Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) data showed a decline in school safety incidents, but a notable uptick in fights/assaults.
The ACPS School Safety Data Review covers the first and second quarter of this 2024-2025 school year. Compared to the third and fourth quarters of last year incidents declined from 73 to 62, though that total still wasn’t as low as the first and second quarters from last school year at 57 incidents.
The data also showed an uptick in fights and assaults, from 69 in the last two quarters of the last school year to 82 in the first two quarters of this school year. While this marked the highest number of fights/assaults since ACPS started publicly tracking data in the 2021-2022 school year — the average is 55 fights/assaults — ACPS staff said at a School Board meeting last week that some of that can be attributed to changes in data collection.
John Contreras, director of Safety and Security Services, said at least half of the fights for each month were usually at the Elementary School level, where fights aren’t necessarily happening more often than previous years, but the “high count can also be attributed to better reporting practices.”
Alicia Hart, chief operating officer for ACPS, said it can be difficult to pick out trends of causes for the increase in fights beyond that.
“Each incident relating to fights is different in some regard,” Hart said. “We see them at earlier parts of the day, we see them at high school during transitions, and sometimes in the afternoon close to dismissal.”
Hart also suggested warmer weather sometimes correlates to an uptick in fights.
“Anything we attribute [to increase in fights] would be anecdotal,” Hart said. “Anecdotally, we tend to see more activity when weather is warmer, so this does cover a portion of late summer and early fall where weather was warm. Hopefully we don’t see a similar trend for the second semester, but we always pay key attention to when weather is warmer, because that does seem to have an impact on behavior.”
The report shows relatively minor change in the number of incidents across the board, though the other major change was a decrease in the number of EMS Assistance calls unrelated to fights or assaults, from 66 at the end of the last school year down to 51 at the start of this school year, though slightly higher than the average of 46.8.
During the report, Hart said ACPS has implemented new security measures. After Alexandria City High School closed for winter break early due to a series of fights, Hart said the school has added additional security officers and instituted hallways sweeps.
“I’ve personally witnessed the hallway sweeps when I’ve visited and they work,” said School Board member Christopher Harris. “That’s a good addition to our protocols.”
