Buzz, buzz. Another Talking Points notification to Garfield parents. Each time a message comes from the Seattle Public School District’s messaging app, our hearts skip a beat, hoping all Garfield High School students and staff are safe. Twice in the spring of 2024, they were not.
That school year, it felt like most Talking Points alerts were lockdowns because of shootings on or near campus. Then in March, a student was shot and injured, and in June, student Amarr Murphy-Paine was shot and killed. Amarr should have graduated with the rest of his 2025 class. Instead, graduation took place with an empty chair surrounded by traumatized teens already worldly wise.
Parents, students and staff sought solutions; bringing a school resource officer back to campus was one idea. We spoke with several SPS board directors about the “moratorium,” their 2020 decision to remove police from SPS campuses. Many of us were skeptical about bringing an SRO program back to Garfield. We were also terrified of someone else being killed. Historically, students of color, with disabilities and the LGTBQ+ are at risk of being criminalized, injured or even killed by SROs. But could an officer prevent future shootings? As conversations continued, everyone agreed: We cannot protect our students from outside violence by bringing different violence into the building.
After working with district, city and Seattle Police Department leaders, school administration, students, parents and community activists, we came up with a new, hopefully better, program: school engagement officer.
The SEO Program would bring the best of SRO programs, while omitting the bad. This officer would wear a polo shirt, only carry a sidearm and a radio — less intimidating and frightening. The officer would patrol around the campus, rarely coming inside the building, and there would be one nonnegotiable: The SEO would not discipline or intimidate students. They would keep danger out while striving to form positive relationships with students. The SEO would be accountable to our community: Garfield students, families, staff.
After over a year of work, community engagement, meetings and board discussions, we nearly brought a one-year pilot SEO program to Garfield. Then, all critical guardrails and agreements we had reached were eliminated from the Board Action Report in the September and October board agendas. Tucked into these reports was a revised Memorandum of Understanding, which looked like it was written 10 years ago: before the moratorium, George Floyd’s murder and all of the community input.
The revised memorandum presented to the board was clouded by legalese, and the essential principles we agreed on were gone. It authorized the officer to be inside classrooms policing students, and removed language on community control, among many changes.
No one in the Garfield community asked for police to patrol our hallways, criminalize student misbehavior or minor infractions. We are trying to keep dangerous people from murdering our children. Why did SPD and the district allow this version of the MOU to progress to the board? Every person involved in the process should have known the community would be outraged and the board could not agree to those terms.
The board vote was not a surprise, because board members were backed into a corner by a district either grossly incompetent or intentionally sabotaging something they had committed months of time and resources to design. For whatever reason, the presentation to the board directly contradicted every previous agreement, and the board had no choice but to vote against it.
Garfield students deserve to feel safe at school as our city continues to struggle with gun violence. Once the new superintendent is hired and the new board is sworn in, we expect the district to reconsider this program and resume where we left off in August. The SEO program still has great potential, but it must be done right.
