Baraboo high school students, community members head to Holocaust museum to ‘heal and grow’

MADISON, Wis. — A group of Baraboo high school students are headed to the Illinois Holocaust Museum today. This comes in response to the controversial prom photo that went viral internationally last November.

The Superintendent said in a statement, ” We are appreciative of the sentiment to highlight the positive school and community efforts to heal and grow. At this time, we are truly focused on serving our students, families, and community and are less interested in the coverage of our efforts.”

Baraboo’s Chief of Police Mark Schauf said since the photo went viral, “There’s been a lot of growth and development in the community since then and a lot of opportunities for education and outreach. We’ve been able to take history and make it alive in some respects. A lot of real good work between the school district working with the community members in educating not only the kids, but the community in general. It’s been a really good opportunity for the city to learn and grow and diversify a little bit going forward.”

Schauf said since November, the school has provided numerous educational opportunities including bringing in nationally recognized speakers to educate the community.

Although the police department is familiar with threats, Schauf said these threats were a different type of beast.

“The threats have been real,” Schauf said. “The threats have been scary to the parents. We’ve addressed those as appropriately as we can and the security at the school going forward to make sure we are properly serving the kids and the community. We are familiar with threats but we’ve never been familiar with the way social media took this. We were getting threats from all over the world. Identifying what threats are credible and what threats are people just being frustrated was a huge challenge for us and took up a lot of investigative resources.”

Schauf said the school’s trip to the Holocaust Museum today includes community members who signed up to attend as well.

“One of the real positives that has come out of this for Baraboo, is that we have this community involvement in our school that we haven’t had previously,” Scauf said. “The future is always going to be a challenge for us. The biggest thing for us is to make sure we keep going forward.My hope is that these educational opportunities for these kids are really something they grab hold of and push forward as the school district and community has intended.”

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