Madison schools will train school cops
to be more racially sensitive!

Justin Creech, West; Rod Johnson, La Follette; Zulma Franco, East; Tray Turner, Memorial H.S.

Fasten your helmets. Gird your loins. Steel your resolve. Tell our story to the world if we don’t get back. We’re going to the Madison school board meeting tonight! 

The school board is voting on cops in schools! 

Meeting starts at 5:45 p.m. today (Monday, 12-17-18) with speaker sign-up at MMSD hdq 545 W. Dayton Street. Gavel comes down at 6 p.m. You can watch live here.

That won’t stop the Freedom Inc. disrupters. They will show up in force and with their bullying bile at full boil. Here is betting they do their damnedest to test the school district’s revised security system. (Odd that a school district pledged to stop bullying in the classroom allowed their bullying tactics for so long at school board meetings.)

Dane County’s district attorney, Ismael Ozanne, has signaled that intimidating citizens and shutting down a government meeting is legal when done by the right people. (“Why won’t you prosecute the mob?”)

Ananda Mirilli’s Facebook page praises the disrupters who shut down the October 29 meeting of the Madison Board of Education. Oddly, Mirilli and Ali Muldrow are running as a team for school board. “Civic engagement of youth,” indeed!

Odd, cops in schools (AKA educational resource officers or EROs) is listed on the “consent agenda.” That means the members are not going to discuss. Just vote. It is a done deal. Good! As it should be after two years of contentious dithering. Which is not to say that a cabal on the school board led by Dean Loumos and Annamarie Moffit (defeated for re-election in April 2018) didn’t offer motion after motion to eliminate EROs. Which is why Loumos isn’t running for re-election. (Does anyone believe the sudden “medical issue”?)

After a quick review, the proposed contract does not seem to include that the ridiculous oversight committee the Loumos committee proposed. That would be the committee stocked with “youth who are the most cited, suspended or expelled or otherwise are / have been involved with the juvenile justice system.” In other words, the troublemakers in judgment of the peacekeepers! [ADDENDUM: Nothing to stop the school board from setting the committee up at a later date, although it would not bind the police department.]

[CORRECTED: The proposed contract includes ignores the Loumos committee’s separate, school-only grievance procedure and his proviso limiting locker searches to probable cause.]

We did not see a section on the ACLU training kids on their legal rights but that would not be part of the police contract in any event, so don’t rule it out.

The contract does include:

• A ton of training in the areas of autism, trauma informed interventions, trauma responses, adolescent brain development, nonviolent crisis intervention, implicit bias, racial bias, and empathy training. 

• “In instances other than emergencies, every level of behavioral response be exhausted prior to calling an ERO into a classroom.”

• “For suspected crimes or ordinance violations that have occurred off campus, SROs will make every effort to interview or arrest students outside of school hours and outside of the school grounds. If necessary, due to an imminent threat to the school community or other extenuating circumstances, SROs may interview or arrest students on campus and will inform the Principal as soon as practicable of the arrest or interview.”

Silence is not golden

Don’t let tonight’s expect action take the issue off the April 2 school board election campaign. Except for Blaska, none of the challengers have spoken word one on the issue. Talking Ali Muldrow (my opponent), Ananda Mirilli (T.J. Mertz’ opponent), Cristiana Carusi, and yes, you, Kaleem Caire (both running for the Loumos seat).

For extra credit: What a great editorial in Sunday’s WI State Journal! East high school’s ERO “most definitely belongs in Madison’s schools.” They could have written equally compelling stories about the other three, as well.

For extra demerit: What a contrast to the fawning story in the weekly Isthmus where editor Judith Davidoff couldn’t be bothered to commit some journalism by asking Mirilli and Muldrow how stand on the EROs.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Should be an interesting campaign. Muldrow and Mirilli say “don’t blame the parents. Don’t blame the students.” Who DO they blame? The teachers? Maybe we’ll find out what is a “racial justice advocate” and whether the other candidates think Madison public school teachers are racists.