SOUTH MILWAUKEE, Wis. — As Milwaukee Public Schools get ready for the traditional back-to-school schedule, a new addition will be joining students sometime this new school year. Milwaukee Police will once again be in the halls of MPS schools. It is required under the state’s shared revenue plan passed by lawmakers this summer.
Wisconsin State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jill Underly, was in South Milwaukee on Thursday as part of an annual public schools summit. She weighed in on MPS now being required to have 25 officers in schools.
“I feel like it is a very local decision. I think local school boards should decide if that is the type of support they want,” said Underly.
MPS has been moving away from police officers in schools since 2015 when a federal board of education investigation found minority students faced harsher punishments than their white peers. In 2020, MPS made the decision to remove all officers from school grounds.
GOP state leaders said adding police will keep students safe. But the state superintendent worries about what issues those school resource officers (SRO) will have to deal with.
"When you think about school mental health, school counselors, social workers, teachers, food services, a lot of those support services for students are already understaffed. I guess I am afraid that more of a burden would shift into SROs and police really, the services for those kinds of student behaviors should be coming from the student support and student services side,” said Underly.
The MPS school board president Marva Herndon said she could not comment on this until the school board meets to discuss the issue.
The district issued this statement saying: "There are ongoing discussions about officers returning to MPS schools. It would be negligent to speak about it at this time. The deadline for implementing this is several weeks."
“How do you pay for SROs? How do you pay for these additional services in a school district, in a school district, like many school districts in Wisconsin, they are cash strapped so it will be difficult,” said Underly.
MPS will hold a special school board meeting next Tuesday, August 15th at 5:30 p.m. and then the full school board meets August 31st. There is no agenda out yet for those meetings. The deadline to return school resource officers to MPS is January 1st.
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