Buzz, buzz. One other Speaking Factors notification to Garfield dad and mom. Every time a message comes from the Seattle Public College District’s messaging app, our hearts skip a beat, hoping all Garfield Excessive College college students and employees are protected. Twice within the spring of 2024, they weren’t.
That faculty 12 months, it felt like most Speaking Factors alerts have been lockdowns due to shootings on or close to campus. Then in March, a pupil was shot and injured, and in June, pupil Amarr Murphy-Paine was shot and killed. Amarr ought to have graduated with the remainder of his 2025 class. As an alternative, commencement occurred with an empty chair surrounded by traumatized teenagers already worldly smart.
Mother and father, college students and employees sought options; bringing a college useful resource officer again to campus was one thought. We spoke with a number of SPS board administrators in regards to the “moratorium,” their 2020 choice to take away police from SPS campuses. Many people have been skeptical about bringing an SRO program again to Garfield. We have been additionally petrified of another person being killed. Traditionally, college students of coloration, with disabilities and the LGTBQ+ are susceptible to being criminalized, injured and even killed by SROs. However may an officer stop future shootings? As conversations continued, everybody agreed: We can not shield our college students from outdoors violence by bringing completely different violence into the constructing.
After working with district, metropolis and Seattle Police Division leaders, college administration, college students, dad and mom and group activists, we got here up with a brand new, hopefully higher, program: college engagement officer.
The website positioning Program would deliver the most effective of SRO packages, whereas omitting the dangerous. This officer would put on a polo shirt, solely carry a sidearm and a radio — much less intimidating and scary. The officer would patrol across the campus, not often coming contained in the constructing, and there could be one nonnegotiable: The website positioning wouldn’t self-discipline or intimidate college students. They might hold hazard out whereas striving to type constructive relationships with college students. The website positioning could be accountable to our group: Garfield college students, households, employees.
After over a 12 months of labor, group engagement, conferences and board discussions, we practically introduced a one-year pilot website positioning program to Garfield. Then, all essential guardrails and agreements we had reached have been eradicated from the Board Motion Report within the September and October board agendas. Tucked into these stories was a revised Memorandum of Understanding, which seemed prefer it was written 10 years in the past: earlier than the moratorium, George Floyd’s homicide and all the group enter.
The revised memorandum introduced to the board was clouded by legalese, and the important ideas we agreed on have been gone. It licensed the officer to be inside school rooms policing college students, and eliminated language on group management, amongst many modifications.
Nobody within the Garfield group requested for police to patrol our hallways, criminalize pupil misbehavior or minor infractions. We try to maintain harmful individuals from murdering our youngsters. Why did SPD and the district permit this model of the MOU to progress to the board? Each particular person concerned within the course of ought to have recognized the group could be outraged and the board couldn’t conform to these phrases.
The board vote was not a shock, as a result of board members have been backed right into a nook by a district both grossly incompetent or deliberately sabotaging one thing that they had dedicated months of time and assets to design. For no matter cause, the presentation to the board straight contradicted each earlier settlement, and the board had no selection however to vote towards it.
Garfield college students should really feel protected in school as our metropolis continues to battle with gun violence. As soon as the brand new superintendent is employed and the brand new board is sworn in, we anticipate the district to rethink this program and resume the place we left off in August. The website positioning program nonetheless has nice potential, however it have to be performed proper.
