Kimball noted in an interview that the data does not say whether those students were alleged perpetrators or victims in a given incident.
The superintendent said he agrees that the statistic is concerning, and administrators have been reviewing each incident to determine ways the district can improve the program.
In addition to the district liaison officer program, Maple Run employs three “school safety workers” at Bellows Free Academy. Kimball said the safety workers help check people into the high school and make sure students are following school policies. They’ve had deescalation and anti-bias training, he said, and are tasked with “proactively working with the students to make sure that little infractions don’t become bigger.”
“All the anecdotal data that I have from students and from staff is that this is really helping the climate in the building,” Kimball said in an interview. When the school was holding classes remotely or in a hybrid setting because of the Covid-19 pandemic, he added, “kids lost some of their social-emotional learning — and so we need to put structures back in place to help them regain that. This is one of the structures.”
Board members have asked Kimball to figure out ways to compile data on the interactions that school safety workers are having with students as well.
About a dozen local residents spoke at the board’s Dec. 21 meeting, many voicing opinions either in support of or against putting a school policing question on the district’s ballot this spring. The majority opposed the idea, though several, including Giroux, said they believed that the liaison officer model was insufficient for keeping their schools safe.
Board member and former mayor Peter DesLauriers of St. Albans City said he thought it would be “equitable” for the district to “listen to everybody” by soliciting opinions from voters directly on whether to bring back the resource officer program. Katie Messier — a board member from St. Albans Town who is DesLauriers’s daughter also said she supported putting a petition about school policing on the ballot.
In a memo, the board’s attorney wrote that members could put a petition on the ballot as a “nonbinding advisory vote,” but it would likely spur confusion.
“That decision is more of a political one than a legal one,” the memo states. “Many voters will not understand … that the vote is not binding on the Board, creating a perception that the Board is not ‘following the will of the people’ if the Board decides the opposite of how the majority of the voters voted.”
Board member Joanna Jerose of Fairfield said that while she agrees it’s important to hear input from as many parents as possible, she doesn’t see issues that impact students’ ability to access their education — such as having police officers stationed in schools — as matters that should be up to a public vote.
“I’m not looking for anybody’s opinion as to whether or not they think that this person or that person is more deserving of rights and protections,” Jerose said.