CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — Dozens rallied outside of Charlottesville High School Thursday afternoon, urging the Charlottesville School Board to revote on its plan to bring back police officers to schools next year. The rally occurred less than an hour before a work session on the topic.

The protests was organized by a coalition of 12 local organizations. Organizers said the event was put together because the coalition felt the school board had not listened to the community before deciding to bring back the SRO program.

“They didn’t ask for our input,” Terry Tyree, President of the Charlottesville Community Resilience Center and founder of Terry’s Tiny Treasures, told the media before the event. “It was a lack of transparency, a lack of our input, and we already agreed to take the SROs out of the schools. Why put them back in?”

The Charlottesville School Board initially voted 4-2 in March 2025 to bring SROs back into the schools, with one at the high school and another at the middle school. But a petition has called for a new vote on the issue in the wake of Zyahna Bryant’s election to the board last November.

The rally occurred less than an hour before the board held a work session at CHS slated to include a discussion on SROs. Following its program, the protesters moved inside to the work session, with many of them speaking during the public comment session.

The program featured, among others, local advocates, faith leaders and CCS teachers and students, including 8-year-old Ann’ylah Jones, who attends Trailblazer Elementary. During the event, Jones was visibly nervous when asked to speak, a point the protesters brought up multiple times to the school board during the work session’s public comments.

“I don’t think police should be in schools,” Jones wrote in Legal Aid Justice Center’s press release on the event. “It intimidates kids. It makes school seem like jail.”

Sam Heath, Executive Director of the Commonwealth Justice Coalition, spoke both at the protest and during the work session. Heath told Cville Right Now that while the 12 members of the coalition had varying opinions of the police as a whole, they as a whole are not against police. What the coalition was advocating for was for the board to admit the process of making its decision was wrong, and for the vote to happen again.

“The coalition is united in saying the way the vote happened was fast. It was quiet. 
It was a surprise, and it was not done with sufficient community input,” he said.

Although his kids do not attend CCS, Heath said he believes what happens in the schools is reflective of the broader community.

“To have police in schools, to have guns in school, is our community’s way of saying, ‘We want to police kids, we want to abuse control, we want to use fear,'” he said. “We don’t parent that way. We seek to not parent that way. That’s not something that we want in any sphere.”

Tyree and Heath both argued for restorative justice practices instead of SROs. Heath said there is data showing that these practices “bring help and healing,” as opposed to inducing a sense of fear, which he said data shows can occur due to SROs.

“The school board is doing a measure of those restorative practices,” he said, “but they’re doing it in hypocritical conflict by also having police within the schools. They need to choose one direction over the other.”

Tyree also argued that SROs make students feel unsafe and bolsters the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

“We do not need armed police officers,” she said. “What are we afraid of? What are y’all afraid of? Because they’re our children. They deserve safety. They deserve understanding, support. They don’t deserve to be regulated, feared, controlled, and put under pressure all of that.”