Just two years after a unanimous vote for police to be removed permanently from Somerville public schools, the administration is exploring the return of an armed, uniformed school resource officer.
An exploration of placing a police officer at the high school, with focus groups beginning as soon as this month, was introduced to the School Committee on April 27, included on the agenda under the vague branding of a “school climate safety memo.”
Because the budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 is well underway, it’s unlikely an officer could be placed on campus at the start of the next school year. Having a budget earmark by December “is a goal for us,” district chief of staff Amara Anosike said.
A group is rallying opposition, calling for residents to come in person to Monday’s meeting of the committee to give public comment for a fight it thought was won in 2023. If the new mayor and superintendent had “followed the recommendations ready for them when they walked in the door,” said Safe Schools Somerville in a Friday post on social media, “none of this would have been an issue.”
The move follows a series of incidents bringing police to Somerville High School and the Next Wave/Full Circle alternative schools, which are in a combined structure on Central Hill, district officials said. Two weeks earlier, they told committee members at the meeting, an armed tactical team from the Somerville Police Department went to the high school on a swatting incident – a false alarm called in to police to make them respond in force.
“We’ve had it several times in my tenure,” superintendent Rubén Carmona told committee members. Even absent such nasty and dangerous practical jokes or hoaxes, “we are currently relying on SPD on almost a daily basis, and being able to do that in a coordinated fashion is really the impetus behind this.”
It was the high school principals who came to the administration for help, and “I’m bringing the same question to you, not as an approval process, but just to be a thought partner, understand where we’re coming from as we’re looking into a very complex subject matter,” Carmona told committee members.
Vote two years ago
It was March 6, 2023, that the committee voted to remove police permanently from schools, a vote that followed a November 2019 incident in which staff at the Albert F. Argenziano elementary middle school called police on a 6-year-old child on a charge of indecent assault and battery against another child – an incident that didn’t involve a school resource officer but contributed to discomfort around policing in schools during an ascendant Black Lives Matter movement. Parents organized over the next three years, many in a group called Justice for Flavia, named for Flavia Perea, parent of the Black and Latino child in the 2019 case. The group is now Safe Schools Somerville.
The school resource officer program was suspended in May 2021, according to a Safe Schools Somerville timeline, and the committee formed a special subcommittee on policing in January 2022, leading to the seemingly decisive vote in 2023.
That vote recommended the resource officer model be replaced with a school liaison model that kept police dedicated to school response, but moved them off campus to be available for specific kinds of emergencies; school-related discipline stayed with administrators.
“The SLO thing was not implemented, which is interesting. I think we oppose that as well, but that is very different,” said Erich Ludwig of Safe Schools Somerville. “If they had implemented this SLO concept, we could have just said, like, cool. It appears that they want to have a officer in the building.”
Turnover in officials
Overpolicing, especially of minority students, is one of the concerns around having a police officer in schools, and the Argenziano school calling in police in 2019 showed why. Carmona – who came on in July 2023 to replace interim superintendent Jeff Curley – said he was aware: “I do not want any of our students to end up with a criminal record because we made a mistake around how we manage discipline.”
There’s been an election since the 2023 vote, with four seats changing hands. “The president of the council also turned over, so I call it 50 percent new members,” said Emily Ackman, chair of the committee, in a Friday phone call. The president of the City Council and mayor are considered members, with full voting rights, and the mayor also is new as of January.
Also new in the past two years: Police chief Shumeane Benford, who took office in September 2024 to relieve longtime acting police chief Charles Femino.
“For whatever reasons, the then leadership of SPD just could not say yes” to the committee’s recommendations around school resource or liaison offices, member Andre Green said at the Monday meeting.
Student safety
Reaching a memorandum of understanding with Benford’s police department may be easier. The superintendent, who is Latino, called Benford, who is Black, “a person who has shared experiences with our students in terms of how challenging it is to have a sense of belonging in spaces in which you are a minority.” Benford told city councilors last month that he had to work for several years alongside a police officer who threatened to kill him.
To Ackman, it makes sense that students can be safer overall when there’s a resource officer in school – someone who knows who is who, for example, when a Swat team is called to the school on a hoax. There are dangers when “there isn’t a consistent officer responding and not every officer is trained the same way,” she said. The high school principal “asked to consider having a school resource officer in the building with the goal of that person being a central point of contact who knows the kids and understands what they’re dealing with.”
References to the talks possibly resulting in an armed officer in the high school were not refuted. Carmona referred at one point to having an officer in the school “whether or not they’re in uniform.”
In neighboring Cambridge, after a school resource officer fired their gun accidentally in April 2024 – the officer was alone, and no one was hurt – the school committee there asked about an opposite scenario: an officer who was uniformed but unarmed. The idea was rejected by police leadership because a uniform might make officers a target for violence, and they would need to be able to protect themselves.
Committee members engage
Even members who voted out Somerville school resource officers two years ago, including Green, were willing to see where the focus groups and police discussions went.
“It’s always worth revisiting things periodically,” Green said. “The balance between security and welcoming spaces is always in flux. And so it makes sense to me to look at it again with fresh eyes, with eyes open, and not to prejudge the outcome.”
Member Emma Stellman, who was elected in November, said she was “very excited” about the discussion “in the sense that our principals are asking for something, and we can actually give it to them.”
The committee sets broad policies and educational goals with the superintendent and is responsible for fiscal oversight and recommended budgeting for the district. State law gives the superintendent authority to explore a resource officer agreement with police and, as member Laura Pitone said, “to not take our guidance.” The committee could decline to pay for a resource officer, but that funding could come from the city or police budget – which Anosike suggested was the likely outcome.
The committee could also set requirements for resource officer training but “probably needs a little more clarity around what our possible authority is,” Pitone said.
A previous process
There’s a big network of parents, teachers and students likely to come out again to oppose the placement, said Ludwig, of Safe Schools Somerville. And they are already upset that the memo announcing a new look at SROs seemed to sneak onto the agenda. “Our whole network did not see it,” he said. “It was buried.”
“It seems as if the superintendent is already negotiating an MOU which is not the one that he was directed to negotiate,” Ludwig said. “It does not fill me with great joy.”
There was a public process and data gathering before the 2023 vote, Ludwig pointed out, and it showed that the previous deployment of officers on campus lacked a consistent policy and record keeping – “like, it did not exist” – and that data nationwide showed more negative outcomes in schools with SROs. “It’s unclear to me why we would invite that into some public schools for essentially what feels like administrative convenience.”
Jon Link, a city councilor who emphasized in a Wednesday email that he was speaking as a parent and not as an elected official, agreed with Ludwig – that there is little evidence SROs meaningfully increase safety but a “preponderance of evidence” that they result in more arrests, police referrals, suspensions, expulsions and higher absenteeism.
“The data consistently shows that SROs disproportionately harm Black and brown students, funneling them into the school-to-prison pipeline for behavior that could be handled by a social worker, mental health provider, school counselor or just a phone call home,” he said.
Referring to the Argenziano case as an “outrageous” example, Link said “We have seen the damaging nature of bringing the criminal justice system into school right here in Somerville.”
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