More Madness in Madison Schools

A student at Madison’s La Follette High School comes to school with a handgun and two magazines of ammo in his backpack. When Madison police show up to arrest him, a security guard and other staff members harass the cops. In another incident at the school, a student (perhaps the same one — he hasn’t been identified) brings a handgun to school. The cops arrive to arrest him and two staff members claim falsely to be his guardians in an effort to stop him from being arrested or prosecuted.

In that first incident this spring, the security guard yelled at an assistant principal for having called the police. “We’re supposed to be protecting kids!” he charged. Madisonians might be justified in responding, “say what again?” This is a security guard. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that protecting kids would suggest that, I don’t know, maybe you remove the kid with the gun and ammo in his backpack.

This is insane and the insanity begins at the top with the Madison School Board. That ideologically rigid group sees enforcement of simple, common sense safety and discipline measures as aiding in an alleged “school to prison pipeline.” So, those staff members were simply carrying out the ideological madness they hear from the very top.

This is the same school board that is poised to ask voters in November to allow them to raise their property taxes by $1,300 on the average home.

I don’t know if there’s a “school to prison pipeline.” I’m inclined to believe that we simply have bad kids, or more likely kids that were raised in messed up households, who are now prone to violence at the worst and disruption at the very least. These kids need help, but they shouldn’t be allowed to disrupt learning for the vast majority of students who just want to go to school. It shouldn’t be controversial for a kid with a gun to be removed from a school. It should be controversial for the kid to have a gun. The cops are not the bad guys. They’re trying to keep everyone safe, which is more than we can say for this school board.

The school board will tell us that that extra taxing authority is needed just to keep schools running. But if they want to keep running them like this, getting voters to go along with them is going to be a hard sell.