Harger: Bothell High students asked Northshore School Board to keep their school resource officer. Four adults said no and called it equity

“You can go around and ask every single person here, and no one will say they feel unsafe. It’s just a myth. Everyone feels safer with him.”

That’s Bothell High School senior Julian Mercado, speaking last week at a Northshore School Board meeting about Officer Garrett Ware, the school resource officer (SRO) at his school.

The board voted 4-1 to remove the position anyway.

Not for budget reasons. The district said so directly. The position is grant-funded by the federal government and costs the district nothing. The decision came out of an annual review. Board director Han Tran put it this way, according to KIRO 7: “I’m not able to support renewal of this contract because this district owes our community something more comprehensive and equitable and more empowering to all community members.”

More comprehensive. More equitable. More empowering.

I have read that quote a few times, trying to figure out what any of it has to do with whether the kids at Bothell High feel safe. I am still working on it.

Northshore School District’s own evaluation supported keeping Officer Garrett Ware. The board overruled it

On Monday morning, a large portion of the Bothell High student body walked out of class in protest. That night, parents and students packed the board meeting to tell the board exactly what they thought. The vote is done. The community is not.

According to KOMO News, the district’s own 2025-26 SRO program evaluation showed strong support from parents and faculty. A student survey found that most Bothell High students feel safe “frequently” or “almost always” at school. The high school principal and other district officials recommended that the SRO program continue.

The board voted against all of that. That is a strange place to land after a thorough internal review came back the other way.

Bothell High students built a relationship with their school resource officer. They’re telling the board the assumptions are wrong

Fair point on the other side. There are kids who feel uneasy around uniformed officers. Of course there are. Kids carry what their families carry. They carry what they see online. That is real. Nobody should wave it off.

But the answer can’t be to keep those kids away from cops their whole lives. The whole point of a school resource officer is the opposite. It is a chance for a kid to know a cop as a person. The one who shows up at the basketball game. The one who knows their name. Take that away, and the only cop that kid ever meets is the one showing up after something has already gone wrong. That isn’t an improvement.

The students at Bothell High are not arguing in the abstract. They lived it. They built relationships with this officer over the better part of a decade. They are telling the board that the assumptions the board is making are wrong.

Sophomore Ray Harless told KIRO 7 he believed the board was projecting “personal prejudices” onto the student body. Senior Brady Minneman, who started a petition that gathered more than 3,600 signatures, told KIRO 7 the goal was simple: show the board “they’re not representing the community.”

Maybe we don’t have to re-litigate 2020 every time a vote like this comes up

We had this conversation in 2020. Defund the police. ACAB. CHOP. A lot of cities tried versions of it. Some districts pulled SROs out of buildings. Many have quietly walked it back since.

I figured we had worked our way to something more nuanced. Good cops exist. So do cops who never should have made it through the academy. The job is to keep the first and remove the second.

And now, in 2026, in Bothell, a school board is voting the way a board might have voted in the summer of 2020. While the actual students are standing in front of them, saying “don’t.”

I’ll tell you what I know from my own kids’ school. There are SROs in that building. They go to the football games. They’re in the hallways. They know the kids. The kids know them. When something starts to go sideways, they are the ones to quietly handle it. And they are the reason a lot of those students will grow up thinking a cop is someone you can trust. That’s not a small thing.

Bothell High is about to lose that.

What replaces a school resource officer? The board didn’t say

Officer Ware was named Bothell High’s SRO in 2017, according to KOMO. He has been at the school for nearly nine years.

ASB President Avery Jensen told KOMO that Ware demonstrated his value just last Thursday during a “student-related incident” involving a kitchen knife. One building was temporarily evacuated. “We were in lockdown in our classrooms for around an hour, and he was there to respond right away. It just is such a sense of security at our school.”

Schools are not what they were when I was a student. Fights escalate faster. Fentanyl shows up in backpacks. Threats arrive by text in the middle of third period. A kitchen knife incident on a Thursday.

An SRO is part of how a school handles all of that. Take that SRO out, and tell me what replaces him.

The board didn’t say. I’m sure it will be equitable and empowering.

KIRO 7 reached out to the board president for clarification on what was driving the decision. The board president did not respond.

The board called it equity. Director Han Tran called it “more comprehensive, more equitable, more empowering.” The students called it their school.

Sometimes the kids are the grown-ups in the room.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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