Cedar Rapids Community School District responds to a threat

I care deeply about our schools. My wife and I have eight children and we were Cedar Rapids Community School District parents for almost 30 years and one of our sons is a teacher in the district. As volunteer, I coached MathCounts at Roosevelt (when it was a middle school) and taught computer programming at Jefferson High School. I still work occasionally as a substitute teacher, and I even ran (unsuccessfully) for school board in 1996.

I was out of state for a few days enjoying the early fall colors and the last throes of summer when my social media feeds exploded with news about a threat shutting down Cedar Rapids Schools. Since I no longer have kids in the district, I did not receive a notice directly from the schools. As a community member, it has been difficult to find out the details of the threat. Some social media posts are claiming the existence of a 'hit list' containing the names of specific targets but officials have not released any more information. On Thursday, Cedar Rapids police announced that a 14-year-old has been arrested in conjunction with these threats.

I think that the district did the right thing in calling off school on Monday. Since law enforcement had not identified who made the threat calling off school, it was the prudent thing to do. Before schools reopened on Tuesday, the district instituted several security measures including only allowing clear, see-through backpacks, not allowing purses, limited entry and exit doors and an increased police presence on campus.

Even with these measures in place, Superintendent Tawana Grover said attendance was around 60 percent. Schools are still open today and although official numbers have not been released, the people with whom I have spoken report that attendance remains low. I do not know how this will play out, hopefully whoever made the threat will be caught and punished and parents will feel comfortable sending their kids to school.

My concern is this, when the threat was made the first thing the district did was Implement new security measures and increase police presence in the and near the schools. The problem I have with this is that just over a year ago the school board thought it was a good idea to reduce the police presence in schools.

In the end, it was about race. The Iowa Department of Human Rights noted that in Cedar Rapids black students were more likely than white students to have a complaint filed against them and black students were also arrested more often.

In 2021, the school board received several recommendations to resolve the issue. The knee-jerk reaction of the school board was therefore to remove the police officers (School Resource Officers or SROs) from two of the district’s middle schools. The Cedar Rapids Police Department, City Council and Mayor even came up with a plan to fully fund the two SROs from the city budget instead of sharing the cost with the school district. In the end, despite the votes in favor of retaining the officers from board members Tominsky, Roundtree, and Neumann, they were ultimately overruled by the majority composed of Borcherding, Garlock, Humbles, and Merschbrock.

I agree with critics of the SRO program that the incident reporting and arrest numbers are skewed. However, I am not willing to jump to the conclusion that this means the program is inherently flawed. The question should not be are the numbers of higher for black or white students, the question should be why? Do the numbers represent the rate at which black and white students actually commit offenses? I also think it is important to continue to look at the use of SROs and when they need to get involved in issues in the schools. Ideally, involving an SRO and making an arrest should be a last resort. Whenever possible, school staff and SROs should pursue other options for dealing with behavior.

I am glad that in response to this threat, the school board recognized the value of a police presence in our schools. I think it is time to return SROs to our schools and replace the current members of the school board!

David Chung is a Gazette editorial fellow. david.chung@thegazette.com