The Wisconsin superintendent who was accosted on stage by a parent during a high school graduation last month said the encounter left him concerned for his safety, as well as that of his family and the school community at large.
Baraboo School District Superintendent Rainey Briggs was confronted on May 31 by Matthew Eddy, who stormed the stage during the Baraboo High School graduation and physically moved Briggs out of a line of administrators greeting graduates as they received their diplomas. He wanted to prevent Briggs from shaking his daughter’s hand.
Eddy told police afterward that he and his daughter had had “past issues” with Briggs and disliked him, according to a police report. But Briggs, who has been superintendent for three years, said he did not know who Eddy was when he approached him and that they had not interacted before that day. Briggs told police that Eddy’s daughter was at one point expelled from the school, the report says.
Eddy was issued a citation for disorderly conduct and was charged with a class B misdemeanor. He is due in court on Aug. 14.
“He physically moved me from the place in which I was standing. And in that moment, I’m like, I’ve never really had anybody put hands on me like this,” Briggs told NBC News on Tuesday in his first interview since the graduation. “The reason for him coming onto the stage, whether it was he didn’t like me, he didn’t care for me, there’s still no reason, no point at all in putting your hands on another individual, regardless of what you may feel in that moment.”
Briggs said Eddy’s attorney apologized on his behalf on Monday, nearly two weeks after the disruption.
Eddy has not returned repeated requests for comment. A person who answered the phone at his attorney’s office Tuesday declined to comment.
A school resource officer who spoke to Eddy said in the police report that Eddy said he was remorseful for his actions, but only for his daughter’s sake, leading the officer to conclude “this may have been something that he had pre-planned to do.”
Eddy, 49, has been instructed not to have any contact with Briggs as part of a temporary restraining order issued last week. A hearing on the order is scheduled for Friday.
Briggs said he obtained the temporary restraining order out of concern for anyone who may be around him, including his wife and their three children, ages 22, 20 and 18.
“It’s really for the protection of myself, along with staff, along with students,” he said. “Because anyone that would accost someone in front of 3,000 students, what will they do in front of one or three or 10 or 15?”
While many online have speculated about what motivated Eddy’s actions, Briggs said it was not for him to say. But he acknowledged “the optics don’t look good,” especially for a town that faced accusations of racism in 2018, when a photograph of students giving what appeared to be a Nazi salute went viral.
Although four school board members and the school’s principal also were on stage during the graduation, Eddy, who is white, confronted only Briggs, who is Black.
“Do I think this was racially motivated? That’s a question for Mr. Eddy,” Briggs said. “That’s definitely a question that he would have to answer.”
But at the time, Briggs said, “it wasn’t so much in my mind a racial thing, more than it was a safety thing for me.”
“I didn’t know whether he had a weapon, knife, gun, whatever,” Briggs said. “That was going to cause possible harm to me, let alone everyone else that was in the vicinity of that space.”
Briggs said that he has received threatening messages since becoming superintendent in 2021, and has forwarded those messages to police, whom he credited with taking the messages seriously. He said the threats did not focus on his race but on policies, including the district’s stance against bullying. A spokesperson for the Baraboo Police Department said Briggs has sent the department two emails and one voicemail, none of which resulted in charges.
Since the graduation, Briggs, 46, said he has received hundreds of messages of support from people across the country and the world, including other superintendents.
Briggs has also received backing from the school board, which said in a statement: “That this adult felt emboldened to behave in this way in front of hundreds of students and other adults should deeply trouble us all; this type of behavior will not be tolerated.”
The seven-member school board also said that it “condemns such actions and asks the community to take a stand and speak out against this type of behavior that threatens the fabric of our democracy.”
But Briggs said he believes that Eddy’s behavior has unfairly cast Baraboo in a negative light, with some critics calling it a racist town. Baraboo is 40 miles northwest of Madison and has a population of less than 13,000, 90.4% of whom are white, according to the most recent census data.
“I do think it’s given the community an unfair narrative of being a racist community,” Briggs said. “The optics don’t look good. But I’m here to say that the community isn’t a bad community.”
