WISN-AM’s Dan O’Donnell said he has been contacted by about 100 teachers regarding his report on violence in Milwaukee Public Schools since it first aired a week ago.
“The biggest response is, this is exactly what my life is like. This is exactly what I deal with every day. It’s about time some other people, besides other teachers, got a taste of what we’re going through,’ O’Donnell said in a phone interview.
O’Donnell, news anchor and talk show host at WISN, interviewed more than two dozen teachers for the special report, “Blood on the Blackboard,” about attacks on teachers in Milwaukee Public Schools. O’Donnell discovered cases where the police were not called and reports were not filed.
“Teachers for a long time have, I think, not been believed when they’re saying that we’ve hit a crisis point in how kids are behaving,” O’Donnell said. “ And how there’s no respect for authority. No boundaries, no limits, no anything. I think most of them that I’ve spoken with are just relieved finally some people are starting to listen and take this seriously.”
“That is not to say that all MPS schools are dangerous, but I think the numbers speak for themselves,” O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell’s report, which first aired June 3 and has been subsequently rebroadcast and posted on the WISN website, said that as of May 25 there have been more than 31,000 referrals issued in MPS this school year for “fighting or violent or aggressive behavior toward classmates or staff members.”
“This stuff is happening all over the place and I think teachers are just fed up,” O’Donnell said in an interview this week. “They’re at the point where they don’t believe that anybody, especially anyone at MPS, is taking them seriously.”
O’Donnell also said he sees a connection between the violence in the schools and violent crime in the city of Milwaukee. “The same kids who are terrorizing classmates and teachers during the day are going out and stealing cars at night,” he said.
Tony Tagliavia, a spokesman for Milwaukee Public Schools, would not consent to repeated requests for a phone interview with him or MPS Superintendent Darien Driver. In a written statement, Tagliavia disputed aspects of O’Donnell’s report but did not provide details and refused to be interviewed regarding those disagreements.
O’Donnell called the lack of discipline in MPS “the Ferguson Effect for Schools,” tracing the problem back to the Department of Education and the Department of Justice. “If more black students than white students are suspended for punching people, the federal government is going to take a closer look at the punishment as potentially being racist because it has what they call a disparate impact,” he said. “That even though the intent is to stop kids from punching other kids, if it has a disparate impact on minority students, then it is suspect in the eyes of the federal government.”
“So they’re putting pressure on these school districts not to suspend anybody,” O’Donnell said. “And the school districts are saying, we even had a school board member admit this, well what we’re doing is not suspending anybody. They’re saying, look, look, our suspension numbers are down, and they’ve gone down around two-thirds in the last eight years.”
“It’s just crazy how incidents that should be punished and should be dealt with severely just aren’t anymore,” O’Donnell said. “And I think it’s because school districts are petrified of losing their funding or some consequences from the federal government.”
State Rep. John Jagler, R-Watertown, said he hopes O’Donnell’s story will spur action on his bill to bring more transparency to violence in schools.
“Anything that can shine a light on what’s going on, that some of these schools are, a war zone would be an exaggeration, a terrible learning environment that just leads to everything else that’s bad that’s going on in the schools,” said Jagler, a former radio news anchor and reporter himself.
Jagler was the author of a bill in the state assembly that would have required the Department of Public Instruction’s report cards for every school to indicate the number of crimes per 100 students, violent crimes per 100 students and the state average for both figures.
Jagler said parents don’t know if their schools are safe or if they’re having the same problems as the schools in O’Donnell’s report. “We started thinking of a way to get parents that information and the best way I thought was to put it on that school report card,” Jagler said.
“A couple of other states are doing it and we wanted some numbers on there for parents,” Jagler said. “We passed it out of the assembly but it never got through. It died in the Senate.”
Jagler pointed out that suspensions and expulsions are already on the report card. “But miraculously as soon as that information started to be reported on the school report cards, all of a sudden suspensions and expulsions dropped,” Jagler said.
A Milwaukee police officer told Jagler’s committee that instead of handling discipline situations and having to report them, school principals are calling the police when fights occur. The police don’t have the evidence, or at most can issue a disorderly conduct ticket, so nothing happens.
Transparency regarding crime is important to teachers, too, Jagler said. “You shouldn’t have to rely upon anecdotal evidence. It should be available to parents, to teachers, to anybody what’s going on,” he said.
“There are more and more options for these parents, and the teachers, too. With more and more options, I think we should give more and more information,” Jagler said. “Some of the critics of our bill said, oh, this will put some schools in a bad light. I’m not trying to shame anybody. At the same time, there are some serious conversations that have to happen. And if this data sparks those conversations, that is a very good thing.”
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