CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – The two police officers who will work as school resource officers in Charlottesville City Schools next year are coming from within the Charlottesville Police Department.

Officer Arron Arreguin will be assigned to Charlottesville High School, while Officer Tyree Kirby will work at the middle school, CCS announced Wednesday in a ParentSquare message to families.

Arreguin has been a CPD officer since 2016, according to the release, while Kirby has been with the CPD since 2023.

Arreguin is a native West Virginian who said he witnessed negative interactions while growing up between police and his father, who had mental health challenges.

“My reason for getting into law enforcement was to help kids, and to make sure they don’t have that bad experience that I had with law enforcement,” Arreguin said in the CCS release. “What’s a better role to do that than as an SRO?”

Kirby, prior to joining Charlottesville Police, was a life coach who taught “yoga, meditation, and mindfulness.” He’s also a former CHS student and assistant football coach at the school.

“I have a passion for uplifting youth and the well-being of our community,” he said in the release. “I see this role as an SRO aligning directly with my personal and professional career path.”

Sam Heath, Executive Director of the Commonwealth Justice Coalition, said that while he opposes the return of police officers into city schools, he didn’t have any objections to the specific officers who have been hired.

“I very much trust their sincerity, I’m hopeful that their past experiences and training will help them,” Heath told Cville Right Now Thursday morning. “I know that Chief (Michael) Kochis is an intentional man and works to train his officers well. Given all of that, I still stand against the institution of policing as a whole because I know it’s ineffective because it meets violence with violence, it is not an effective response to violence.

“We want to respect and honor police officers because they are human, but we do not support the institution of policing because we know it does not lead to the health and safety of others,” he said.

City Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania said he knows the two officers and called them “great guys.”

“I think if you read the bios of these two officers, one is about to be a first-time father who has in his past a family member who struggled with mental health issues, he’s bringing a great degree of compassion and life experience,” Platania said. “And the other officer has done life coaching, yoga, and meditation. These are the kinds of people we want in the school system that are going to reach out and interact with kids, develop relationships with kids.”

The city’s SRO program was discontinued in 2020, but talks to bring officers back into city schools resumed in 2024.

In March 2025, the Charlottesville City School Board voted 4-2 to bring back the division’s SRO program, a joint venture of CCS and CPD, starting with the 2026-27 school year, placing an officer in each the high school and the middle school.

The city began the hiring process back in February, despite renewed calls from some community members to hold another vote on the topic. Ultimately, despite an effort from new board member Zyahna Bryant, the board voted not to rescind its decision.

About a dozen community groups rallied outside CHS before the school board met in that work session.

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?”

Heath 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.

School Board Chair Lisa Torres found herself in the middle of the brouhaha as a member who voted “no” in that 2025 vote for the SROs, but abstained from the April vote.

She explained she still has reservations about officers in the schools, but she was encouraged by the working group that became part of the process of putting a new SRO program together, as well as the police department’s reception.