Madison School Board members are taking a harder look at the role of police officers inside city high schools and whether they should be there at all.
Board member TJ Mertz told News 3 amid a national conversation on communities and their police officers, schools shouldn’t be left out of the mix.
“We hear stories,” he said of officers in Madison’s public schools. “We hear good things, and we hear causes for concerns. And we hear stories where they’ve done wonderful things for our students and for our schools.”
Madison West, East, Memorial and La Follette high schools each have one officer assigned to their building. All of the officers are on three-year contracts, which is the norm since the district struck up a partnership with the Madison Police Department back in 1998.
But issuing citations and making arrests within school premises aren’t their only duties.
Safety and Security Coordinator Luis Yudice said the officers’ role extends to mediator and even mentor.
“Just simply being in the hallways, saying hello, greeting students, offering encouragement,” Yudice said. “You’d be misled into thinking they’re only there to arrest students, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Mertz still has questions about the role of officers inside schools, pointing to research that he says shows their very presence could be criminalizing kids’ behavior when it shouldn’t be.
“Despite the best intentions, the very presence of educational resource officers actually increases the chance that students will go into the criminal system,” Mertz said.
He’s asking for more public input on whether officers should stay in their current roles. Mertz has also proposed a one-year contract with the department instead of the traditional three, offering up more time for a city-approved review of police procedures to wrap up.
“The schools-to-prison pipeline is something none of us want to be contributing to,” he said.
Mertz said he would also like to see more public reporting on police-student contacts. The high schools already release a yearly review with detailed accounts of arrests, citations and other contacts, but Mertz said those reviews aren’t widely shared among the public.
Yudice said the school district welcomes questions about its security contract, but says the answers haven’t changed since the beginning.
“Bottom line is our schools are safe, and they are safe because we have a good relationship with our police department,” he said.
The school board is supposed to vote on another contract with Madison police Aug. 8. The City Council must also sign off on the measure.
