On Wednesday morning, a “semi-marked” van sat with police lights flashing at the corner of Fernwood Ave. and Lorraine St. facing Mitchell Elementary School. It turned out, the usual crossing guard was off for the day, and guards are actually Ann Arbor Police Department employees, so AAPD sent a substitute, spokesperson Chris Page confirmed.

That’s all fine, except in this era of immigration enforcement agents purportedly picking up potential deportees by lying in wait for them near public schools, AAPD freaked a lot of people out simply by not having the name of the department prominently displayed on the van. Sure, the police lights were a clue; ICE probably doesn’t sit around with its lights going. But Mitchell, among the most diverse schools in the district, has a lot of children of immigrants in attendance. As we’ve seen recently across the country, having legal status (or even U.S. citizenship) is no guarantee that ICE will lay off.

To make matters worse, though, nobody actually seemed to be doing the crossing guarding. Traffic was a mess at that intersection when I joined the dropoff line at 8:45 a.m. to offload my little darlings, and another parent who was there earlier told me she didn’t see anyone, either. Based on what the principal and other parents said, and what I saw, the officer, it appears, just sat in the car the whole time. Page did not answer questions about that inactivity in our email exchange.

This isn’t OK. In such situations, especially near schools, AAPD must make it clear that it’s them – and not just to those able to glimpse the passenger side of the vehicle where the agency name is written. A uniformed police officer shepherding kids across the street would’ve been good not just for their safety but to calm some ICE-paranoid nerves, too.

Your news is here. The data center debate may be full of sound and fury around here but isn’t all the rage elsewhere in Michigan, AAPS teachers are still fighting for a contract, a native son was an Olympic flagbearer, and a tough basketball loss is spun as necessary adversity. 

This is last week’s most-clicked link.

Oh! And one last thing: Do you love your neighborhood? Want to be quoted telling us why? Go to this survey to offer thoughts for our upcoming annual City Guide.

– Steve Friess, editor

Corrections:

1. Data centers are … not unpopular?: Well, sort of. A plurality of respondents, 36.4 percent, in a statewide poll of 600 people conducted by the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce said the large computing facilities will provide economic benefits, specifically more jobs, to Michigan. The chamber, which is a cheerleader for data center development, touted that figure as meaning there’s “a 2-to-1 margin” of support for them because 19.3 percent said there would be no economic benefit. Still, bigger message from the poll seems to be that more people either think it will have no economic impact (20.3 percent) or don’t know what the impact will be (23.3 percent). More broadly, in fact, 42.4 percent hadn’t even heard about data centers. When asked about their position on them, 25.3 percent of voters oppose them and just over 5 percent are supportive; 65.7 percent “did not offer a position.” All of this suggests that, despite the intense media coverage, all the local anti-data center legislation, and all the protesting, the battle over this issue remains undefined to most voters. Beyond this survey, there are other data center developments this week, notably a judge’s refusal to slow the construction of the OpenAI-Oracle data center coming to Saline Twp. and a ballot measure in Augusta Twp. giving voters the decision on whether to rezone 500 acres for a facility near the township’s border with Milan. Interestingly, after coming out enthusiastically in support of the Saline Twp. project, governor Gretchen Whitmer made no mention of data centers in her final State of the State address this week.

2. AAPS working on no-phones plan: With Whitmer signing into law a ban on their use during instructional time (and bragging about it in her big speech), the district is weighing how to implement it. MLive reports that some believe one option, providing students with pouches to seal their devices in for the entire day, could cost as much as $15 per pocket, or more than $200,000 for a district of 17,000 students. Another option, however, would be to hang “pocket charts” in each classroom; a thirty-six-pocket organizer retails at Walmart for less than $20 a pop. AAPS board president Torchio Feaster tells MLive that the district has been “ahead of the curve” on this issue, with several schools running pilot programs.

By Jennifer Taylor

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