(Updated 9:40 a.m.) Alexandria City High School and the Minnie Howard Campuses are on lockdown and will have an asynchronus learning day.
According to the school’s website:
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Alexandria City High School
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After significant outcry from a school system concerned about weapons in schools, the Alexandria City Council took a dramatic 4-3 vote around 1 a.m. this morning (Wednesday) to temporarily return school resource officers (SROs) to two middle schools and Alexandria City High School until the end of this school year.
Councilman John Taylor Chapman was the lone vote to reverse course, going against Vice Mayor Elizabeth Bennett-Parker and Councilmen Canek Aguirre and Mo Seifeldein, who voted to keep away SROs.
A power outage on Saturday set off a week of concerns about city infrastructure, even as the city was ranked one of the best small cities in the country.
The power outage that derailed the Art on the Avenue celebration is just the latest in a long chain of outages that have hit Alexandria over the last year, giving the lie to Dominion Energy’s claim that a large outage almost exactly a year ago was a fluke. Mayor Justin Wilson has previously called the state of frequent outages unacceptable and urged Dominion to do more to upgrade its infrastructure.
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(Updated at 2:15 p.m.) Alexandria City High School is back to normal operating status after a lockdown Tuesday morning when a student was arrested outside the school with a handgun.
The school released the following note at around 12:30 p.m.:
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Alexandria City High School Executive Principal Peter Balas says that violence within the school is being handled and students caught fighting are being dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
In a letter to the Alexandria City High School community on Friday (October 1), Balas said that many of his 4,370 students have been traumatized by the pandemic and social/political upheavals over the last couple of years. He also said that a recent shooting of a student at the McDonald’s at the Bradlee Shopping Center and the firecracker incident at a recent ACHS football game has added to a “heightened sensitivity” within the school.
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It was a busy fall week in Alexandria. Here’s the rundown.
Our top story this week was on a plan to completely close off the 100 block of King Street as a pedestrian-only zone. The plan has been in the works since 2019, and was put into action last year. ALXnow’s poll on the subject had very one-sided results, showing 91% (791 votes) in favor of a permanent change.
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(Updated at 10:40 a.m. Alexandria City High School’s rates increased to their highest levels ever, not the highest in Virginia) Alexandria City High School has a lot more than just a new name to be proud of. This week, the school system announced that its recent graduating class saw the highest on-time graduation rate and the lowest student dropout rate in the school’s history.
“ACPS saw a nine-percentage point increase in the on-time graduation rate, from 82% in 2020 to 91% in 2021, and a nine-percentage point decrease in the overall student dropout rate, from 14% in 2020 to 5% in 2021,” ACPS reported. “The previous highest on-time graduation rate for ACPS was 86% in 2013 and the previous lowest dropout rate was 8% in 2019.”
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Weeks of tension and frustration over violence in Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) boiled over last night with a small crowd of parents shouting at City Council members to restore the school resource officer (SRO) program.
In May, the City Council voted 4-3 in favor of reallocating funding away from SROs, a program started in 1997 that installed police officers in Alexandria’s high school and two middle schools. While the schools have additional security staff, SROs were authorized make arrests and carry weapons — a fact that made headlines in 2018 when an SRO accidentally fired his gun inside George Washington Middle School.
The Alexandria Police Department confirmed that a firecracker, not gunshots, prematurely ended a football game Saturday between Herndon High School and Alexandria City High School (ACHS).
“The game was called with less than three minutes remaining,” said Claire Going, a spokesperson for Alexandria City Public Schools. “Fans began self-evacuation. Once the source of the noise was determined, an announcement was made to let people in the stadium know what had caused it.”
What a busy week in Alexandria.
Our top story this week was on a juvenile who was shot outside the McDonald’s at the Bradlee Shopping Center on Tuesday, Sept. 21. There have also been a number of concerning incidents at Alexandria City Public Schools, including a juvenile who was arrested for trespassing and assault and battery at Alexandria City High School.
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(Updated at 10:15 a.m. on Friday) A juvenile was arrested for assault and battery and trespassing at Alexandria City High School on Friday, September 10, according to the Alexandria Police Department.
“At ACHS this school year, there has been one incident where a juvenile was arrested for assault and battery and trespassing on September 10, 2021,” Alexandria Police said. “Due to the strict confidentiality of juvenile criminal justice records, we cannot provide further information to explain those charges or where the juvenile suspect or victim resides.”