Mary Langenfeld
Officer Zulma Franco feels motherly towards the students at East High: “I want them to flourish and grow up and do all these wonderful things.”
When Madison police officer Zulma Franco walks through the doors of East High, she is reminded of her own childhood. Not because Franco went to East High — she dropped out of school in Los Angeles at 13 after becoming pregnant. Still, many of the children Franco sees every day remind her of her younger self, troubled and at risk.
“Growing up in LA, being Latina, being poor, my experiences were different with law enforcement,” Franco says. “Most of my friends went to jail or [died]. That’s just kind of the road you took.”
Fortunately, Franco eventually found a different path. Today, she’s one of four educational resource officers — or EROs — who work in the city’s high schools. And she has transferred her motherly instincts onto the hundreds of kids she sees every day.
“I want to protect them, and I want to provide for them. I want them to flourish and grow up and do all these wonderful things,” says Franco, who admits playing mom with the students. “Because of my own life and my own struggle, I just think, ‘If only I could give you this knowledge now.’”
The school officers work with at-risk youth and gather information to prevent fights and gang activity. Like any police officer, the EROs have the power to arrest students; however, they also refer students to restorative programs aimed at avoiding citations. Since 1998 the Madison Police Department has assigned one officer to each of the city’s four largest high schools with the goal of providing security while creating a buffer between students and the criminal justice system.
But lately, the officers’ presence in the schools has been questioned, as community concerns about police use of force, particularly against people of color, have grown.
“We’ve had good collaborative relationships with these individuals in our schools,” says school board member TJ Mertz. “[But] they don’t have any obligation to follow our rules. We pay their salaries, pay [for] their cars, they are interacting with our students all the time. Yet they are only answerable to their own command structure. That raises some issues.”
The concerns led the Madison school board to request a shorter, year-long contract with MPD while it reassesses the program and waits for the results of a city study of the police department. Although the contract was delayed, on Oct. 4 another three-year contract was approved, albeit one that gives the district the ability to opt out after two years.
The controversy surprised one of the officers, Shane Olson, who just started the Memorial High beat a few weeks ago.
“I was worried I’d be done before I got started,” Olson says.
Officer Corey Saffold in many ways fits the mold of big brother, playing basketball with students and helping to coordinate college trips. Long before working as an officer in the school, he worked on West High’s security team and advised the Black Student Union. But wearing a badge seemed unlikely when he was a student.
“I was one of those teenagers that wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t too good either,” he says. “I could have easily fallen through the cracks.”
But Saffold’s experience in high school with a police officer inspired him to try to change the system from within. A police officer, responding to a fight, handed out tickets to everyone, including bystanders, “without giving it a thought, without thinking about investigating,” says Saffold. “And I just wanted to provide a system where that did not happen.”
Franco, a Colombia native, has also seen police at their worst. She grew up in LA during the city’s Rampart police scandal, when numerous officers in the city’s anti-gang unit were found to be corrupt. But the Madison Police Department showed her a different side of the profession, with a department engaged in the community through programs like Amigos en Azul.
“I wanted to help people, specifically the Latino community,” Franco says. “For me, being part of this organization feels patriotic. You’re carrying around the American flag. Although I’m very much proud of where I came from, it also symbolizes belonging here.”
Kenneth Mosley, the officer at La Follette, was inspired to help the vulnerable when he was 13 and his grandmother was robbed twice. “I remember how that made me feel,” says Mosley. “I wanted to take an active role in combating that type of crime.”
Mosley has worked with children in other roles. Before joining the Madison police, he taught third grade in the Milwaukee Public Schools and also worked for that city’s Mobile Urgent Treatment Team, intervening when kids had mental health emergencies.
While studying to be a nurse in East Los Angeles, Franco worked in HIV and AIDS prevention. “I was at Hollywood Boulevard giving out needle kits and condoms to runaway youth, and helping in shelters for people that were not part of the system,” Franco says. “I come from that place.”
Although a rookie school officer, Olson is an MPD veteran who 17 years ago gave up a job at a bank to fight crime. Before starting at Memorial a few weeks ago, Olson served for six years on MPD’s gang unit. There he spent the days making contact with at-risk youth through gang prevention efforts. Although he liked the mission, he regretted not getting to spend more time with students.
“The difficult part was how do you get kids to see things your way when you’re only talking with them a few minutes at a time,” Olson says. “Being in the school, I have more access to kids as they grow and can help.”
Working in the schools, Olson hopes to make more of a difference. “Getting someone off the streets who has been involved in truly violent actions in the community is extremely rewarding,” says Olson. But if he can prevent people from becoming violent criminals “that’s even better. It’s just not something you get associated with directly as a cop.”
All four officers say that critics of police in schools overlook their skill set and motivation.
“I hear school board members all the time saying we need more training; we don’t know how to work with kids, especially kids with mental health diagnoses. All I’ve worked for is kids,” says Mosley, who has a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. “Critics of the ERO program never come into the building. They go off hearsay and statistics.”
The officers admit the job is a demanding one that not everyone is cut out for.
“Some officers won’t put in for this because they don’t want to deal with a student talking back to them,” Saffold says. “Inside a school it’s a more of a delicate situation. You may see an ERO get cursed out or even threatened… and sometimes it’s just giving them the space to do that. You’re not the one who has to save face.”
Having that kind of patience, to deal with this generation’s set of challenges — sexting, girl fights, gangs, online bullying — requires empathy.
“One act doesn’t define who you are. We all make mistakes,” Olson says. “I got to know them when they weren’t doing something wrong. So I know they can do better.”
“Kids are human beings like everybody else. You treat them with dignity, you treat them with respect, and they are going to recognize the error in their ways,” agrees Saffold. “Everyone wants to be treated with respect, regardless of what mistakes they’ve made.”
