001promising yeah okay all right greetings good evening everyone thanks for your patience technology having a little case of the Mondays thank you so much Lori and Marcy for your diligence and taking care of that for us um I'd like to call this meeting to order let's establish that we have a quorum beginning with a roll call vote Joe here Corby here John here Meredith here Christopher here Juan Carlos and I here as well we have a quorum Corby has this meeting been properly noticed yes it has thank you to help ensure that we're centering our board work around our shared values and serving our students We Begin each of our board meetings by reading our District's Equity framework and the hooch chunk land acknowledgement both of which can be found at the top of your
002agenda Juan Carlos would you please be will to read those for us in the Verona Area School District our mission is that each student will acquire the Knowledge and Skills necessary to achieve their personal goals thrive a diverse Global society and lead a healthy selfing life to meet this Mission the Barona area school district will ensure that every individual has access to the educational social and emotional support they need to feel valued and affirmed their unique identities and experiences we acknowledge that equities and power dynamics exist in our system such that some individuals on the basis of their identities face barriers to accessing the opportunities they need to experience success in acknowledgement of such Verona area school district is committed to disrupting these systems of anity followed by the Hun and acknowledgement there are currently
00312 tribal Nations who call Wisconsin home with the H Trump Nation being the primary group living around Madison no matter where you are in the state you're on the ancestral land of a tribal Nation as we begin our meeting we honor the land on which we stand thank you so much um moving to adoption of our agenda I'm taking some time for members to just Peru the rest of our agenda this evening and I'd accept a motion to approve the agenda as printed to approve thank you Christophers is there a second second thank you Juan Carlos all those in favor of approving tonight's agenda as written please signify with i i any opposed thank you very much so we'll move along to our first agenda item our discussion about our school resource officer potential contract
004with a presentation tonight we have Chad meey we have Lieutenant Dart and chief dresser at the table thank you so much for joining this evening Dr CL I'll turn it over to you all right uh good evening everyone thank you for joining us today whether you're here live or with us virtually uh for a very important presentation to our Board of Education as you know all presentations are are key and important but this one really evolves around the potential for deeper partnership in the form of of contract and also uh professional and and personal relationship and connections and so we want to thank our guests here today if feel we're calling them guest because we see them almost on an every other day basis which is really why we're having this conversation today because of
005the deep partnership between the Broner school district and the BR Police Department so thank you for giving your time and commitment for being here today I also want to acknowledge here in our in our audience a great partner uh with the Bron are school district and that's our city administrator Mr Jamie Jamie olik who I I have the pleasure of uh seen on frequent occasions on on City City events but from the first time we've connected it's really been about our our partnership and how we can support schools knowing that strong bu schools mean strong communities and uh that's been a very uh great great relationship so before I turn it over to the team for a full presentation of the potential uh of a contract that'll go before our board of education for consideration
006I just want to think about or talk about so some key aspects of the last uh three and a half years really of of really working to develop sound relationships and Partnerships with uh the Bron area uh police department specifically understanding that uh that is a a necessary and appropriate entity for supporting the safety of all all of our students uh here in our not just at the brary high school but across our our school district when you think about the immense responsibility and appropriate responsibility that the Board of Education and the and the community as a whole has which is for us to ensure the safety of up to 6,000 uh students and up to to a thousand staff members on any daily uh on a daily basis you're talking about in essence a
007small city which we are responsible to making sure it gets home safely every day has a safe experience here in our in our buildings and ensuring that um their families get to enjoy the the great fruits of public education uh I take that responsibility to heart but also want to make sure that we're doing as much as possible in terms of resources and Partnerships to ensure that we are uh providing that safety to the timate uh to the ultimate platform uh I also want to talk about things that just cannot be uh presented in data form and that is due to what has already been a very strong partnership over over the years the amount of proactive work that there's not going to be a data point that prevented this many uh issues because the
008proactive work has prevented a multitude of ISS just from potentially happening uh every time you send the we send a communication home about safety event we we talk about the diligence in which we investigate or proactively look and even if there's a 1% chance of any issue that could uh hamper or hamper the safety of our students or to our our staff we investigate with thorness and we we do that in partnership with our our law enforcement to ensure that every stone is is on turn so that proactive partnership really um lends itself to that preventive nature that you're never going to have a number that that that shows you what that that partn what that looks like but I can tell you without the uh great partnership with Bron the police department those investigations
009will can't reach the thoroughness that they really have because there spaces that the district can't go to just to make sure just to make sure that that things are things are okay uh I you know it's I hate to say this but we live in a in a time in a space in a society where threats against public schools happen and that's an unfortunate thing to have to say but it's a fact of our reality and we have this Mutual responsibility and the mutual desire to ensure that our schools are as safe as possible and um and just being able to work side by side uh with with our law enforcement support uh to do the appropriate training to work uh hand in hand in ensuring that our our systems are sight the time was
010really appropriate and knowing that trust and systems have been built for the potential of a school resource officer to be here for just for more of the consistency basis when we think about um having someone that can build relationships here in our in our schools ensuring that we can uh have a a go-to person to uh prevent threat and in the event of a threat against our schools we have someone there that could help address that in a in a fast fast more immediate uh scenario so given that I I do want to just give my perspective of an endorsement of the potential for a contract today from my position as the as a superintendent and I'll turn it over to our F Dynamic team to talk about what this potentially could look like as
011the board takes us into consideration turn CH thanks Dr CL certainly excellent introduction I don't want to go through this and Echo all the things that you said before I turn it over to the Chief and lieutenant and Dr C I do think a place to even start to get data would be count the number of times either Lieutenant Dart or myself uh text each other do you have a second uh and uh we're in pretty much constant communication to your point uh even this building alone has uh 2,000 people in it every single day uh and there rare a day not for sure a week that goes by uh that we haven't been in touch over the last three years uh problem solving commic communicating and making sure that uh we're doing as much
012work proactively as possible to keep our school and Community safe uh today we want to go through a little kind of progress update in terms of the work we've been doing with the Verona Police Department uh at which point I'd like to turn things over uh the board hears from Dr clity and myself all the time we're super excited to have the chief and Lieutenant Dart here uh to kind of talk through a little history lesson which which I picked up even a few tibits when I when I attended the city council meeting uh and then we've got a quick summary of the contract and then we wanted to leave time to make sure if the board had any questions uh the three of us including Dr Clarity were available to answer those so a
013quick status update in terms of the work we have been uh doing uh for this entire year before I turned things over to chief chief pressor as I said earlier uh there is pretty much consistent two way communication both with the Fitchburg uh police department and the Verona Police Department on a number of issues related to community uh and school safety uh many times they can be as uh as low level as things going on behind the scenes uh related uency work there can be mandatory reporting work and to Dr clar's point if we get a tip on a Saturday night uh that someone is concerned about a a student who's making unsafe uh posts on social media um I'm on the pH with Matt and we're developing a plan to make sure that things
014are safe on Monday morning we are excited about the possibility of having a police officer in our school district in this school uh that knows our community and knows our staff uh in an even deeper way than the two of us do uh where that Saturday night phone call is all the more meaningful uh and they know the mom they know the dad they know Aunt they know Uncle they know a cousin because they're embedded in this community on a on a daily basis um I can also say that we've uh picked up the second semester here and these have been great um we've made our rounds around the school district Savannah Oaks will be our last stop where we set aside an hour and a half uh to go through a number of different
015tabletop exercises uh where our team will and that's a picture right there of uh of a big one we did here at the high school well we we'll go through a couple of different scenarios that required School administration and support staff along with the police department to go through our own standard operating procedure related to a potential safety issue to make sure we don't have any areas we feel exposed in a systematic way uh and those have been really good discussions things have come up that have actually said yeah we should tweet this in our incident uh Response Guide for the for the following year uh because we're having these discussions on a more regular basis uh we uh just I I just attended an active threat training with the Verona Police Department along with
016principal Cox uh Shayla glass Thompson was there uh and that was really good just this week uh and uh lastly we've had certain times that our district starts a threat assessment process for uh for a student and have enough going on in an individual case where we'll call in uh the Verona Police Department to join that team uh in terms of making sure that we're putting a safety plan and have all the right questions answered related to individual student needs and that happens uh quite often as well um I I do want to be brief because we do want to hear from the chief and the lieutenant it's certainly here tonight to answer any questions that come up in terms of our current work and the ways we envision this partnership moving forward so it's
017good to see everybody and I will turn things over I think Chief are you gonna open things up I will yeah all right Chief dresser we'll turn it over to you I'll be your slide guide all right appreciate it so thank you everybody for having us we're thrilled to be here um just a little bit of history that we've had an officer in the brono high school since 1998 um Officer Steve Zimmer who retired as a sergeant many years ago actually was our first school officer um and back then we called it a police School the aine officer um we're changing um that language now to SRO to catch up with the rest of Dan County in the area um because apparently PSL did not stick but that's what we called him here in Verona
018um Matt Dart a lieutenant of operations for for patrol he will supervise the SRO directly uh he also has the distinct privilege of formerly being a school resource officer or a PSL back then um so has firsthand knowledge of working in the marona high school um a few years ago right just a couple um it wasn't until about 2019 um 20 20 20 that we could not reach a successor agreement and a variety of reasons for that um part of it was Co harv it was political um culture at the time political um an anti or not everybody agreed with law enforcement um kind of writing in the tales of George Floyd um and going along with Co again yet had a brand new beautiful building sitting here and it was vacant for a year
019um to coincide with that you just hired security staff um so you're trying a new model so for those reasons um we did not have a successor agreement and we've gone a few years without having an officer in the school we are excited to have an officer back in the school and what I really want to focus on or or point out is it's not for enforcement um we're not here for enforcement um first and for most we want to add a layer of security um and um Mr Weezy and I have spoken many times times about um the current level of security that you have here is good but adding a police officer is an added layer and we do know through data and we also know through trainings and experience um that acts
020of violence are deterred when there's a police offer on a campus um and so first and foremost that's what we want to accomplish secondly we want to build relationships inh house we've been talking about this for a few years that's what we've been missing as a law enforcement agency is I guess thousands of kids that have gone through these doors we're not having an opportunity to build positive relationships and that is really our goal and I can think back to one of our more recent um School officers and a letter he received from um a student and it's in his personnel file it literally brought a tear to my eye on how that offer changed her life for the better and she took the time to actually write that note um and deliver to them
021and that's our goal that that's what we want um we understand that this is an educational facility I I see that you focus on culture so do we actually um the culture of the Rona police department is very important to us and we have vacancies that I could have filled five times over I haven't because I want to make sure I get the right people in those spots and having said that I want to make sure we get the right person up here in the school um back in 2019 2020 we had zero officers that wanted to be a school officer and and again it's kind of going back to the political climate back then um and now I'm proud to say we have three officers that are excited at the opportunity a school officer
022ano here in the high school um and so that has changed and of course you know whoever that officer is we want them they want to be here um you know they want to bring you know that their passion with them we definitely do have passion police officers that can make a difference we are very excited I'm kind of going off script I'm just I'm I'm try to follow you all right so next page um I'd be remiss if I I didn't speak a little bit about um School violence uh the incident at Mount hor um we had officers there we saw and felt the impact um we have instructors an active threat uten Dart is one of them so they actually played a pretty pivotal role um managing that incident Abundant Life Christian um
023we were not there but it affected us uh just like everybody else done less um that's the last thing any of us want to see or read about or deal with in real life but as already mentioned that is the world we live in that is our reality and that is what we train for um for that immediate response and stopping a threat so that is the added bonus of having op in the school if one act is a deterrent but two trained on act on stopping the threat um our interactions with uh superintendent clity and um Mr ruzy have been amazing and I I use the word refreshing um I hope that's um not not um an over exaggeration but to us it's been refreshing um because as Mr Weezy said the the phone
024calls the interactions the collaboration that we have done um I mean we we have worked on tabletop exercises we have worked on active threat exercises we there's a plan to work on reunification um all these things that we we need to be doing and it's just it's jelling um it's a very positive relationship and I think that's why I know that's why um from the city's perspective and the schools perspective um this is going to be successful so we do appreciate you hearing um you know our current status and our desire and what we hope to accomplish by putting an offer back in the school um couple of changes from the former um agreement and then and they're pretty minor uh we like the idea that you have Security on campus uh again I I
025refer to it as a layer of security uh previously our school officer would pretty much be the first line of defense would get involved with disturbances and fights and that wasn't necessarily good because they're police officers and then they go into investigative mode and then you know citations are being issued and and then you just have the the police presence and if they called for backup and now you have more uniformed officers on campus and things just kind of escalated and I I I understand that I saw that perspective um having security and we've seen them work for years now and the training that they have you know we still want them to be that first layer to break up a disturbance to break up a fight the only cave it is it's happening directly
026in front of our police officer we can't just ignore we have to pre prevent somebody from getting injured um but if it's minor we can still hand those individuals off to security and let the school do what the school does without law enforcement um intervening and I think that's a win-win I think it's a win for the city it's a win for the school district it's a win for the student um just have not having that extra um law enforcement contact and investigation um something I I've struggled with a little bit just only a little bit is um the drug investigations that occur right now let me back up when we had an officer in the school we would investigate everyone we we document the students's name and a lot of times they would get
027a citation way we've been doing the last couple of years the school security administrators if they see and frankly a lot of it's just I shouldn't say just but vaping material um or small levels of marijuana sees it we get a phone call it's turned over to us because it's illegal to possess um and then we handle it and we don't have a student's name and there's no discipline um and you know part part of this agreement is that the police department will not be involved with discipline um I totally agree with that 100% um but from our perspective enforcement and um we're not we don't want to be enforcement heavy either so you you may or may not know so since the beginning of the school year uh we've had 50 calls for service
028at the high school um 50 and we've issued 15 citations in those two months all those citations have been driven by a call from the school to the police department 11 of those citations are for truancy um and that is how we want to keep um the data looking with with an officer in the school that that is our goal now of course with the officer in the school they see something if they get involved um we're going to probably see a slight increase here and there but I can assure you that's our goal um I guess a brief comment about was this your side for 8020