This article was corrected and revised on Dec. 5, 2022: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a comment regarding the Madison school board’s vote to end the district’s contract with the Madison Police Department for school resource officers to district spokesperson Timothy LeMonds. Vic Wahl, then the acting chief of the Madison Police Department, said the action was “disappointing.” The article has also been revised to remove a paraphrase of Wahl’s comments.
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Brawls in school hallways and parking lots.
Blood splattered on lockers.
Assaults and threats against teachers.
Parents fighting students; parents fighting each other.
Pepper spray, police, arrests.
Several of those brawls at Madison, Wisconsin’s East High School were broken up by dozens of police officers. Some fights went viral on social media videos, some left students hospitalized.
“It’s a total mess,” said Kerry Zalenski, whose daughter was attending East, remembering the goings-on as the 2021-22 school year wound down.
The fights and other misbehavior recounted in Youth Today interviews with school staff, parents and students and in published news accounts, came during the first full school year, following the COVID-19 pandemic, after Madison Metropolitan School District removed the armed Madison Police Department officers who previously had been assigned to each of the district’s four high schools.
Madison is one of about 49 public school districts nationwide that, according to Education Week, have trimmed or eliminated school policing programs since 2020. While some districts that removed police officers have reported largely positive results, in Madison, some students, parents and educators are considering what they believe they’ve lost.
Madison school district officials did not respond to Youth Today’s recent emails and phone calls about whether it has data reflecting those results.
Reimagining safety and security
“We must come together to find ways to reimagine what safety and security looks like in our schools.”
That’s what Madison Metropolitan School District Board President Gloria Reyes said, following the June 2020 unanimous vote — in the shadow of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer — to end the district’s contract with the Madison Police Department. Those school resource officers, commonly called SROs, were replaced with restorative justice coordinators who were hired to help de-escalate conflicts and build relationships with and provide emotional support for students.
“Officers with badges, guns and handcuffs created an environment that was triggering to students with trauma and to those who had negative experiences with law enforcement,” said Zalenski, who, with her husband, was among parents and members of such groups as Freedom, Inc., supported getting rid of SROs.
Others opposed that move. In a statement issued after the vote, acting Madison Police Chief Vic Wahl said that school resource officers played an “instrumental role in maintaining a safe learning environment” at the school district’s four high schools.
“They’ve developed relationships with faculty, students and staff,” Wahl said. “It’s disappointing that the program appears to be ending without recognition of the real work that the SROs have done or understanding of the consequences that will follow their removal from the schools.”
Fighting to regain losses from COVID-19
At Madison’s La Follette High School, havoc ensued after students, many of them adrift and pent up with assorted stresses, returned to in-person classes, said John Milton, who coordinates such services to minority students as chaperoning trips to historically black colleges and universities.
“We averaged two to three fights per day,” Milton said. “Not just physical fights, loud talking, swearing — we had kids from other schools coming up here to fight. We had parents up here trying to fight students and other parents. Then, the news [crews] came and videotaped the high school with police cars out front.”
One morning near the end of the 2021-22 school year, La Follette’s Black Student Union Co-president Jasmine Winston, 18, sat in Milton’s office, listening and pondering the fallout from Madison’s SROs’ absence as the nation was emerging from lockdown.
“Two grades went in that were never in high school and students had trouble navigating social areas. They never got the chance to develop that maturity,” Winston said. “When we came back, we didn’t have assemblies and pep rallies like we did before. A lot of that stuff was lost because of COVID, and we had a lot of fights.”
A national debate over police in schools
Outside of Madison, other districts that have eliminated armed police officers from schools include Alexandria, Virginia; Boulder, Colorado; Dallas; Denver; Houston; Los Angeles; Minneapolis; Oakland, California; Portland, Oregon; Phoenix; Prince George’s County, Maryland; Seattle; and Worcester, Massachusetts.
School resource officers, a job role created in the 1950s, started becoming more plentiful during the 1990s, said attorney Barbara Franks, a former assistant district attorney in Dane County, where Madison is the county seat. That was partly in response to the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado but also to what was seen as the particular misbehavior of Black students. (Eighteen percent of Madison students are Black. )
“There was a lot of talk about super-predators, so there were some draconian changes in schools,” said Franks, who previously prosecuted juvenile cases and now is a pro bono special prosecutor, including cases involving juvenile and young adult alleged offenders. “They were expecting the super-predators. That contributed to the policy of having an officer on hand in the schools to try to get on top of issues as they were developing.”
Studies suggest school police show mixed results
An analysis of 28 previous studies and surveys, published in 2019 in the American Journal of Community Psychology, said SROs have achieved mixed results.
At schools with school resource officers, Black students are expelled from school at higher rates than at schools without officers, according to a 2017 analysis in the American Journal of Criminal Justice.
Though no precise measures of how the district has fared without SROs were available for this report, some Madison parents, educators and students have said they’ve seen the positive impact school resource officers can have.
One Madison parent, who asked to remain anonymous, said the school resource officers had a positive effect on their child’s school.
“They were mentors to students, doing the work of building relationships and de-escalating conflict and kind of proving that you don’t need a badge or a gun to interact with young people who may be having a tough time,” the parent said.
The school resource officers were a key conduit of information, said Milton, La Follette High’s minority services coordinator. They knew for example, what happened off campus and over the weekend or during school breaks.
“If a kid got into a fight with someone at the park and it came up on the police radar,” he said, “that Monday morning the principal and the SRO would approach that kid. We would pull them in private and say, ‘We heard you had a rough weekend, how can we support you?’”
Losing that information is a problem, he added.
Former prosecutor Franks said the loss of those four SROs, all of them Black men, was big. “The culturally sensitive and committed SROs brought a unique approach to school safety. They were better able to handle evolving conflict by getting to know the kids, their families, their struggles and challenges,” said Franks, adding that she’d witnessed the roles that SROs can play.
“A lot of our kids were being suspended and expelled for what was considered disrespect to the teachers. They were pushed out because they wouldn’t listen to the administrators, especially when they were getting angry,” she said. “If you have an SRO that the kids respect, they can pull them aside and try to de-escalate the situation so the kid is not suspended, expelled or removed from the community.”
La Follette High alum Winston, now a student at Florida A&M University, said her favorite among the police officers previously assigned to her school, Roderick Johnson, took the time to get to know students, including those who were the most troubled and from some of the poorest and embattled homes.
“When I got to school, he welcomed me. He told me if I needed anything I could come to talk to him. It was sad to see him go,” she said
But some officers, she said, “didn’t talk to the students. They stood in the common areas, posted up, with their hands on their vests. They didn’t extend themselves to us.”
A former SRO’s assessment
For half of his 10 years with the Madison Police Department, former Officer Corey Saffold was a school resource officer at West High School. During that time, he started its Black Student Union. He took students on tours of historically Black colleges and universities, with money raised through basketball games.
And he helped write the rules on what school resource officers should do.
“Those are the life-changing stories you never hear about,” said Saffold, 43, now director of crisis management, safety and security for the Verona Area School District near Madison.
As a school resource officer, Saffold said he created his own version of restorative discipline. “When a student stole something, I made them work. When the Tony Robinson shooting happened, many of our students came to me and I had honest conversations with them.”
It’s unfortunate, he said, that Madison bought into the trend toward replacing school resource officers with restorative justice coaches. Saffold favors merging school resource officers and the restorative justice professionals, or so-called “climate coaches,” that Madison schools have hired.
“We went from one extreme to the next, missing a valuable piece of this and wondering why we’re not getting anywhere,” he said. “SROs have more leverage than coaches. They really need to buy into both patterns … You need teeth and muscle.”
Especially amid what pediatricians and child psychiatrists have called an ongoing crisis in youth mental health, Saffold predicts that Madison schools will see more calls to police, more citations and more arrests. Taking SROs out of schools stripped away the buffer that Saffold and some other SROs said they tried to provide by building one-on-one relationships with students.
“Now the officers that respond don’t care,” he said. “Whoever gets arrested gets arrested. That’s the tone police are taking.”
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Journalist and author Stacey Patton has written for, among others, The Baltimore Sun, Al Jazeera, BBC America, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News and The Root.
