MADISON (WKOW) — A Madison school board member is receiving pushback from community leaders after a Facebook post compared Madison’s youth jail to concentration camps.
“We would not talk about the role of the Nazis and act as if the experiences people had in concentration camps is a separate issue,” Ali Muldrow wrote Saturday in a public Facebook post.
Muldrow was criticizing the role of police in sending students to the youth jail.
“… the students they arrest and ticket in our schools are disproportionately LGBTQ students, youth of color, impoverished youth and students with disabilities,” Muldrow wrote.
She also emphasized the unique powers that police have in the schools.
“Cops can be great mentors and community members sure but they are the only people who have the power to arrest students and they target children with certain identities for the most severe punishments available that is a problem we can not ignore or afford to invest in,” she wrote.
Muldrow’s post garnered hundreds of comments with some supporting her for highlighting the issue, while others took issue with her assertion that certain groups of students are being targeted.
Fellow school board member Ananda Mirilli supported Muldrow in a comment.
“Thanks for directly speaking to the issue of armed police in our schools. Thanks for speaking to the experiences of our students upon incarceration,” Mirilli wrote.
However other community leaders took aim at Muldrow’s comments.
Madison Police Chief Mike Koval, in a statement, criticized what he called Muldrow’s “defamatory rhetoric.”
“It is unfortunate at a time when agencies like MPD are bending over backwards to increase trust and to enter into meaningful dialogues that will advance collaboration and mutual respect, that a member of our school board would be inclined to use defamatory rhetoric to make a point,” Koval said. “Attributions and inferences born in hot button buzz words only create more barriers to our mutual goal of finding the best ways to educate our children.”
Middleton Police Chief Charles Foulke wrote in a comment that Muldrow is unfit for public office.
“What an outrageous statement by an elected official,” Foulke wrote. “To equate police in schools with Nazis and JRC and Dane County Jail to concentration camps trivializes the horrors experienced by people during the Nazi era and shows that Ms. Muldrow has a complete lack of knowledge of history and is unfit for public office. We can debate police in schools without comparing police to Nazis or JRC or DCJ to concentration camps. Shameful statement.”
AChange.org petitionasking for Muldrow to step down had more than 90 signers as of Tuesday morning.
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