Tosa schools chief pledges to address discipline problems
Yet another fight at a Wauwatosa high school prompted parents to vent their frustrations at the school board this week.
This time, the fight was Feb. 28 at Wauwatosa West, between a parent and a student.
Kate Bertram told the board Monday her daughter and friends hid in a boiler room during the incident.
“They had located a ladder ... and if they heard gunshots, they were ready to climb for their safety on the roof of Tosa West. I was dying as a parent inside, as I had to coax her through that it was going to be OK,” Bertram said at the meeting.
“The new pandemic in Wauwatosa schools is a lack of accountability,” she said.
“What will it take for you to hold students and parents accountable?” Bertram asked the board.
Although her children were home sick that day, parent Danielle Long called the Feb. 28 fight “very disturbing.”
“This is terrifying that we are living this all the time . ... Everyone preaches about mental health. Nobody cares that our kids are so used to the violence at this point. Their mental health is worth everything,” Long said.
Superintendent Demond Means also decried the violence that's been plaguing the schools.
“I want to be very clear: Under no circumstances does this administration condone the fighting, the physical altercations, the bullying, the harassment and the chronic misbehavior that is happening in our schools,” Means said.
“I just want to make sure that the community knows that we're going to do everything in our authority to continue to keep our schools safe. There is law, there is procedure we have to follow, but we are going to rid our schools of this problem,” he said.
School board will review policies on discipline and more
Means said there will be “a series of policies” that will come before the school board “in the next few weeks” to help the board govern on discipline “from a policy perspective.”
On Monday, board member Jessica Willis asked that a special meeting be held to address several policies along with the one specifically addressing student discipline, including the student code of classroom conduct, student hazing, student anti-harassment, bullying, suspension and expulsion, and alternative expulsion hearing procedure.
“We've had some really great conversations with community members that have come in and really given us their input on what do we need to do to address discipline and how can we weave it through all of these policies so that we're not highlighting it in one area like the student discipline, but that we have this alignment through all of these pol
icies that really affect and outline what are our expectations around student behavior,” Willis said.
A date for the special meeting has not been determined, but could be held later this month, according to board President Eric Jessup-Anger.
Discipline has escalated this year
In the meantime, the district will continue to discipline students under the existing policy.
That discipline has escalated this year. In the first semester of the 2022-23 school year, the district sent out 10 expulsion notices ordering students to appear before the school board for a hearing. Of those 10 notices, two students were actually expelled and two were allowed to return to school. Six withdrew from school, an option that prevents an expulsion from appearing on a student’s record, according to district communications coordinator Sarah Ellis.
In the entirety of the 2021-22 school year, there were three expulsion notices and one expulsion. Two students withdrew, according to a presentation at the school board’s Feb. 13 meeting.
Means said the reason for more expulsion notices and hearings is a combination of seeing more issues as well as cracking down on discipline.
“As the community is asking for, they’re wanting more action and they want us to respond to it. So we’re issuing more expulsion notices, and we’re having more hearings as a result of the behavior we’re seeing,” Means told reporters who were covering the March 6 school board meeting. “In other words, we’re not just sweeping this under the rug. We’re not just ignoring this. This is something that’s very serious.”
‘For some students, this is not the right placement’
In a March 3 interview, Means said he wants every student to be in the right environment to learn. “For some students, this is not the right placement,” he said.
In determining the appropriate action for each situation, the district applies a student discipline framework that spells out consequences ranging from a conference/intervention on the lighter end to an expulsion hearing on the more severe end. Principals can use their judgment within the discipline framework, Means said in the interview. He added that the district tracks students to see who are “chronically not following our rules,” something that is taken into consideration in determining where on the discipline framework a particular student and incident falls.
For situations such as the Feb. 28 fight at Wauwatosa West High School and the Feb. 14 student-parent fight at Wauwatosa East High School, Means said severe discipline was needed.
“We’re not applying discipline and building up discipline, and you don’t get multiple chances to violate our rules. If certain violations are so egregious, we do act immediately because the behavior, the incident, was so unspeakable that we do respond right away,” said Means.
Means said a common thread in many incidents has been social media.
“Students are having social media conflict, and then when they get into the same physical environment — schools — they don’t know how to deescalate to be preventative,” Means said.
Citations issued in most recent incidents
In the Feb. 28 incident, a parent tried to physically confront a student at the school entrance, and a physical altercation ensued, according to police and a letter to parents from principal Corey Golla. Golla, himself, tried to intervene as “a shield or obstacle between the student and the parent,” Means said, and was hit in the process. The parent and two students were cited in the incident.
Two weeks earlier, there was a fight Feb. 14 between a parent and a group of high school students at Wauwatosa East High School before a freshman basketball game. The students were cited for battery. The parent involved was not cited at the time, although police said additional citations were possible. It’s unclear whether any additional citations have been issued.
When do police get involved?
Wauwatosa Police Department Sgt. Abby Pavlik said the decision to issue citations or seek criminal charges “depends on the totality of the circumstances.” The Journal Sentinel has requested information on how often incidents at the schools have resulted in citations or criminal charges, but that information was not immediately available.
“It can depend on the age of the subject, prior history of similar behavior/ criminal history, the actual crime that occurred, whether there was a victim, the location of the incident, etc,” Pavlik said in an email.