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On May 11 the North Shore School District voted to remove the School Resource Officer position at Bothell High School. This decision was deeply unpopular with students and parents (around 80% of them in surveys wanted to keep the SRO), with many of them saying that the current officer in the position, Garrett Ware, was widely like and had helped students in crisis. On May 18th there was a student walkout to protest the firing. Tonight there was a meeting of the Northshore School Board which included an hour at the beginning for public comment. Dozens of students and parents spoke out against the decision to fire the SRO, and nobody spoke out in favor of it. When one student got called for his turn for public comment, he brought up his friends holding signs and said “We’re holding a minute of silence for your bad decisions” and, surreally, the whole room fell quiet for the full minute. I had initially mixed feelings about this but it’s hard to disagree with 80% of students and parents saying the SRO is a positive presence in the school. [Edited to add: this is according to https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1716432406/nsdorg/ymu62qilgl00vwydhyz0/Report-2024-SROAnnualReview-Final-V2.pdf which also says on page 6 that the percentage who agreed the “SRO program promotes student safety” was about the same for Black and Latino respondents as it was for white respondents.] And this is in a liberal city, where according to https://www.zipdatamaps.com/election-atlas/city/wa/bothell/map-of-2024-presidential-election-results-by-voting-precinct most precincts voted around 70% Democrat in 2024. I was part of the police accountability protests in 2020, but had a falling out with them when the movement pivoted to “abolish the police”, which I thought made no sense (and about this time I was getting more outspoken against people filming themselves yelling wildly homophobic things at cops and telling cops to kill themselves). And “removing SROs from school” feels like a holdover from the “abolish” movement. I have been trying to find if any board members made a coherent argument for the decision. According to https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/bothell-high-school-students-fighting-keep-school-resource-officer/E7GY4JHGNRCXPGFWUZVZ7PVUGE/ board member Hân Trần said during the vote, “I’m not able to support renewal of this contract because this district owes our community something more comprehensive and equitable and more empowering to all community members.” Sorry, I don’t know what that means. One student during tonight’s public comment angrily denounced the reasoning that board member Carson Sanderson had given for her vote ( https://www.instagram.com/p/DYse_U9ywOJ/ ). Sanderson had talked about how her Black family members had once been harassed by a cop in the 1950s for drinking from the whites-only drinking fountain; the student said she was sympathetic but the story had nothing to do with the merits of keeping a cop in a school in Bothell in 2026. (This is basically what I said a lot in 2020: every institution, police, libraries, swimming pools, whatever, used to be horribly racist; that has no bearing on the merits of keeping them around now. 80% of Black Americans in 2020 were opposed to abolishing the police, and I guarantee it was not because they were ignorant of the racist history of policing.) The district has already posted tonight’s meeting video online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0prO05eEEH8 submitted by /u/bennetthaselton |
