Wisconsin's School Safety Moment: What Lawmakers Got Right, Got Wrong, and Missed Entirely

From the Desk of Mark Zirtzlaff

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I started this newsletter because school safety conversations deserve to happen in plain language, not buried in policy reports or hidden inside legislative databases that most educators will never open. The people making daily decisions about the safety of students and staff are principals, counselors, superintendents, school board members, and parents. They deserve a clear-eyed, honest account of what the state's lawmakers did this session, what they failed to do, and what it means for the real work happening in real buildings every day.

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This issue focuses on Wisconsin's 2025–2026 legislative session; a session that was, from the very beginning, shaped by grief. On December 16, 2024, two people were killed at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison. Their names were Rubi Vergara and Erin West. This newsletter is, in part, a reflection on whether the legislative response honored what happened that day. I'll let you decide how you feel about the answer.

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Setting the Stage

A Legislative Session Shaped by Tragedy

On the morning of December 16, 2024, a 15-year-old student walked into a mixed-grade study hall at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison and opened fire. Two people died: Rubi Patricia Vergara, 14 years old, a freshman who had attended the school since kindergarten. And Erin M. West, 42, a substitute teacher who had spent four years serving that school community with extraordinary dedication. Six others were injured. The shooter died by suicide.

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The school had security cameras on the walls. It did not have a school resource officer. It did not have a metal detector. And it did not have the same mandated safety requirements that Wisconsin's public schools are required to maintain. That gap matters. It mattered on December 16, 2024, and it matters now.

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Wisconsin legislators responded to this tragedy, but not uniformly, and not always wisely. Some moved toward thoughtful, relationship-centered proposals. Others reached for familiar tools of control and exclusion. And as a whole, the legislature failed to pass some of the most urgently needed investments this session produced. The result is a mixed record that every district leader in Wisconsin needs to understand.

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One bright spot before we get to the bills: in April 2025, Wisconsin's Department of Justice released an updated statewide framework for behavioral threat assessment — a structured, research-backed process for identifying students who may be on a path toward violence and connecting them with support before a crisis occurs. This framework, which I'll reference throughout, represents exactly the kind of careful, relationship-centered thinking that the best legislation this session tried to build on, and that the worst legislation ignored entirely.

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The Good

What Lawmakers Got Right

Not everything that came out of this session was reactive or punitive. Several proposals reflect genuine progress; a growing recognition that school safety is not a single event or a single purchase. It is a culture, built over time, through relationships and institutional commitment. These deserve to be celebrated, and in some cases, acted on immediately.

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Schools Must Now Have a Plan for What Happens After a Crisis

The most important piece of legislation to come out of this session, in my professional opinion, is a new law requiring every Wisconsin school to include two things in its safety plan: a clear process for notifying students and families when a safety incident has occurred, and a structured process for debriefing students, families, and staff afterward. This law takes effect July 1, 2026.

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This sounds simple. It is not. Before this law, Wisconsin schools were required to have emergency response plans, but there was no mandate for what happened after the emergency ended. No requirement to communicate. No requirement to debrief. No requirement to help the community begin to heal. That silence — institutional and organizational — is itself a form of harm.

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What schools do after a critical incident matters as much as what they do during one. When students and families are left without structured communication following a safety event, that silence is filled by rumor, social media speculation, and fear, all of which deepen psychological harm and erode the trust that is the true foundation of a safe school. Structured notification and debriefing give people a framework. They reduce anxiety. They build the kind of trust between schools and families that no camera system can replicate.

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What This Means for Your School

If your district does not yet have a formal post-incident notification and debriefing process, the clock is already running. July 1, 2026, is not far away. A protocol that exists only in a binder is not a protocol — it needs to be trained, practiced, and embedded in your school's culture before an incident occurs, not after.

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A $30 Million Safety Grant Program — That Didn't Make It

Legislators proposed a $30 million competitive grant program that would have given public, private, and tribal schools up to $20,000 each for building safety improvements and security training. Priority would have gone to schools that had never previously received state safety funding; a smart design choice that would have directed resources toward Wisconsin's most underserved schools.

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It failed. It did not pass before the legislative deadline in March 2026. And that failure has a real human cost.

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Abundant Life Christian School is exactly the kind of institution this program was designed to reach. A private school, operating largely outside Wisconsin's public school safety requirements, without the budget to fund the kind of security infrastructure that might have changed what happened on December 16, 2024. Many of Wisconsin's smaller, rural, private, and tribal schools are in the same position today. They want to do better. They don't have the money to do it alone. And now, they don't have the state's help either.

 

Expanding Safety Oversight Beyond High School

One bill introduced this session would extend Wisconsin's Office of School Safety, the state agency that supports K-12 safety planning, to also cover technical colleges. This is a systems-level move that makes sense. Safety risk doesn't end at graduation. Mental health challenges, isolation, and the kind of distress that can escalate to crisis don't stop when a student gets a diploma.

 

Technical college students include young people transitioning directly out of K-12 systems, some carrying unaddressed trauma or undiagnosed mental health conditions that school safety teams have tracked for years; and that their new campus may know nothing about. Expanding the safety net to close that gap is the right instinct. The opportunity now is to make sure the implementation is grounded in relationship and prevention, not just physical security.

 

The Most Ambitious Mental Health Investment This Session — Still Waiting

A bill introduced in July 2025 with support from nearly 40 lawmakers would have dramatically expanded state funding for school mental health professionals; not just social workers, but also school counselors, school psychologists, and school nurses. The proposed investment was over $83 million per year, and it would have changed how Wisconsin reimburses districts for the people who are, in reality, the front line of school safety.

 

I want to be clear about something: the adults in this bill; the counselors, the psychologists, the nurses, are not support staff in the peripheral sense. They are the people who notice when a student stops showing up to lunch. They are the people a struggling teenager finally opens up to after three weeks of small conversations in the hallway. They are the people who know their students as full human beings. Every serious research framework on school violence prevention — including the federal behavioral threat assessment models — points to the same truth: connected students in caring communities are safer students. This bill understood that.

 

At the time of this writing, its fate is uncertain. If it fails to become law, that is not just a policy loss. It is a moral one — and the cost will be paid by the students and districts who needed it most.

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The Bad

What Lawmakers Got Wrong

Not every bill that invokes school safety is actually good for schools or students. Two proposals this session, both of which passed the full Assembly before stalling in the Senate, warrant serious attention. Both came from a genuine desire to give parents more information and teachers more authority. Both, in their specific design, would cause harm; particularly to the students who are already most vulnerable.

 

Requiring Schools to Notify All Parents Every Time Any Student Is Removed from Class

One bill passed the Assembly 54 to 43 before failing in the Senate. It would have required school principals to notify every parent of every student in a class by 5 p.m. on the same day that any student was removed, as long as the removal affected instructional time. The intent was transparency. The effect would have been harm.

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Here is what that looks like in practice. A student with anxiety begins to show signs of distress during a test. A skilled teacher quietly facilitates a transition to the counselor's office; a thoughtful, supportive move that de-escalates the situation and gets the student what he/she needs. Under this bill, that one decision now triggers a mass notification to every family in the classroom by end of day. Those parents don't know who was removed or why. What they do know is that something disrupted their child's class. And in a school community, that becomes conversation, and conversation becomes speculation, and speculation follows a vulnerable student down the hallway long after the incident itself is forgotten by everyone except him/her.

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The equity concern is equally serious. Students with disabilities, black and brown students, and students who have experienced trauma already face disproportionate rates of removal and discipline in Wisconsin schools, year after year, the data says the same thing. A blanket notification requirement amplifies the consequences of every classroom intervention and falls hardest on the students who are already most marginalized.

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Why This Matters

When every flexible, supportive response to a struggling student carries a school-wide disclosure consequence, the system's incentive shifts from "what does this child need?" to "what can I manage quietly enough to avoid the notification?" That is not school safety. That is something else entirely. This bill failed in the Senate. The thinking behind it has not gone away.

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Giving Teachers Broader Power to Remove Students — with Vague Standards

The companion bill to the one above would have expanded teacher authority to remove students from classrooms using language that critics across the political spectrum — disability advocates, educators, practitioners, and parents — described as dangerously vague. The behavioral threshold included terms as undefined as "boisterous," a standard so subjective it invites exactly the kind of inconsistent, bias-prone application that research on exclusionary discipline has documented extensively.

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Among the voices in opposition was a psychologist and parent of an autistic child, who raised pointed concerns about the impact on students with disabilities, particularly those without formal support plans, as well as students of color and students who have experienced trauma. For these students, behavioral expression is often the visible sign of an unmet need, not evidence of willful disruption. These two concepts are not the same thing, and any school safety framework that treats them as identical is not a safety framework. It is a discipline framework wearing safety's clothing.

 

Both bills failed in the Senate. That was the right outcome. But the thinking behind them is alive in many school buildings, and it will return in future legislative sessions. The work of pushing back on it; with evidence, with data, and with a clear-eyed account of what actually keeps schools safe — never really stops.

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The Ugly

What the Legislature Couldn't — or Wouldn't — Do

There is a particular kind of institutional failure that is more painful than a bad decision: the failure to act when the need is clear, the evidence is solid, and the political will simply does not show up. Wisconsin's 2025–2026 session produced several of those failures. They deserve to be named directly.

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One-Time Money Is Not a Safety Strategy

The failure of the $30 million grant program isn't just a single loss — it is the latest version of a recurring pattern. Wisconsin introduces safety funding, attaches an expiration date, and never builds the institutional infrastructure for lasting improvement. Even when these programs pass, a one-time grant of $20,000 doesn't fund a multi-year safety culture initiative. It buys a camera upgrade and a lock replacement. That is better than nothing. It cannot be mistaken for a strategy.

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Meaningful school safety requires sustained investment and multi-year commitment. Wisconsin has consistently chosen the gesture over the commitment. And the consequences of that pattern are visible in every underfunded school that is one crisis away from becoming the next headline.

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The Mental Health Funding Gap Is a Moral Failure

A pilot school-centered mental health program also failed to pass before the legislative deadline. The larger mental health funding overhaul remains in uncertainty. Wisconsin is choosing compliance frameworks over care infrastructure, and it is doing so during one of the most difficult periods in student mental health in a generation.

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The students in Wisconsin's schools right now grew up in a world shaped by a global pandemic, unprecedented rates of adult anxiety, and active shooter drills that have become as routine as fire drills. Their mental health needs are not abstract or speculative. They are documented and growing. The legislature's inability to fund the human systems that address those needs is not just a policy failure. It is a moral one.

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Private Schools Are Still Largely on Their Own

Abundant Life Christian School was private. It operated under different — and in many ways, less rigorous — safety requirements than the public schools a few miles away. This session took a meaningful step forward by requiring debriefing and notification in all school safety plans, including private schools. But the larger question — comprehensive, enforceable, adequately resourced safety standards for private schools — remains substantially unaddressed.

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How many of Wisconsin's private schools are operating today with significant gaps in safety infrastructure? The honest answer is: we don't fully know. And that uncertainty is itself a problem. The gap will not close on its own.

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The Adults Who Responded Are Still Carrying It — Largely Unacknowledged

One year after the Abundant Life shooting, first responders and school staff who were present that day spoke publicly about what they are still carrying; the invisible wounds that reshape careers, relationships, and identities long after the news cycle has moved on. Not one bill this session specifically addressed the mental health and recovery needs of school staff and first responders following critical incidents.

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The new debriefing requirement covers students and families, and that is genuinely important. But the adults in the building are not an afterthought. They are the system. Their wellbeing is not a peripheral concern. It is a prerequisite for the kind of sustained, caring school culture that protects children. This gap in the legislative record is meaningful, and it signals how much work remains to be done.

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For District Leaders

What You Need to Do — Regardless of What the Legislature Did

Here is the honest reality of where you stand after this session: you have been given partial tools, a few genuine mandates, and a significant list of unfunded needs. It is your job — and the job of your safety team — to build what the legislature has not provided, to implement what it has mandated, and to resist the institutional gravity that always pulls systems toward the easiest answer rather than the right one. That has always been the job. This session just made it more visible.

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The most immediate action item is the new post-incident notification and debriefing requirement, which takes effect July 1, 2026. If your district doesn't have a formal process for communicating with families after a safety event, and a structured plan for debriefing students and staff, you need to build it now. Not after something happens. Before. A protocol that exists only in a binder is not a protocol.

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The state's updated behavioral threat assessment framework should be the operational standard for every threat assessment team in Wisconsin. If your district doesn't have a trained, multidisciplinary team working from that framework, that is the most important structural gap in your safety system; more important than any camera upgrade or lock replacement. Building a genuine threat assessment team takes time, commitment, and ongoing investment in the relationships and trust that make it work. Start now if you haven't already.

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The failure of this session's mental health bills does not relieve you of the responsibility to invest in mental health infrastructure. It makes that responsibility more local. Community partnerships, state education department resources, federal grants from agencies like CISA and SAMHSA, and creative budget reallocation all need to be on the table. The mental health crisis in Wisconsin's schools is not waiting for the legislature to act. Neither can you.

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And perhaps the most important leadership challenge this session raises, is cultural rather than procedural. The bills that would have expanded classroom removals and triggered mass parental notifications may have failed in the Senate, but the thinking behind them is very much alive in many school buildings. Trauma-informed practice is not a soft option. It is not a political position. It is the only approach that research consistently shows to be effective at building the school culture conditions that prevent violence and sustain trust. Your job is to protect that approach from the institutional pressures that will always push toward the more visible, more politically defensible answer; even when that answer makes schools less safe in ways that are harder to measure.

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To the leaders of Wisconsin's private schools specifically: the gap in safety requirements is wide, the risk is real, and what happened at Abundant Life has made the consequences of that gap devastatingly clear. The new debriefing and notification requirement now applies to you. The state's behavioral threat assessment framework is available to you. The question is whether you will use these resources proactively — before an incident — or reactively, in its aftermath. History has a clear answer about which approach produces better outcomes.

 

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How I Can Help

Where MZ Security Consulting Fits In

I want to be straightforward about what MZ Security Consulting is and what it isn't. I am not a vendor selling cameras or access control systems. I am not a company that produces safety plan templates for districts to file and forget. I am a trauma-informed school safety consultant; a retired Navy Senior Chief with more than two decades of experience in youth development, leadership, and real-world school safety practice, and my work is grounded in a simple conviction: safety is built on trust, and trust is built through relationships.

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The new debriefing and notification mandate creates an immediate need in every Wisconsin school district. I help districts design, train, and implement post-incident communication and recovery frameworks that actually function under the pressure of a real incident; not just on paper. Building that capacity requires more than a policy document. It requires trained staff, practiced protocols, and a school culture in which adults are empowered to talk honestly about hard things with students and families.

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The state's behavioral threat assessment framework is a strong one, but a framework is only as effective as the team implementing it. I help multidisciplinary threat assessment teams build real capacity through training, tabletop exercises, and — most importantly — the relational infrastructure that makes early identification possible. The most critical element of any threat assessment process is the quality of human relationships that allow a student in distress to be seen before a crisis occurs.

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Where the legislature has not fully funded mental‑health infrastructure, I help districts make sense of the landscape; identifying what supports, grants, and partnerships already exist and how to align them with their safety and well‑being priorities. Most districts have resources they’re not fully leveraging simply because no one has had the time or bandwidth to map them. The funding gap is real. It is not insurmountable.

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And where punitive thinking still holds sway — in boardrooms, in administrator practice, in the day-to-day culture of individual buildings — I offer school climate assessments, staff training, and data-driven consultation that helps leaders make the case for prevention over punishment with the confidence of evidence and the language of professional authority. For Wisconsin's private and faith-based schools in particular, I offer tailored safety audits, plan development, and training designed for your specific context; the same evidence-based principles that drive best practice in public schools, adapted for the culture and resources of a private institution.

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"Safety isn't just about locks and cameras. It's about trust; trust between students and adults, trust between schools and families, and trust that every person who walks through that door in the morning is seen, valued, and worth protecting. Not as a behavior to be managed, but as a human being who matters." - Mark Zirtzlaff

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​That is the work. And it starts before anything goes wrong.

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​Closing Thoughts

The Work Begins Now

Wisconsin's 2025–2026 legislative session is a mirror. It reflects both our growing understanding that school safety must be trauma-informed, relational, and sustained — and our persistent failure to fully fund and sustain that vision at the level the moment demands. The bills that moved forward represent meaningful progress. The ones that failed represent a cost that will be carried by students, families, and districts who needed more than what the Legislature delivered. And the punitive impulses embedded in proposals around removals and mass notifications have not disappeared; they are deferred, and they will return.

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Rubi Vergara and Erin West cannot be brought back. But they can be honored; by every district leader who chooses to build systems that protect dignity, invest in relationships, and resist shortcuts that look like safety but are only its appearance. Their loss is a reminder that safety is not a checklist. It is a culture, a practice, and a commitment.

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The question facing every superintendent, every school board, and every safety professional in Wisconsin remains unchanged: 

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What kind of school are we building — one where children feel safe because of the locks on the doors, or one where they feel safe because of the adults in the halls?

 

The answer must be both. And the work to build that answer begins now.

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If your district is navigating these new requirements, or preparing for what comes next, I can help you assess your current safety and mental‑health infrastructure, identify gaps, and build practical, trauma‑informed systems that align with both statute and the lived realities of students and staff. Whether you need a review of your safety plan, guidance on notification and debriefing protocols, or support mapping the resources you already have, you don’t have to do this alone.

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The expectations are growing. Your capacity can grow with them. Let’s take the next step together.