The Wisconsin Office of School Safety has averted nearly 600 potential attacks on school grounds in the eight years it has been active. Yet, while the office is permanent, the funding to support its staff is limited.
“The breadth and the depth we can have (on school safety) is impacted right now by consistent funding sources,” said Trish Kilpin, the Office of School Safety’s executive director.
The state office currently has 18 employees, only five of whom are funded through general purpose revenue. The remaining 13 position are funded through more limited program revenues, according to a budget paper from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
General purpose revenue, or GPR, is a stable and predictable funding source, Kilpin said, but when less than a quarter of the staff operates with this stability, it creates a difficult working dynamic. Moreover, positions funded by program revenue aren’t reliable year over year.
“If we had GPR funding for those 13 other positions, then neither we nor school nor law enforcement would have to think about their buy-in to a program,” Kilpin said. “They know that this is the model. This is what Wisconsin has invested in. This is what works to keep our schools safe.
“It’s a confidence in belief that our practices are going to be around, that schools aren’t on their own.”
It needn’t be said that a single mass shooting event at a school ruptures every facet of a community. The fear and trauma it instills around education in public spaces continues long after the news cameras move on. It can take years to physically recover from a single gunshot wound. It can take even longer to find purchase once more in everyday life.
While it’s impossible to quantify the human cost of a mass shooting, the economic cost is easier to calculate. The Abundant Life tragedy, according to the gun violence prevention group Everytown, amounted to nearly $48 million, which includes costs to survivors and families directly affected by the tragedy, as well as employers, government and the broader community.
That single event cost taxpayers nearly $1.6 million.
Those numbers are based on ballpark estimations from the national nonprofit and haven’t been confirmed by the Office of School Safety. Still, the calculation speaks to the astronomical costs associated with a single mass shooting event.
Based on current estimates, the cost to fund the 13 additional positions with general purpose revenue would roughly amount to $1.7 million over the next biennium.
The team behind the Office of School Safety operates the Speak Up, Speak Out tip line 24 hours a day, trains school staff on how to identify and respond to at-risk behaviors, supports schools in the aftermath of a crisis and helps schools create school safety plans that align with state laws.
The Office of School Safety relies on what the state Department of Justice is able to allocate from the agency’s limited annual budget, Attorney General Josh Kaul told the Cap Times editorial board. Such decisions are an exercise in priorities.
“If we were to continue using that source of funding, we would have to make very difficult decisions about where to make cutbacks,” Kaul said. “That’s not something I want to see happen with our school safety programs or the other important programs that the DOJ works on.”
The Office of School Safety emerged as a proactive response to the 2018 Parkland school shooting, the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in the country’s history. The creation of the office established school safety grants, revised school safety plans and required mandatory reporting of threats of school violence.
Since Parkland, 59 schools across the United States have been ravaged by shootings. All told, 92 students and school staff have been killed, including 21 at the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, with another 157 injured. Four deaths and six injuries in that period were in Wisconsin.
Kilpin and her team have worked hard to shift the narrative around youth violence. Violence isn’t inherited. It’s born out of isolation, bullying, adverse childhood experiences, social determinants of health and a lack of belonging.
Then there’s a dark underbelly of the internet that seizes on at-risk young people’s grievances in private channels with few guardrails. These groups create the illusion of community and not only promote violence but reinforce the idea that nothing but violence matters.
Time and again, investigations into mass shooters unearth an expansive digital footprint on open forum sites like Discord and Telegraph, interactive video games like Roblox, and run-of-the-mill social media sites.
It’s gotten to the point where Alan Karr, a special agent with the FBI’s Milwaukee office, authored a press release on April 22 to parents, guardians and caregivers about the dangers of online predators using tactics termed “sadistic online exploitation” and specifically named the violent extremist network 764.
“The goal of the relationship is to allow the predator to manipulate and threaten the child into producing and sharing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), acts of animal cruelty, self-harm, or violence,” Karr wrote.
The Office of School Safety is painfully aware of such groups. As Kaul noted in our conversation, one of the major ways the office improves school safety is by improving school climate and culture. That includes responding to more routine issues like bullying, school fights, and other forms of harassment and assault.
“Having an office that can support schools in the work they’re doing to address those issues allows schools to be able to focus on what they ought to be focusing on, which is teaching kids,” Kaul said.
As Kilpin said at the end of our conversation, “People will do better if they know better.”
We intend to send this editorial to every lawmaker in the state. It is imperative that the Wisconsin Legislature ensure the Office of School Safety has every tool available to it, as it is the state’s line of defense against unspeakable violence.
