School Cop Incident Shakes Up Kenosha's School Board Races

By Henry Redman, Wisconsin Examiner

March 23, 2022

The Kenosha Unified School District (KUSD) has been upended following an incident earlier this month in which an off-duty Kenosha Police officer, serving as a security guard, put his knee on the neck of a 12-year-old girl as he tried to break up a fight.

The incident has thrown a wrench in the community’s attempt to heal from the events of the last two years and has thrust a new issue into a contentious school board election. Three of the board’s seven members are up for re-election next month.

The district and its board have had to deal with the effect on students of the unrest and violence following the August 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake and ongoing fights with parents over mask mandates. Now, the community is debating the proper place for police officers in schools as it’s once again forced to confront difficult questions of policing and race.

On March 4, a fight broke out between two girls in the cafeteria at Lincoln Middle School. Video of the incident, released by KUSD, shows the two girls beginning to shove each other before Shawn Guetschow, the security guard, runs in to try to break up the fight.

Guetschow and one of the girls fall to the ground in the scrum, the video shows. Guetschow then rolls on top of her and puts his knee on her neck for 22 seconds while he puts the girl in handcuffs.
The girl’s father, Jerrel Perez, and his lawyer, Drew DeVinney, have said they plan to file a lawsuit. Citing the possible litigation, KUSD has declined to comment on the incident.

In the weeks following the fight, Guetschow was placed on paid leave while the district and Kenosha police department investigated. On March 16 he resigned, writing in his resignation letter to district Superintendent Dr. Bethany Ormseth that the lack of support he received from the district led to his decision.

“Given the events that have taken place and the escalated attention this incident at Lincoln Middle School has caused in the community, mental and emotional strain it has bought (sic) upon my family, and the lack of communication and or support I have received from the district, I can no longer continue my employment with the Kenosha Unified School District,” he wrote.

At a school board meeting on Tuesday, nearly two dozen community members spoke during the public comment period. Many of them implored the board to focus on making school safer for students.

“The past few weeks alone since the incident that happened at Lincoln Middle School, my phone has been ringing off the hook,” said Dr. Dominique Pritchett, a Kenosha-based therapist who mostly works with Black patients. “Our Black and brown girls do not feel seen, supported or safe to go to school.”

“But to have a child nearly killed in front of her peers perpetuates the trauma, the compounded trauma, racial trauma, contextualized trauma, all the traumas they’ve experienced, not just the past two years with the pandemic but since the day they were born Black and brown,” she continued. “And so I invite everyone to have conversations with your children to truly examine what is valuable and important to you because they all have to hold space together. And so when we think about the officer who kneeled on that individual’s neck, no, it is not a direct correlation to George Floyd, but my God, how it’s quite similar. And thank God she is here to tell her story. So Black girls and Brown girls are pushed out, pushed aside and pushed over within our school systems. We don’t need to be the voice for them. They have voices, are we listening?”

Speakers on the opposite side of the debate from those asking for cops to be removed from schools also said they felt student safety was being ignored.

“With the incident at Lincoln, the district now has another black eye, it’s already already dividing the community even more,” said Robert Tierney, who spoke while wearing a pro-police Thin Blue Line hat. “Student and teacher safety should be a top priority for KUSD. Parents should not have to worry about violence when they drop their children off at school. We have asked teachers to fill too many roles already. And now some want them to become de-escalation specialists. Teachers are not police. Keep officers in schools.”

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