August School Board Meeting Highlights

Strategic Plan and new disciplinary framework approved, open meeting violations, and Board Member Mike Meier in fundamental disagreement on most issues

The discussion and approval of the district’s new Human Growth and Development (HGD) curriculum wasn’t the only issue discussed by the school board in the month of August, it was merely the one that attracted the most attention. As one representative from the Wauwatosa Commission for Persons with Disabilities stated on August 8th:

At some point I would love to have posted why were three hugely significant issues facing Wauwatosa School District put on one agenda? And what is unfortunate, of course, is that sex comes first, and once sex is done there goes the audience.

This elicited a few laughs but is, I think, true. Pretty much everyone did leave after the sex.

In the month of August, the Wauwatosa School Board had two in-service meetings and two board meetings. A few things I found interesting:

→ School Discipline. On August 22, the school board approved a new Disciplinary Framework. A recurrent problem for administrators in the district has been understanding the nature and scope of disciplinary problems across all of its schools, because schools within the district vary in the types of disciplinary problems they record and how they categorize offenses. The Disciplinary Framework will standardize the categorization of offenses and their punishments. Another goal is to hopefully reduce the much higher disciplinary rates among black students and students with disabilities. Based on statements at the board meeting, Wauwatosa School District is particularly bad in this respect when compared to other districts in the state.

→ CUBE 2022. Board Member Jessica Willis was nominated to attend the National School Board Association’s Council of Urban Boards of Education (CUBE) 2022 Conference. Board Member Mike Meier thought it was a little egregious to spend $2,500 sending a board member to Miami and voted ‘no’. Nominations and costs were approved by the board 6-1.

→ Policy Subcommittee nominations. Board Members Jenny Hoag and Jessica Willis were nominated to be on the Policy Subcommittee. During the many hours of discussions leading to the approval of the District’s Strategic Plan for 2022-2025, whenever something came up that was vague or incomplete but that the Board didn’t have time to fix, someone would say, “The policy committee needs to be sure to…” So I imagine they already have a lot of work to do. Nominations were approved 7-0.

→ WSD’s Strategic Plan 2022-2025. The board approved its strategic plan for the next three years by a vote of 6-1. It is a very long document with a lot of detail and the school board discussed it for many hours over two board meetings and an in-service. Superintendent Demond Means presented the following graphic to synthesize its various components:

It’s shaped like a house. Source: ”An Overview of Strategic Planning for Wauwatosa School District”

The District’s Mission:

As a connected, inclusive community of learners, we serve as active advocates to provide equitable access to excellent academic, co-curricular and social-emotional learning opportunities that empower every student to thrive as passionate, productive, and creative citizens.

The District’s Core Values:

Eradicate Inequity.

Eliminate Disproportionality.

Exceed Proficiency for All.

After some discussion during the August 17th in-service meeting, the following was added:

Ensure an Exceptional Student Experience.

The main body of the document was focused on the district’s major strategic goals for the next three years:

1. Academic Performance,

2. Diversity and Inclusion;

3. Social, Mental, and Emotional Health;

4. High Quality Staff;

5. Community and Culture;

6. Operations

These were then subdivided into multiple 1-year strategic objectives with accompanying performance metrics to monitor accomplishment. I’ll only mention one only because it consumed about 40 minutes of discussion during the August 22 board meeting and some lesser amount of time during the August 17 in-service meeting.

Strategic Objective Section 2.1 (version 1):

Immediately begin to implement strategies and programs to increase representation and the sense of belonging of non-white students and staff, to be completed by October 2022.

There was an involved conversation during the August 17 in-service to change “non-white” to “Black and Brown,” I think because some board members felt that was where the district’s data said the greatest disparities were identified. This led to (version 2):

Immediately begin to implement strategies and programs to increase representation and the sense of belonging of Black and Brown students and staff, to be completed by October 2022.

However, Mike Meier, during the August 22 meeting, felt that this language was potentially legally risky, might exclude someone, and should be significantly amended. Superintendent Means then added an additional (third) paragraph at the end (version 3):

Immediately begin to implement strategies and programs to increase students and staff representation and the sense of belonging of individuals with disabilities, individuals of color, LGBTQIA2S+ individuals, individuals with varied religious, atheist, and agnostic identities, individuals of varied immigration citizenship and dreamer statuses, and individuals with limited socioeconomic statuses.

Also acknowledging in the Wauwatosa School District we are on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland along the southwest shores of Michigami, North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida and Mohican nations remain present, to be completed by October 2022.

Strategies to address black and brown students are to be completed by October 2022. Strategies for all other groups will be accomplished across the duration of a three-year strategic plan.

Multiple board members were really excited about this, or at least they said they were excited. And I too look forward to increasing the representation of agnostics among students and staff.

But then Board Member Sharon Muehlfeld asked how we would apply the already-listed key performance indicators (KPIs) to all these groups since they were specifically tailored to the “Black and Brown students” in version 2. She also wanted to explicitly mention making improvements for students with disabilities based on the results of a recent Special Education Audit.

After more discussion, Strategic Objective 2.1 was reverted back to version 2 and a new Strategic Objective was added to include the language Mike Meier proposed. A separate Strategic Objective 1.7 was added to include actions based on the Special Education Audit.

Just before the final vote, one member of the community expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that Strategic Objective 2.1 did not mention special education students, Mike Meier made a motion to add those words, Sharon Muehlfeld again asked how the underlying KPIs could even be applied to them, there was some arguing, no one seconded the motion, and the Strategic Plan was approved by a vote of 6-1. Mike Meier voted ‘no.’

In general, I think it’s useful to have long term goals and concrete actions to achieve them, and it’s clear that a lot of thought and discussion went into this. But I guess I don’t know what a lot of the things in this document mean.

For instance, objective 3.1:

Introduce and/or revive developmentally-appropriate, district-wide framework that supports and integrates trauma-sensitive, restorative practices, and PBIS school programs for teachers and staff […]

What is PBIS? The internet says it stands for Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support and promises “an evidence-based three-tiered framework to improve and integrate all of the data, systems, and practices affecting student outcomes every day.” This sounds pretty technical, but when I read more closely, a lot of the suggestions to teachers are just to do things like “put up encouraging statements on your classroom walls,” and “provide positive reinforcement.”

And when I look up what a “trauma-sensitive” classroom is, it seems to mean pretty anodyne things like having educators practice “active listening” or painting their rooms in “warm colors.”

On the other hand, when I look up something harmless-sounding like “Social and Emotional Learning,” (part of the overarching Strategic Goal #3) I learn that half the country thinks it’s going to turn their children into radical leftists.

Why do innocuous-sounding terms turn out to be wildly contentious and complicated-and-cutting-edge-sounding terms mostly refer to basic things that thoughtful and caring people have been doing forever? I’m not sure.

Also, it’s not always clear, in a concrete sense, what is actually going to happen. Strategic Objective 5.4 states that they want to have a “45% decrease in out of school suspensions in 2024-25” and Objective 2.4 wants to “Decrease the disproportionality [of] discipline rates [for] Special Education, Black and Brown students.” I think the thought is that the new Disciplinary Framework described above will somehow lead to these things, but what if it doesn’t? There are ways to hit these metrics that don’t necessarily signal any real improvement in the underlying problem. Goodhart’s Law is a real thing.

One Board Member, Leigh Anne Fraley, I think voiced somewhat similar worries when she said, “In our attempt to be expansive, if you're not an educator or someone who's sat in this room for all these conversations, it might feel too vague.”

And Mike Meier, during the August 23rd in-service, said he doesn’t really like words like “moral imperative” and “equity,” because they often lead to foggy thinking. “Where if the word’s there, we say ‘yes.’ But what do we specifically do?”

Yeah, something like that.

→ General acrimony and discord among board members. During public comment at the August 22 meeting, one parent asked why the board hadn’t posted the recording of its August 17 in-service meeting (it was eventually posted on August 26th) and wonders out loud if this is because communication had occurred prior to that meeting through a shared Google Docs file which would be a violation of the state’s open meetings laws.

While this got no response from the board during the August 22 meeting, if you listen to the August 17 in-service around minute 24, you can watch the blow-up between Mike Meier and Eric Jessup-Anger after the latter cuts him off and says he’ll come back to him after other people who submitted comments on the Google Document get a chance to speak. Mike Meier says that he thinks this is illegal because it’s a walking quorum.

I’m not sure this is actually true, and if you listen to the end of the board meeting on August 8, there’s a discussion about creating a Google Doc to submit questions and changes to the Strategic Plan so the staff can review them before the August 17 in-service. This seems like a pretty normal and reasonable thing to do, but I’m not a lawyer. After the 5-minute recess everyone went back to discussing the Strategic Plan like nothing happened.

More acrimony and discord occurred during the August 23 in-service meeting which YouTube tells me only six people so-far have watched. This is unfortunate but understandable. If I had to summarize the whole thing in one word it would be: diversity.

In contemporary discourse, diversity is often portrayed as an unalloyed good. And I do think emphasizing the benefits and deemphasizing the downsides of a particular goal or value can, at times, be reasonable. For example, if everyone around you thought doing X or believing Y was bad and terrible, and you thought there were actually many upsides and it would be better for everyone, on the margin, to do a little more X and believe a little more Y, you should just talk about the good parts because everyone’s already familiar with the bad parts. But I think there are very obvious potential downsides to the effectiveness of organizations and groups when there’s a lot of diversity—(1) because it can make communication difficult or impossible and (2) because deep differences in beliefs, values, and goals reduces group cohesiveness and its ability to accomplish things. Many times these can be overcome. Occasionally they appear insurmountable.

The goal of August 23rd’s in-service was to try to identify the school board’s moral imperative. There were multiple exercises planned and there were several items on the agenda, but they never really got to all of them because the board couldn’t agree on their moral imperative, whether the term moral imperative was too ideological, or even whether it was necessary to define a moral imperative at all. Most of the disagreement was between Mike Meier and the other six members, although they weren’t uniform in the level and nature of their disagreement.

After an hour and a half, Board Member Jenny Hoag says something like, Surely we can at least agree that we’re here to serve the students and do what’s best for student learning and outcomes? And Mike Meier says, “We hold a piece of the sovereign. My customer is the people. And we are a public school district. So I serve the community. I have a duty to the taxpayers whose money we take. I have a duty to the citizens.”

Some of the board members would very much like everyone to get along, to work together, to collaborate, and for the board to be unified and cohesive. In order to do this, they want to establish shared norms and ways of operating, and Jenny Hoag sees this as the key to improving student outcomes:

Our facilitators from WASB [Wisconsin Association of School Boards] were incredibly clear with literature to say a board that works together, that’s high functioning, has better student outcomes. It’s crystal clear. Study after study.

But it’s hard to do that when there is a fundamental disagreement about why you’re on the board, who you’re responsible to, what’s most valuable, and even what language and words to use. A wide gulf in people’s sincerely-held beliefs really does make it difficult for people to work together because at a deep enough level of disagreement you lose trust and stop believing others are acting in good-faith, and you can’t agree on goals or why you’re trying to achieve them.

And the acrimony in the board is at least partly a function of acrimony within the community as a whole. Sharon Muehlfeld thinks some members of the public are starting to act like bullies and finds it difficult to engage with them when they threaten to move away if the board approves something they don’t like, like the HGD curriculum. Eric Jessup-Anger wants to have more constraints on public comment. On some level these are pretty reasonable comments. On another level it seems like little more than wishing the problem would just go away. Mike Meier finally says at one point:

During the course of this meeting I’ve heard statements that, in my perception, they were criticisms of things said at the microphone by citizens. And also a shot taken at quote, First Amendment Rights, unquote. It’s my understanding that over the next 2-3 months a great many citizens are going to vigorously operate to exercise their democratic rights in this community. And their legal rights. And I’m not looking forward to this period. And I guess it’s because the community hasn’t decided what direction they want us to go in. We have different perspectives on the board. We were voted into office. I don’t understand, but that’s what we were given. And these are on the fundamentals of how we run the school district.