Albemarle bringing back school resource officer to AHS

ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. (WVIR) - Albemarle County’s new school resource officer (SRO) will be placed Albemarle High School in the fall.

This is the first SRO in the division since 2020.

“It made sense to start at the biggest high school. Obviously, to us, that’s a perfect place to just see how things will work,” Helen Dunn said.

The 2023-24 school budget includes just one SRO for the whole county, though this officer will respond to other schools in emergencies.

“It’ll be quite rigorous in terms of interview, and then just picking the best person for that role,” Dunn said.

The division pulled all police presence from its schools in 2020. At the time, Albemarle County Public Schools did not have a memorandum of understanding with police.

“I think people believed that was a really important part of the process was actually having an understanding of how everything would work sort of more officially,” Dunn said.

ACPS is drafting that memorandum now with the Albemarle County Police Department.

“We do a lot of research and work to make sure that we’ve got the program rolling out the way we want it to,” Dunn said.

The school division says it also wanted to take time to focus on students’ social and emotional learning at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Now, it feels it is time to slowly re-introduce the role.

“We won’t even really think about expanding this program until we feel sure that would be the right thing to do as a next step,” Dunn said.

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