The Board of Trustees at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, or MassArt, voted Tuesday night for the school’s campus police officers to stay unarmed.

During a contentious and packed public meeting, the trustees voted 8-2 to continue its policy of campus police officers remaining unarmed, ending a yearslong saga that had frustrated many students, faculty and officers.

“It is not only unnecessary, but unwise to change our current policy,” MassArt president David Nelson said before the board vote. “To be clear, our currently policy is that officers remain unarmed … and that remains my position today.”

James Durkin, a legislative director at the trade union American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, told the board that “continuing down this path of delay, by striving for some dreamlike, utopian campus insulated from the real world, you are placing the lives of these officers, the staff, and most importantly the students in jeopardy.”

“My biggest fear is that when our officers are patrolling the surrounding area, a community that we are already infiltrated and a gentrifying force, we will hurt their children and elders,” one student said at Tuesday’s meeting.

MassArt police Sgt. Matt Hurley told the trustees that officer turnover is “a well-known and expensive problem that this department faces” as a result of the school’s unarmed policy.

“The MassArt community has been done a disservice as it has presented a false sense of security,” Hurley said. “Parents have an expectation that when they send their child off to school at MassArt, that since there is a police department there, they have nothing to worry about. This is just wrong.”

Hurley said that every campus police officer is fitted with a custom Kevlar vest, something MassArt “acknowledges that our officers face danger and may end up being shot at while in the performance of our duties. However, here we stand today to try and rationalize why we would need to be equipped with a firearm.”

MassArt is located within a cluster of other schools and universities: Northeastern University, Boston Latin School, Simmons University, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science, and Wentworth Institute of Technology are within walking distance.

Last November, more than 550 students and community members signed a petition demanding campus police officers remain unarmed. The Board’s decision Tuesday night will mean that MassArt remains the only 4-year state college that remains unarmed.

Officer William Goldman, who started three months ago, told the Board that “it’s our students’ and staff’s lives you are gambling with” and that “we have nothing to gain but everything to lose.”

Officers told the Board that campus police officers have undergone the same training as other municipal police departments and that they know the layout of MassArt buildings, staff and students better than Boston police officers who respond to emergency situations at the school.

Brianna Florio, a 2017 graduate, told the board that campus police officers are “walking targets in uniform. … Think for a minute about what would happen if we had an active shooter. Our cops would be our front-line and it would be a bloodbath. Everyone would die.”

“I don’t feel safe around guns,” one faculty member said at the meeting. “I felt I needed to speak because I’m a very sensitive person and there are many other sensitive people on campus and I wanted to speak for me and for them.”

“We’re extremely disappointed. Clearly, the board is ignoring longstanding, accepted safety practices, putting the lives of staff and students in danger,” Durkin told the Herald after the vote. “Even their own consultants are recommending their officers are armed. They’re going against their experts.”

“I support the board in their decision and I appreciate the deliberative way in which they arrived at this decision, while looking through the lens of the mission and values of MassArt,” Nelson said in a statement to the Herald. “With the board, I express my support of MassArt’s public safety staff, and I am grateful to them and to our entire community for sharing in the process of making this decision. We are a community that cares for one another, and while members of our community will still have different views about this decision, we all affirm the mission of MassArt and we share the common goal of making our campus a safe and inclusive environment.”