David Michael Miller
Madison sometimes suffers from what I think of as Teacher! Teacher! Syndrome.
You remember those kids from grade school who were sticklers for rules. Teacher! Teacher! Tommy is eating boogers again! That sort of thing. A lot of those kids ended up in Madison. Now some of them run things or have achieved local busybody status.
A case in point is the complaint filed by three former local officials over the vote of Madison school board president Gloria Reyes to renew a three-year contract to keep one Madison cop, called school resource officers, in each of the district’s four regular high schools. The recent vote in favor of the contract passed on a 4-3 vote with Reyes casting the deciding vote. She had abstained on earlier votes when she worked for Mayor Paul Soglin and, as part of her duties, oversaw the police department. Reyes is also a former officer herself.
But now Reyes has a new job in city government working in the Community Development Division. Former Alds. Brenda Konkel, Andy Heidt and Andy Olsen wrote a letter last week to district officials claiming that even in her new job Reyes has a conflict and so the vote should be retaken without her. If all the other votes stay the same it would mean that the motion would fail on a 3-3 tie, the contract would not be approved and there would be no police in Madison schools come September.
And let’s be honest. It seems clear to me that killing the contract and ending the SRO program is what these three former alders want. The ethics complaint is just a ruse to reverse a policy decision they didn’t like.
On the other side of the issue is the Madison teachers union, the school nurses, Chief Mike Koval and, I think it’s safe to say, most parents of high school kids. Without the SROs, cops will still be called to schools but they won’t know the students and staff and the result could be more incidents and more arrests amid more dangerous circumstances.
On its merits the ethics charge is pretty thin. The contract is with the Madison Police Department over which Reyes now has no influence. She still works for the city, but her new job and the MPD are not related in the sprawling city bureaucracy with its 3,000 employees and some two dozen agencies.
Moreover, when someone is elected it seems to me that ethics rulings should bend in favor of allowing them to serve their constituents and they should be denied their vote only in the most direct conflicts. For example, when Konkel was an alder she couldn’t vote on the contract for the Tenant Resource Center, which she ran. That was proper since there was such a direct line between the contract and Konkel’s own job. But the relationship between Reyes’ job and the cop shop is so thin as to be invisible.
Actually, if we want to be sticklers, the more intriguing question surrounds the circumstances of the last vote. After many contentious meetings where an activist group disrupted proceedings over the contract, and after it was an issue in the most recent school board elections, the board voted without any discussion to approve the amended contract by one vote. Even the three board members who oppose the contract said nothing. That’s curious and it suggests that there had been behind-the-scenes discussions by board members. Given the state’s highly restrictive open meetings law — which I think goes too far — there may well have been a violation of those laws.
If so, put me down as not wanting to know. Local officials need to be able to talk to one another candidly and to float ideas that they would never utter in public. That’s often how good policy gets made.
And a good compromise is what we have here. Under the new contract, which still must be approved by the city council and by the mayor, the school board could remove an officer from one school after the next school year, but only after giving reasons to justify that decision. In addition, the district and department are to conduct quarterly meetings to go over the arrests and citations issued by SROs. The council vote is scheduled for July 2. The contract was recommended for approval by the city’s Finance Committee on June 24.
Let’s not let a good result that protects school kids’ safety get derailed by a Teacher! Teacher! moment.
