RPD’s return to schools uncertain

Less than a month before Rochester City School District students return to classes, it’s unclear whether the Rochester Police Department presence at city high schools will resume as well.

At the RCSD board of education’s July 30 business meeting, a pair of contracts paying for RPD officers to be stationed outside the schools—during arrival and dismissal and at sports or special events—failed in a 3-4 vote. However, the matter is likely to come up for a vote again before school opens for students on Sept. 8.

“I know City Council was very surprised, (RCSD Superintendent Eric Jay) Rosser was very surprised at the way that the vote went since this has really been such a non-issue year after year after year,” says Amy Maloy, vice president of the RCSD board.

Maloy voted in favor of approving the contracts, joined by board president Camille Simmons and commissioner Kareem Ba McCullough. The “no” votes were commissioners Isaiah Santiago, Beatriz LeBron-Harris, Jacqueline Griffin, and Heather Feinman. This is the first time such a contract fell short of approval.  

Rosser has indicated that the contract package, with some potential reworks, will come before the board again in the next few weeks. A special meeting held Tuesday offered a security assessment with several options for public safety. The administration recommended the option of RPD presence at arrival and dismissal only.

The contracts before the board July 30 allow for officers to be placed in patrol cars outside five high schools for one hour during both arrival and dismissal times, as well as during special events, such as sports events.

“Officers are to provide a visible presence outside of the schools in order to provide whatever police services are necessary, as well as to provide a visible deterrence,” says RPD Captain Greg Bello.

Board commissioners who voted against the contracts expressed concerns about overpolicing students, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the cost of the programs, which total $968,800. To date, $3.3 million has been budgeted for the program.

“Fear isn’t always the best way to get to the right solution or to the solution that truly goes to the root. Fear, in many ways, can actually be more of a trigger than a support at some time,” says Santiago. “We’re investing a million dollars, but there might be more effective ways for us to provide safety, violence prevention, and accident prevention at our schools.”

An $80,640 contract to have RPD officers on-site during the summer school period this year was approved in June. It passed in a 5-1 vote.

Commissioners who voted to approve the contract renewals shared worries around these issues. However, they argued, there’s too little time before the start of the 2026-2027 school year to make any drastic changes or come up with a long-term alternative.

“There were lots of looks of surprise across the entire room by our administration and operations folks. They were very concerned immediately,” says Maloy. “The year really starts, for our sporting events in particular, two weeks before (school does). So, we’re kind of two weeks right now out from needing to know how public safety is going to be carried out.”

“At this point, because it’s so late and the school year is going to be starting so fast, within the next month, this wasn’t the time to say no to it,” adds McCullough. “But it definitely was a time to say, ‘Hey, can we look at this again at a future date and start coming up with some alternatives?’ Because I don’t think the conversations have fully been had.”

Police and the schools

For more than 20 years, armed RPD officers—known as school resource officers—were present in city schools. The program, which started in the late 1990s, ended in early 2021, after the Children’s Agenda and other community organizations advocated for removal of the officers. They were replaced by unarmed school security officers.

Late that year, RPD officers were first stationed outside schools for a one-month period. They returned in early 2023 after a near-fatal shooting incident outside Franklin High School, and have remained since then.

There have been relatively few reported crimes at Rochester high schools in recent years: 11 in 2023, 14 in 2024 and 21 last year. However, the numbers began declining years before the current program was put in place.

According to Rochester Police Department records, the number of reported crimes at a school have dropped tremendously since 2011. Campuses with high schools had 75 incidents that year. The number declined over the next decade, reaching an all-time low during the COVID-19 pandemic: nine and eight incidents in 2020 and 2021, respectively.

The 21 reported crimes last year is a drop of 72% compared to 2011.

The majority of reported crimes were larcenies (83%); very few were in violent crime categories (7.5%). Still, highly publicized and dramatic scenes, such as the January 2023 shooting at the Franklin school campus, have been one of the primary arguments for maintaining RPD officers on-site.

“You can see it clearly on the video that was released.  (The 2023 shooter) missed by literally two inches, shot two more shots, but the gun jammed and they ran away,” Maloy recalls. “I’m so glad that a student was not killed in that, but we could have had three lives lost that day.”

Adds Maloy: “I don’t know how effective having a police officer would have been in preventing (the 2023 shooting), (but) had there been a police officer stationed outside of the school, I wonder if it would have even happened.”

Bello says that the program has “absolutely been effective” and officers are necessary to carry out emergency responses.

“RPD are law enforcement officers legally able to take police action,” he says. “School security officers are not. They serve two completely different functions.”

A November 2021 survey of staff and families found that there was overwhelming support for RPD cars at schools; 4,125 respondents backed the police presence versus 421 who opposed it.

Student impact

The elimination of SROs from RCSD schools came amid the public groundswell of support for police reform brought on by the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. They were largely replaced by SSOs, non-law enforcement personnel who carry no weapons. Although Maloy voted in favor of the change, she admits it was not a simple choice.

“I still remember my own son when he was in kindergarten coming home and one of the SROs gave him a lollipop, he was so excited about it. Some of those SROs have just done such a great job of building relationships with kids,” says Maloy. “(But) my kids’ experiences … are not the lived experiences necessarily of the general population.”

Santiago, the youngest member of the board and a 2022 RCSD graduate, also sees complexity in the relationship between SROs and students.

“For me personally, I am able to see both sides of having SROs in the school. I mean, I ended up having a good relationship with one of my SROs during my time in school,” he recalls. “But I also have a memory of seeing an SRO slamming one of my friends to the ground during an incident. And so I definitely live with the experience of both sides of that.”

“(SROs) are the first sort of touchpoint with the criminal justice system for a lot of RCSD kids, and there are a lot of incidents that otherwise wouldn’t have been handled by the criminal justice system that get swept into that,” observes Eamonn Scanlon, director of community impact for the Children’s Agenda. He says Raise the Age legislation, which raised the age of criminal responsibility to 18, has helped with this issue. 

“(Police presence in schools) is quite costly and also associated with a lot of harms for students academically because of increased incidents of suspensions and expulsions and arrests. So, the ideal is to move away from that,” he adds.

Scanlon says that police presence at schools can contribute to a “school-to-prison pipeline.” This is a phenomenon where students, particularly those who are Black or Hispanic, are taken out of school systems and placed into the criminal justice system instead. 

RCSD is predominantly a district of color, with 91% of students identifying as non-white or multiracial. A 2024 report by the Police Accountability Board found that, from 2021 to 2023, nearly 80% of the 311 RPD use-of-force incidents toward juveniles citywide were against Black minors who were mostly male. The most common incident types where force was used were mental health calls, robbery investigations, or an active fight. Use-of-force incidents were not clustered around schools, however.

Cost concerns

With the city school district facing budget gaps and potential program cuts, Santiago believes that RCSD cannot afford to pay for police officers stationed outside the schools. 

“If the RPD gets a $90 million budget or whatever, that’s to protect the citizens of Rochester, which should include the students,” he says. “The price is only going to rise, prices are only going to go up. And so there might be better ways for us to provide safety during those times.”

The original 30-day period in 2021 cost $78,210, or $2,607 per day. It covered the deployment of 13 officers across 11 schools.

In 2023, the cost for a full school year was $787,520, which equals $2,678 per day. However, the number of schools covered dropped from 11 to five. RPD was also posted during summer school for the first year with a price tag of $90,736.

The proposed contract for the 2026-2027 school year totaled $868,800, or $3,006 per day. The special events contract was $100,000, which is the same as in 2025, the first year it was instituted. RCSD administrators say these prices are determined by RPD overtime rates and come out to about $120 per hour.

“It’s a very expensive thing, police officers are well compensated for what they do. And that’s a lot of money that could otherwise be used in the classroom or to support students in other ways,” Scanlon says.

Maloy believes that, while a more favorable payment arrangement for this program could be worked out with the city of Rochester, the bigger issue is RPD staffing, which affects the entire city. Further, the district’s own security also requires additional aid.

“I don’t think there’s any fleecing of the district going on. The reality is, (RPD) is already short-staffed,” she says. “You’ve got cops that are working overtime just to fill basic needs throughout the city.

“(SSOs) have begged us to give them more support because they feel like if they are to encounter a weapon or some type of violence, they aren’t always equipped to handle it. A lot of them are pretty terrified,” adds Maloy. “Having outside police presence so that the SSOs don’t have to deal with that is just a really practical solution. I believe it has nothing to do with our students because it’s outside of the buildings where this might take place.”

Santiago plans to vote to approve a contract for RPD’s presence at special and sporting events when it is presented again. He says that the crowd numbers at games extend the issue beyond students and into more of the community, making it necessary to have extra help.

Moving forward

A decision on police presence outside high schools in the 2026-27 school year is likely to come at the RCSD board’s next business meeting later this month. McCullough believes the district must take a closer look at all potential options, but also consider what has already been done.

“What resources do we have here locally? How are we training our staff? How are our SSOs being helped? How are we equipping our schools and what are their resources when it comes to dismissals and arrivals? What other alternatives do we have that we can use outside of the police, outside of the RPD?” he says.

Rosser’s administration wants to keep the contracts with RPD in place so the district can take additional time to create a longer-term solution. However, he has suggested that other alternatives could include a shorter-term contract with RPD or partnering more with anti-violence organizations Pathways to Peace or 585 SNUG.

“I believe that (Rosser) is fully willing to look at other alternatives moving forward and have those conversations and create those types of social-emotional plans or look more at the finances,” Maloy says. 

“By all means, let’s do it, let’s work on something,” she adds. “But you can’t three weeks before school starts. It’s not practical. I don’t mean to disparage any of my fellow board members, but as someone who works in a school district (as a teacher in Brighton) and knows how day-to-day operations work, we need to leave those types of decisions up to our superintendent. With all due respect, I think we can balance being fiscally responsible with the social-emotional stuff, but we need to operate. We need to start the school year and we cannot without a viable plan that’s ready to go and in place.”

For his part, Santiago says he is tired of waiting.

“Since I’ve been on the board, I’ve raised the issue. The first year, people were in consensus and then nothing changed. The second year, people were in consensus and nothing changed. And I passed it both years. I was always a fourth vote because if I didn’t vote yes, it wouldn’t have passed,” he says. “I passed in the past because, ‘Okay, well, we need a safety net.’ But I think this time I was going to stand on the nose so the conversations can at least start.

“I think right now was the best time to start the discussion. I mean, it could have been a little bit earlier, I guess, but at least the ball is rolling. And I think that’s part of my job,” adds Santiago. “Even if it can’t be done before the upcoming school year, then we can have these conversations going into the next school year.”

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.

The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. See “Leave a Reply” below to discuss on this post. Comments of a general nature may be submitted to the Letters page by emailing [email protected].