During their Tuesday evening meeting, the Urbana School District 116 Board of Education reaffirmed its decision to hire two full-time school resource officers (SRO), including one each for Urbana Middle and High Schools.

At their Tuesday night meeting, members of the Urbana School District 116 Board of Education approved an intergovernmental agreement with the city that would quadruple police presence in the district’s middle and high school buildings. 

Schools in Illinois and across the country are turning to restorative justice practices as an alternative to traditional discipline models. Mikhail Lyubansky, an associate professor of pyschology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studies restorative justice, and he's written about some of the criticisms of the way it's used in schools. 

Urbana school officials promised a capacity crowd attending Tuesday night’s school board meeting that they would do better. Their statements were in response to a series of fights Monday at Urbana High School that resulted in initial arrests of seven students and a parent, sent a teacher to the hospital, and led to the early dismissal of class.

Fights involving students at Urbana High School led to several arrests and the early dismissal of class Monday.