Wis. Police, District Rebuild Trust as Officers Return to High School

Police officers will return to Verona High School next fall after years of the school district managing student misconduct largely on its own with limited police presence.

In early March, the school board approved the new contract with a unanimous vote. The contract between the school district and the Verona Police Department will last for one year, through June 2026, the first consistent police presence at Verona High School since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

The district is responsible for 80% of the officer’s wages when school is in session, and by the entity that requests the additional hours.

As part of the school officer’s contract, whoever fills that role will not be in charge of disciplinary actions in place of school administrators but will refer issues to them. The officer is also allowed to help develop “diversion” programs to reduce the number of municipal tickets, such as disorderly conduct, that are given out during the school day.

Other aspects of the contract involve mandatory trainings and giving officers discretion over what they wear, which were sticking points four years ago as city and district leaders sparred over provisions in the contract.

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The previous contract was not renewed in 2021, after a school year during which the new high school was largely empty because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in the years since, there’s been a growing appetite among school leaders and police to reinstate a school resource officer, Verona Police Chief Dave Dresser said. The district and the police department started to seriously talk about returning an officer to school grounds last summer.

Officers were already going to the high school multiple times a week. During the first two months of the school year, Verona police officers were there about 50 times, mostly to write truancy tickets and conduct security trainings with staff.

Not having an officer in the school hindered the police department’s ability to for officers to personally engage with residents — in this case, hundreds of high school students — as a means to prevent crime, Dresser said.

“We’ve had hundreds of kids that were going through the school that we didn’t have an opportunity to interact with and build positive relationships with,” he said. “From a community policing perspective, we were missing something there.”

‘A huge difference’

During the March 3 meeting, board member Meredith Stier Christensen, who was also on the board as negotiations broke down, said that this time she could support an officer in the schools because the relationship between the police and the district had changed.

“To the credit of everybody sitting here, I see a huge difference in how the communication has gone between school and the police,” Stier Christensen said. “There’s just been such a different shift in the relationship, and also the shift in putting students first.”

The decision to bring back a school resource officer comes almost two years ago after in incident in which the lead member of the district’s security team faced legal repercussions. Then-security team lead Corey Saffold, a former police officer, was charged with felony child abuse after an altercation with a 17-year-old student who had been walking the high school halls for hours. Saffold was found not guilty of the charge during a jury trial in October.

Saffold resigned from the district a few months ago to focus on being a full-time law student, Deputy Superintendent Chad Wiese said.

As the board discussed a new contract, there was little dissent about putting a police officer back in the schools. A written public comment from an elementary school parent at a January meeting asked the board to consider how Black and Latino students might feel if a police officer were returned to the high school.

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Rebuilding trust

In 2019, the Verona School District started to move away from stationing city police officers in schools in favor of building its own security team over increasing distrust.

At the time, the relationship between the former Superintendent Dean Gorrell and former police Chief Bernie Coughlin was deeply frayed. One incident, in which school officials didn’t report a 2019 sexual assault by a middle school substitute teacher to police, only to state authorities, left city leaders particularly incensed.

Gorrell thought the district would be better served by an in-house security team that would be completely under the district’s purview. That team was founded in spring 2019 after three fights broke out during a school day.

At the same time, Verona police officers increasingly did not want to work at the high school and had to be assigned there.

In 2021, the district and the police department were struggling to come to an agreement on a school resource officer: School officials wanted to be able to choose the school resource officer, wanted the officer in plain clothes and wanted a say in the citations the officer issued; the police department said those were nonstarters.

Around the same time, political winds were shifting: A petition to remove police from the high school circulated in the weeks after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, stating that police presence in the schools made Black students feel unsafe. Calls to remove police from schools had been gaining traction for years.

A near-complete turnover of school administrators and a new police chief since then have since wiped the slate clean, Wiese said. In crafting a new contract, they didn’t dwell on the past lapse; they started with a boilerplate contract and neither side thought it needed to concede anything to make it work.

“The relationship we have with the Verona School District right now is very good,” Dresser said. “The (collaboration) between the PD and the school has been very refreshing.”

Security team

The district’s security team, which consists of three staff stationed at the high school and one at Badger Ridge Middle School, will stay and work with the school resource officer, Wiese said.

The security team is effectively school administrator’s “eyes and ears” for what’s happening in the schools, Wiese said. Members of the security team will still report to school administration, while the school resource officer reports to the chief of police.

Wiese said many day-to-day things will still be managed by the security team, hopefully well enough to where a situation doesn’t require officer intervention. But should there be a serious incident, district officials are hoping having an on-campus officer will “pay dividends” in quick responses and de-escalation.

“Our security assistants are not going anywhere,” Wiese said. “We’re super proud of the proactive, relationship-based work that they do every single day in our schools, and we actually only see adding an SRO to that team as just another benefit for us to make sure our schools and our community is as safe as possible.”

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