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 secure. Twice within the spring of 2024, they weren’t.
That college yr, 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 determination 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 colour, with disabilities and the LGTBQ+ are susceptible to being criminalized, injured and even killed by SROs. However might an officer forestall future shootings? As conversations continued, everybody agreed: We can not defend our college students from outdoors violence by bringing totally different violence into the constructing.
After working with district, metropolis and Seattle Police Division leaders, college administration, college students, dad and mom and neighborhood activists, we got here up with a brand new, hopefully higher, program: college engagement officer.
The search engine marketing Program would deliver one of the best 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, hardly ever coming contained in the constructing, and there could be one nonnegotiable: The search engine marketing wouldn’t self-discipline or intimidate college students. They’d hold hazard out whereas striving to kind optimistic relationships with college students. The search engine marketing could be accountable to our neighborhood: Garfield college students, households, employees.
After over a yr of labor, neighborhood engagement, conferences and board discussions, we almost introduced a one-year pilot search engine marketing program to Garfield. Then, all crucial guardrails and agreements we had reached have been eradicated from the Board Motion Report within the September and October board agendas. Tucked into these reviews was a revised Memorandum of Understanding, which appeared prefer it was written 10 years in the past: earlier than the moratorium, George Floyd’s homicide and the entire neighborhood enter.
The revised memorandum offered to the board was clouded by legalese, and the important ideas we agreed on have been gone. It approved the officer to be inside lecture rooms policing college students, and eliminated language on neighborhood management, amongst many adjustments.
Nobody within the Garfield neighborhood requested for police to patrol our hallways, criminalize pupil misbehavior or minor infractions. We are attempting to maintain harmful folks from murdering our kids. Why did SPD and the district permit this model of the MOU to progress to the board? Each individual concerned within the course of ought to have identified the neighborhood 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 sources to design. For no matter purpose, the presentation to the board immediately contradicted each earlier settlement, and the board had no selection however to vote in opposition to it.
Garfield college students should really feel secure 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 search engine marketing program nonetheless has nice potential, nevertheless it have to be achieved proper.
