November 21: Highlights from the School Board's Policy Committee meeting
Neola reps falling down on the job and sprawling discussions on the role of police officers in schools.
I attended the Wauwatosa School Board’s Policy Committee meeting on Monday, November 21. This is a subcommittee chaired and attended by a subset of the full board—specifically, Board Members Jessica Willis and Jenny Hoag—along with Superintendent Dr. Demond Means. These meetings aren’t recorded which is unfortunate, because without them I’m forced to rely solely on my hastily recorded notes and my increasingly fallible memory. Treat what follows as the incomplete and imperfect impressions that they are.
→ Writing policies for school boards and school districts is hard. The policies must cover everything1 from “Revising Job Descriptions for Compliance with ADA 504” (Policy 1400) to “Procedures for Inspection of Instructional Materials” (Policy 9130A). They must also comply with state and federal laws which constantly change and in cases of conflict supersede whatever the school board might think is the best way to do things. And they should strike a fine balance between being specific enough to guide the administration and keep the school district from being sued while general enough that those same administrators don’t need to make a formal presentation and get permission every time they want to make minor changes like move the location of first aid kits in an elementary school or hire a different company to provide training to teachers on “Inclusive Classroom Management” (a topic I simply pulled from next week’s agenda).
Enter Neola. Neola used to be NEOLA when it stood for North Eastern Ohio Learning Associates and was an organization that provided “facilities studies, population projects, curriculum units and staff development” to local school districts. Today, their name doesn’t stand for anything because they also work in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, West Virginia, and Florida. They also realized that what school districts really needed help with was “staying on top of the new and changing laws and regulations affecting schools” and now all they do is help school boards update and revise their policies to comply with state law and align with best practices.
Hence the presence of a consultant from Neola on Monday to provide his expertise as the Policy Committee reviewed policies related to administering medications to students (Policy 5330), setting expectations for School Resource Officers (SROs) (Policy 8407), handling interactions with law enforcement and representatives from other government agencies (Policy 5540), managing school social events (Policies 5850 and 5855), and something about service animals on school property (Policy 8390).
The committee blew past the two hours allotted for their meeting, and I missed the end, but I’ll provide some highlights on the items that comprised the bulk of discussion.
→ Chief of Pupil and Family Services Luke Pinion and District Nurse Katelyn Lasse discussed revisions to the district’s policy on the “Administration of Medications in School” (Policy 5330). There were many changes, but the primary motivation seemed to be the addition of naloxone (to reverse opioid overdose) to the district’s list of emergency medicine to have on-hand, and they would need a policy that described how to handle procurement, training, and storage. The revised policy also included some modifications to the storage of over-the-counter medications and guidelines for students who possess and use medicine during the school day. It was very, very detailed.
So detailed in fact that the Neola representative told board members and district staff that it might be a little cumbersome and that instead they should use Neola’s model policy that meets all state requirements but without any extra fluff. Mr. Pinion then suggested he would go back to the drawing board and return with a more condensed policy suitable for approval.
This all seemed fairly straightforward and unremarkable to me, but then a member of the audience who happened also to be a former member of the school board pointedly asked why all this coordination hadn’t happened before the meeting. Why does Mr. Pinion need to go digging around in other district’s policy manuals and trying to cobble something together when the district hired a policy consultant to do this? “We’re paying you, right?” she asks.
The Neola representative admits that he is indeed being paid to help out here but reassures everyone that Mr. Pinion’s efforts were not in vain because the very detailed policy he drafted can go in an administrative handbook for lower-level staff—principals and school nurses—to make use of in their day-to-day operations.
The former school board member then asked, “But now [the policy as written] is not ready for board approval, right?”
“No.” The Neola representative answers.
“And this is a board meeting, right?”
One of the board members then makes a motion to table discussion and the conversation ends.
→ Three Wauwatosa police officers are permanently assigned to work in schools. They are called School Resource Officers. A lot of parents, teachers, and administrators seem to think they’re an essential component in reducing violence in schools, are pretty good at their job, and would like more of them (there are supposed to be four but due to staffing shortages, the WPD can only provide three).
Others worry that they are polarizing, lead to students being punished more harshly than they might otherwise be, and that this has long-term negative effects that potentially outweigh their benefits. For instance, during a September board meeting Mses. Hoag and Willis brought up the implicit bias of police officers and the potential for unnecessarily criminalizing student behavior as the board discussed the roles and responsibilities of SROs within the district.
On Monday the same board members—along with Superintendent Means and the Neola rep—contemplated revisions to two related school board policies.
The first was the “School Resource Officer Program” (Policy 8407) which identifies the required elements in any contract with the police department to supply SROs.
The second was Policy 5540 on the district’s “Relationships with Governmental Agencies.” While this policy applies to any governmental agency that interacts with students in school—the Neola rep mentioned court-appointed social workers—most of the discussion revolved around how the school district should handle a (non-SRO) police officer’s request to interview students.
The ensuing hour-and-a-half conversation became increasingly hard to follow—for everyone involved—as board members voiced their concerns and considered finer and finer distinctions between various police-officer-interviewing-student scenarios.
Some of the high points below:
For instance, there was much fretting about the difference between the school calling the police for assistance with, e.g., a fight, a theft, or someone bringing a weapon on school grounds and situations where the police—in the course of their own investigation—wanted to speak to a student about something that had occurred outside of school (like toilet papering a house or knocking down mailboxes). Members of the Policy Committee seemed okay with the former but somewhat resistant to the latter.
At one point, Ms. Willis asks why they can’t just prohibit the police from doing any investigations on school property. This elicits much murmuring and some incredulous scoffs from the half-dozen parents in the audience.
The Neola rep tells the board they can’t impede a police investigation. (This is apparently against the law.)
Mses. Willis and Hoag feel it’s okay for police to question a student if there’s imminent danger but it’s less okay if there is not. Mr. Means says they need to define the term imminent danger. I don’t think this ever happens.
Ms. Willis brings up a (not entirely?) hypothetical case of an elementary or middle-school-aged child suspected of toilet papering a house and being psychologically traumatized by a police officer questioning him or her.
Mr. Means suggests maybe we’re all getting hung up on unlikely edge cases.
There is an extended discussion about whether the school district must contact parents before allowing the police to question a child or whether they should merely attempt to contact parents before allowing them to question a child. It seems like everyone comes to a loose consensus that attempting is more reasonable than requiring (because do they really want to hold up a police investigation for three days as they try to call a parent? Maybe that would just make the victim’s parents mad.) But then Ms. Hoag worries that the term attempt needs to be defined somewhere.
Mr. Means again suggests maybe everyone is getting hung up on unnecessary details and unlikely edge cases.
The skeptical former board member in the audience then asks, Shouldn’t these type of scenarios be covered by administrative guidelines? She suggests the discussion is getting beyond the level of board policy. Apparently exasperated at this point, she gets up and leaves.
At this point, I move closer to a mother in the crowd and ask what she thinks of the proceedings.
She whispers, “It’s a clown show.”
In the board’s defense, I’d be surprised if meetings in front of a skeptical and sometimes irritated public are the most conducive to sober reflection and the free exchange of ideas. On the other hand, an hour-and-a-half? I never even got to hear the discussion about service animals on school property.
I agree with the mother who whispered her opinion to you.
🙋♀️