Last night, Urbana City Council discussed the ongoing School Resource Officer (SRO) debate. If you are unfamiliar with the situation, here it is in brief: Urbana School District #116 would fund and add two armed SROs in Urbana schools, one at the high school and another at the middle school, costing the school district $321,300.
If you’re curious what Champaign and Urbana school board members think about SROs in schools, look no further than our Editorial Board feature to showcase who thinks what.
There was concern that the City of Urbana would sue the Urbana Board of Education if the contract was not carried out, which turns out to not be the case. The City of Urbana’s council discussed this at length last night, voting 5-2 in favor to release the school board from that obligation if they so choose with no penalty. This means that if Urbana School District’s Board of Education votes to end their pursuit of adding SROs in their schools, they can choose to not continue the intergovernmental agreement between the city and the school district.
The Urbana BOE meets tonight at 7:30 p.m. to discuss what they will do about this situation.
The Urbana Public TV recording of last night’s meeting is below. The discussion starts around 2:15 mark, with the vote around 2:45. In case you don’t have time to watch the video, here is the resolution, here is the city council agenda for last night’s meeting, and you can see who voted for the amended resolution below:
- Brown: yes
- Colbrook: no
- Hursey: no
- Luit: yes
- Miller: yes
- Roberts: yes
- Wu: yes
