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Fayetteville renews school police contract after clash over transparency
- Details
- Tuesday, 02 June 2026
- Written by Rachel Heimann Mercader, CityView Today
The Fayetteville City Council voted to renew its contract for putting 18 police officers in public schools after a tense debate Tuesday over transparency, data, and the long-running role of officers in schools.
The contract continues the city’s school resource officer program with Cumberland County Schools, with a revised term structure and the inclusion of the city’s Office of Community Safety.
A motion by Councilmember Shaun McMillan to send the item back to a work session for deeper review failed 8–2, with only McMillan and Councilmember Stephon Ferguson voting in favor.
City Manager Doug Hewett told council members the renewal, first signed in 2024, largely keeps the existing agreement in place but changes the term from 1‑year renewals to a 1‑year contract with two additional 1‑year options, effectively creating a possible three‑year term. The new contract begins July 1.
The council also approved a contract with the school district to provide 66 crossing guards, called traffic control officers in the agreement, in a program administered by the police department.
Cumberland County Schools reimburses the city for the cost of the SROs and TCOs, making the programs “largely of no cost to the city,” Hewett said. The contracts do not include the cost of either program, and the city was not able to immediately provide the figures on Wednesday. A school board committee is scheduled to consider the contracts on Thursday.
The SRO contract provides officers to nine high schools, six middle schools, and three elementary schools. The TCO contract provides 66 crossing guards assigned to seven high schools, seven middle schools, and 23 elementary schools. Hewett said the SRO contract formalizes collaboration with the city’s Office of Community Safety, which did not exist when the city started providing SROs.
A Push to Slow Down
McMillan moved to remove the SRO contract from the consent agenda, the bundle of items passed together without debate or separate review. He argued that the council was moving too quickly on an issue with serious implications for students, particularly in light of historic racial and disciplinary disparities.
“We have to get this right,” he said. “This is more serious than something that should be on a consent agenda.” McMillan added that he was “disappointed that it would come to the council and to the public without serious examination.”
He brought up past findings about disparate discipline and SRO involvement discussed by Cumberland County Schools, the NAACP, and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.
In 2024, the Southern Coalition for Social Justice urged the city council to avoid placing police in schools and instead invest in counselors and mental‑health staff.
It argued that SROs don’t improve safety, contribute to racial disparities—citing five years of reporting shows that Black students make up a disproportionate number of the juvenile complaints from the school district—and often lack adequate training.
If the city proceeded with an SRO agreement, the group recommended a tightly written memorandum of understanding (MOU) with limited SRO roles, strong data reporting, oversight, training requirements, and annual evaluation.
McMillan warned that approving the agreement without a data‑driven review ignores concerns about a school‑to‑prison pipeline.
“Rubber stamping something like this denies the existence of, and the complications of, the school to prison pipeline,” he said.
He urged the council to review the contract during a work session and demand figures from Cumberland County Schools and the police department on how the SRO program has performed since it was launched under the current structure.
“There’s an analysis that has not been done,” McMillan said. “It’s piss poor leadership to zoom past that and rubber stamp approval of a program that you have not taken an analytic look at in terms of the efficacy and the safety.”
McMillan said the council was missing an opportunity to build “systems of accountability and transparency.”
Mayor Mitch Colvin strongly pushed back on the call for a work session, arguing the program has been in place for decades and has not produced the harms being suggested.
He recounted that in 2024, the sheriff’s office withdrew deputies serving as SROs due to personnel issues. Municipalities— including Fayetteville, Hope Mills, and Spring Lake—then stepped in, using city police officers to fill those positions on short notice.
“We had about 60 to 90 days to ramp that up… to make sure that these kids had protection at schools,” Colvin said.
Colvin said SROs “are not new” in the community and challenged what he described as a pattern of framing any police‑involved program as inherently problematic.
“There’s a theory called the self‑fulfilling prophecy, right?” Colvin said. “If we do something that involves the police, that means it’s bad.”
“We say we want to build better relationships, but you can’t build better relationships by implying that things are bad with the officers,” the mayor added.
He said councilmembers need to be “mindful of our words” and the message they send to students.
“Our kids need positive reinforcement, and to know they may want to grow up one day and be a police officer,” he said.
Later in the meeting, Colvin dismissed McMillan’s appeals for more data and safeguards as lacking specifics.
“Words sound good. No depth to it,” Colvin said. “So it’s good to say transparency and accountability. You don’t have anything specific that’s not transparent, because we’re discussing it now… you’ve got to do more than give word salads; you’ve got to have something that goes along with that.”
The council then voted to renew the SRO contract under the updated three‑year structure, along with the TCO agreement.
The vote was 8-2 with McMillan and Ferguson in opposition.
Request for More Data
Earlier this year, police Chief Roberto Bryan Jr. presented the department’s 2025 year‑end report. At that meeting, Colvin told council members that the rise in juvenile incident reports—from 1,111 in 2024 to 1,275 in 2025—was partly the result of having more officers stationed in schools.
On Tuesday, Bryan, who took command of the police department in July, updated the council on what those officers are handling. Between August 2025 and March 2026, SROs responded to 1,091 calls for service and filed 334 incident reports, he said.
During the question portion of his presentation, McMillan asked Bryan to provide data including racial and disability breakdowns, links between police contact and school discipline, MOU compliance, and school climate/perception surveys, rather than relying on occasional anecdotes.
Bryan told McMillan that he was willing to provide the council with that data.
“There’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to provide some type of data,” he said.
