Fayetteville council to take up measures on school resource officers, racism as health emergency

FAYETTEVILLE -- The City Council will consider whether to accept a grant for two more school resource officers as a new item Tuesday.

Councilwoman Teresa Turk introduced the measure, which would have the School District take on the cost of hiring the officers not covered by the grant. The federal Community Oriented Policing Services hiring program grant would cover $250,000 to pay for two officers over four years. The School District would pay $342,900, more than the $312,710 matching requirement, in order to have two higher-ranking officers than the grant normally would provide.

The two officers would come at no cost to the city, but the council would have to accept the grant Tuesday for the officers to be hired, City Attorney Kit Williams said.

The council rejected an item Aug. 4 by a 5-3 vote to accept the same grant, but with an added condition in the job description. Under the added condition, the two officers would have to be licensed in social work, as long as adding the requirement followed state law and the department made a good faith effort to find such candidates. Councilman Matthew Petty introduced the added condition.

Williams said because the council only voted on an amended resolution, not the original item to merely accept the grant or not, it could be presented as a new item. That, and the School District taking on the entire dollar amount without sharing it with the city, differs from what was originally proposed.

The deadline for the original proposal was Aug. 9. However, Police Chief Mike Reynolds said the grant has a clause for extension, which was granted. The new deadline is Aug. 20, Reynolds said.

Reynolds also said the department would provide data on school resource officer activity, including arrests and citations, for the council to consider before Tuesday's meeting. The department hasn't historically tracked school resource officer data specifically, but Reynolds said the information is available, it just has to be extracted from the records management system.

"For me, as the police chief, I've learned from this," he said. "Once we get that data caught up, we can certainly incorporate that."

The city has seven resource officers working in schools. Springdale has 18, Rogers has six and Bentonville has five.

Also Tuesday, the council will consider declaring racism a public health emergency. Mayor Lioneld Jordan introduced the item as a recommendation from the city's resident-led African American Advisory Council.

The resolution states studies have linked racism to worse health outcomes for Black people, including cancer, coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and high infant and maternal mortality rates.

The measure includes 16 recommended actions for the city to take. They include measuring the effectiveness of city programs and how they relate to advancing racial equity; developing an annual report with separated data on the health of Black residents; advocating for relevant policies to improve the health of Black residents; and developing a racial equity action plan.