Photo by Tommy Washbush
It wasn’t surprising, but it was telling.
Last week, in response to yet another school shooting, this one in Georgia, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes renewed calls to return police officers to Madison high schools.
The instant and expected negative response came from School Board member and former president Ali Muldrow who accused Barnes of “politicizing” the awful event near Atlanta. While Muldrow’s response was to be expected, what was telling was that it came from her.
It begs the question: where is new Superintendent Joe Gothard on this question?
Gothard started his job just this summer, so it makes sense that he would take some time to get settled in before asserting himself too much. But Gothard is not just any other hire. He is steeped in Madison culture and MMSD policy. He’s a Madison native, a product of these very same schools and a former teacher and administrator here. He’s spent the last several years running the St. Paul schools, so a few months to get reacquainted makes sense. But he should be ready to flex his muscles by now.
And the school resource officer (SRO) issue would be a good place to start. I thought it was ironic that Muldrow would accuse Barnes of politicizing this issue since the SROs were eliminated a few years ago for purely political reasons. In a couple decades there had never been an incident involving an inappropriate action on the part of an SRO. But in the wake of George Floyd, activists who had long wanted to remove the SROs for abstract ideological reasons saw their opening and the board was eager to comply. The SROs were banished over the objections of the Madison Police Department, before Barnes took over as chief.
The stated reason to eliminate the cops in schools was an alleged “school to prison pipeline.” But, if anything, I wonder if arrests have increased since the SROs were taken away. (I’ve actually asked the MPD this very question, but as of press time I hadn’t heard back.) That’s because a cop embedded in a school could get to know students and staff. They could defuse a situation before it got out of hand or their very presence might have discouraged some activities. It’s impossible to quantify events that didn’t happen.
But we do know that in the 2022-2023 school year, after the SROs were pulled, there were over 800 police calls to Madison schools, including 47 for threats, 20 for fights and 17 for weapons violations. How many of those kids ended up getting arrested? How many arrests could have been avoided if an SRO were in place?
Moreover, most of those SROs were women or people of color. They provided positive role models. How many kids ended up becoming cops because of that and thereby increasing the diversity of this or other departments?
And, of course, to Barnes’ point, if an active shooter did get inside a school, a trained police officer is going to have a better chance of preventing a tragedy than cops responding from the outside.
It was simply irresponsible for the school board to abandon the SRO program because of political pressure and to achieve a policy outcome (fewer student arrests) that they might have only made worse. And it was doubly irresponsible to reject Barnes' request to reinstate them out of hand without so much as considering the idea or looking into the results of their earlier action.
But I’ve come to expect this kind of thing out of this heavily ideological, hard-left school board. I had some hope (though it was tempered) for Gothard. I hoped that he would be a voice of common sense and that he had the gravitas to assert control and to reestablish the proper balance between a superintendent and a board. The superintendent should run the show while the board should be a high-level policy making body, staying out of the day-to-day business of running the schools. The SRO issue probably falls somewhere in between, but Gothard should be in a position to exert strong influence over the board in any event.
There’s still time. While he’s been on the job for a few months, this school year has just begun. But we need to get to a point fairly soon where the press goes to Gothard for comment on big policy issues like this, not part-time school board members. That would be a clear sign that the right balance is coming back into play.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
