‘We can’t cover all the schools’: MoCo police discuss youth safety with County Council, MCPS
Some district families, staff express support for increasing officer presence, according to survey results
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Ashlyn CampbellApril 24, 2026 5:37 p.m.
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Count Me In!Three days before a Watkins Mill High School student was detained Friday for alleged possession of a firearm on the Gaithersburg campus, Montgomery County leaders had met to discuss the issues of youth and school safety with Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) officials and county police.
The Tuesday meeting in Rockville addressing the long-debated role of police officers in public schools came after the release of preliminary results from an MCPS survey that showed about a third of families, administrators and staff who responded said they want to see more police presence in schools.
It also followed several recent security incidents in schools, including the arrest of a Gaithersburg High School student in March for alleged possession of a loaded handgun on school property and a February shooting at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville that left one student injured and another facing an attempted murder charge.
However, police officials acknowledged during Tuesday’s meeting with the County Council that the department does not have enough officers to place one in each of the county’s 211 schools on a daily basis. The county police department, like other departments in Maryland, has been facing understaffing issues for several years.
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“We can cover the high schools with [an officer] in every high school,” Assistant Police Chief Dave McBain told the council on Tuesday. “When you look at our staffing situation, we can’t cover all the schools, we just can’t.”
More than 30% of the MCPS survey respondents expressed support for having officers in all schools daily – the highest percentage of respondents to options that ranged from having officers in school full time to keeping the existing Community Engagement Officer (CEO) in place. Under the CEO program, officers are assigned to a high school cluster. They check in daily at their assigned high school, handle calls for assistance at other schools in the cluster and aren’t permanently stationed inside any school. They don’t patrol the hallways or get involved in school-based student discipline.
“There is very little support for reducing police presence in schools. That option consistently ranked among the lowest responses,” Marcus Jones, MCPS chief of the Department of Security and Compliance and former police chief, said of the survey results during an April 16 county school board meeting. “This tells us that the current model is generally viewed as a benefit. The interest is not in changing the [CEO] program, but in strengthening it.”
The survey, which covered a range of topics including safety, launched March 12 and ended April 13. Out of the options ranging from having officers in school full time to maintaining the existing CEO program, the highest number of respondents chose having officers in schools daily, with 32.8% of families, 37.5% of school-based staff and about 28% school-based administrators choosing that option. Nearly 37% of school-based administrators said they wanted police to visit their schools more often.
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Other respondents said they did not have an opinion on the issue, with 21.6% of families and 23.6% of staff members choosing the “do not know” option in response to the recommended options for the CEO program. About 10% of families, 2% of administrators and 5.5% of teachers responded that they want to have fewer police officers in schools.
McBain noted to the council that the police department didn’t envision that officers would spend their entire days inside schools.
Since the 2021-2022 school year, local police officers have been assigned to public high school clusters through the CEO program, which operates under a memorandum of understanding signed by MCPS, county police and other law enforcement agencies.
The CEO program replaced the School Resource Officer (SRO) program that stationed county police officers full-time in public high schools. The SRO program was scrapped after criticism that it led to higher arrests among Black and Hispanic students and community calls for more emphasis on mental health resources than policing in schools. At the time, proponents countered that the SRO program led to stronger relationships between police officers and the school communities.
In addition to continuing the CEO program, the district is working on several technology enhancements to address school safety, including distributing iPads to security staff in schools to monitor cameras and identifying doors that need sensors in all school buildings, according to the April 16 school board meeting.
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On April 8, the district officially began a monthlong pilot of a school camera program using artificial intelligence at three high schools, MCPS spokesperson Liliana Lopez told Bethesda Today. The pilot program originally had been scheduled to begin in February. Lopez said Thursday the pilot was delayed because the district’s “priority was ensuring all training was finalized and the equipment was fully operational before launching the pilot.”
The debate over the role of police in schools has reignited following the Wootton shooting and other incidents.
On April 11, vandalism was found at Bradley Hills Elementary School in Bethesda that referenced the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut, according to police. The incident followed a fire at a shed on the school’s property that was intentionally set, police said. A student at Bethesda’s Walt Whitman High School is facing charges in connection with the incidents.
Some elected officials, including Councilmember Dawn Luedtke (D-Dist. 7), have expressed support for the return of the SRO program, while others, such as Councilmember Will Jawando (D-At-large), are against the return of SROs.
Amid debate on how to address safety within schools, MCPS Superintendent Thomas Taylor told the council Tuesday that there was “no one solution” to addressing safety within schools. How the district carried out safety measures was more important than labeling its efforts, he said, referring to the CEO and SRO programs.
“By far, the most effective strategy at improving safety is having adults present … and having those adults have a positive relationship with young people,” Taylor said. “The partnership between the [local] police departments … and the school system, I don’t think, has ever been as strong as it is right now.”
However, Montgomery County Council of PTAs President Brigid Howe noted to Bethesda Today that “one of the worst nightmares that [parents] have is that a trusted adult can actually not be trusted.”
A media services technician at Bethesda’s Walter Johnson High School was arrested on April 15 by county police. The MCPS employee was charged with allegedly videotaping students in the school’s theater changing room after a video taken in 2018 was discovered by a current student, according to police.
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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine