Students, teachers and parents were alarmed when local and federal law enforcement rolled up to Albemarle County’s Lambs Lane school campus Tuesday morning, unannounced and unexpected.
According to police, however, there was never any cause for concern: Local and federal agents were simply using an athletic field for training purposes; they had simply forgotten to alert the school division due to a scheduling error.
At the beginning of the school day, four vehicles — three K-9 vehicles, two marked U.S. Department of Homeland Security and one Federal Protection Service, and a fourth vehicle marked Albemarle County Police Department — parked near the Boys & Girls Club building on the campus north of Charlottesville that houses the club, Albemarle County High School, Journey Middle School, Greer Elementary School and the Ivy Creek School for special education.
The police department failed to ask permission or notify anyone with the school division.
Without an explanation for law enforcement’s sudden presence, students and faculty were left wondering if U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of DHS, was conducting a raid on one of the schools. In late April, plainclothes ICE agents, one masking his identity in a balaclava, raided the Albemarle County Courthouse in downtown Charlottesville and detained two men, putting them in unmarked vehicles and transporting them to a detention facility in Farmville. The ICE agents refused to show bystanders at the courthouse their badges or arrest warrants; multiple people told The Daily Progress they thought they were witnessing an abduction.
At least one of the men is in the country illegally, ICE later told The Daily Progress in a prepared statement that did not disclose whether the second man was also in the States illegally. The Daily Progress has not been able to get in contact with the men or their families since their detention.
“As you can imagine, on our Albemarle High School’s campus and on the whole Lambs Lane campus, people seeing Department of Homeland Security marked vans and law enforcement in uniforms plus canines, they got nervous and thought, ‘Is ICE here?’” Helen Dunn, a county schools spokeswoman, told The Daily Progress.
Dunn said the school division has been flooded with questions, complaints and concerns since the incident Tuesday morning.
“It’s been a huge fallout,” she said.
It was only later that the truth came out.
The Albemarle County K-9 Unit had planned to conduct an explosive detection training exercise and had invited DHS to join. The federal agency and the county police department “regularly trains together,” according to a statement from Albemarle County Police Chief Sean Reeves issued after the incident garnered significant attention.
The training was not intended to take place at the Lambs Lane campus, and instead was meant to take place on an unrelated field. But due to a last-minute scheduling error, law enforcement officers failed to reserve that field for use, according to Dunn.
“So at the last minute, they transitioned over from wherever they were going to be, or thought they’re going to be, to the practice field at Albemarle High School in Lambs Lane,” said Dunn. “And they failed to tell school division personnel; they forgot.”
In a statement sent divisionwide Wednesday, Albemarle County Schools Superintendent Matthew Haas and School Board Chair Kate Acuff said the school division and the police department maintain a longstanding partnership, but police are still required to provide advance notice when they wish to use school facilities, especially during school hours.
Police officers and federal agents ran through their training exercises with their dogs for roughly an hour Tuesday. They never entered any school buildings, according to the police department.
Still, the unexpected police activity near the schools created much “confusion and concern within our school community,” said Haas and Acuff.
Reeves said he fully understood.
“Please know that I take any disruption to our campus seriously, and I have personally followed up with ACPD’s K9 Unit leadership to ensure something like this does not happen again,” wrote Reeves in a statement sent to the county Board of Supervisors.
While the police chief stressed that “all students and staff remained safe,” the recent raid on the Albemarle County Courthouse has put many in the community, especially immigrants, on edge.
Albemarle County police were not involved in that raid. And although she pointed out that “our police in this community do really well by us,” Dunn said she is concerned Tuesday’s incident may have affected that relationship moving forward.
“I do worry that this may have a little bit of an impact on their credibility,” she said. “I hope it doesn’t, but who knows how it goes moving forward?”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com