This year, Albemarle County is ramping up its security. Students are already familiar with metal detectors and SMARTPass, but these technologies are only the most quotidian of new safety measures. One such measure is a return to pre-COVID policy: School Resource Officers.
Officer Raymond Lilly is one of four SROs in Albemarle County, each serving one high school and its feeder middle and elementary schools, with one general ACPS SRO. SROs act as a link between the police department and schools, working to “assist in providing safe and positive school environments with a law enforcement presence,” according to the ACPS Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
As a police officer, Lilly has undergone extensive training to become an SRO on top of police training, so he is equipped with everything a normal police officer is—guns, handcuffs, pepper spray.
Lilly emphasized that he’s not here to “get you in trouble.” Instead, he said, he wants to “help keep you from getting in trouble.” In other words, his presence is for prevention, not punishment; he’s here to advise students against illegal actions, not arrest them.
“I would like to be somebody that the students here would feel comfortable coming to whether it’s just a friendly conversation or actually, if they have a problem, if they have questions, whether they need guidance, [and] be a mentor to them,” he said.
Being an SRO is not new for Lilly: he has worked as a “floater” SRO for the past two years, but this is the first year he is more permanently stationed at a particular school. Coming to Western, he said, “I felt very welcomed here already by knowing a bunch of the staff members.”
The school “feels more safe” with an SRO in the building, junior Logan Juhl said.
“I think that having an officer there that people trust allows the school to feel safe, because if something bad were to happen, they would know that that person is someone that they can trust to protect them,” English teacher RobinAnn Apicella said.
Despite some positive reception, not all students have reacted well. “A lot of them are still very standoffish, because they see the uniform, they see… a figure of authority,” Lilly said.
Sophomore Duncan Innes said that an SRO “is an important thing to have, but… it kinda feels a little threatening at times,” citing concerns for marginalized students who may feel unsafe with an armed police officer in the building.
Stationing Lilly at Western is a sign of the broadening ACPS policy towards SROs. This year, there are four SROs across Albemarle County, the largest number there have been since 2020.
SROs were taken out of schools in 2020 due to “political climate change in the school board,” Lilly said. Now, he said, “The school board is starting to realize that having officers in the school is not a bad thing.”
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, around 70% of public schools in the US recorded some instances of violence. Last year, the US saw the most school shootings in history at 83, according to CNN.
The program began again, “because the world has kind of turned into a crazy place,” Lilly said. “[I] would love for me not to have a job in this profession, but the world doesn’t allow for that.”
