Chris Zirbes, candidate for school board

Part 4 in a hopefully-7-part series where I talk with every single school board candidate

[Note: There will only be one newsletter this week and through the remainder of March. I’ll be out of the country for work. During this time I plan to send out the remaining candidate interviews.]

Part 1: Daniel Gugala, seat 6

Part 2: Lynne Woehrle, seat 6

Part 3: Liz Heimerl-Rolland, seat 5

Chris Zirbes is running for seat #5 on the Wauwatosa School Board against Liz Heimerl-Rolland. His website is here. This is the fourth in a series of conversations I've had with school board candidates, and I hope to complete and publish the rest through February and March. I originally sat down to speak with Chris on February 2nd.

Sometimes it’s useful to ask each of the candidates the same questions so you can compare their responses. I think some groups are already doing something like this, so I didn’t. I have some topics I'm interested in, but I generally let the conversations go where they want. Perhaps through this, in combination with other candidate questionnaires, forums, and meet-and-greets, you can come to a slightly more complete understanding of these people.

Also, a note. Unless people are very polished public speakers, they tend to pepper their speech with things like sort of, kind of, like, not to mention err and uhh. They double back on themselves to revise the beginnings of their sentences and sometimes do all sorts of things that are seamless when spoken but sound clumsy when read. I tried to remove most of those.

Why?

Chris’ interest in running for the school board began somewhat inchoately last July. Before then he had not been particularly engaged with what the school board was doing, but at his wife’s prompting he attended several board meetings on the district’s new human growth and development curriculum¹ and the role of School Resource Officers (SROs) in schools, and was surprised by what he saw. He described long arguments among board members about the role of SROs, with “[Wauwatosa Police Chief James] MacGillis and the Lieutenant or Sergeant […] deflecting questions that night for hours.” Questions, that he felt, “were kind of BS.”

Referring to the approval of the new human growth and development curriculum, he was particularly concerned about the timing of it all. “They had all these big topics in summer when people weren’t there,” and he was frustrated by the way some of the survey responses from parents soliciting feedback about the curriculum had been thrown out.

We talked to all our friends in Tosa, [and] everyone had submitted the survey that could. Then a couple weeks later [we] found out that this person who’s an empty nester or this person who’s a young couple that just moved here—their names or their surveys were randomly removed from the survey.

While he recognized that many survey responses were removed because they came from email addresses that did not match the district’s internal database of parent contact information, he still felt that, “it just sounds like a, We don’t like this opinion so let’s throw it out. If you disagree with us, we don’t want any part of you, sort of thing.”

Over time, as he became more engaged—he mentions commenting once at a meeting but also talking to his wife who “would talk to friends, read stuff on Facebook, read stuff on the Pasadena Neighborhood site,”—some friends suggested that he should run himself.

“I had no interest in it. I have other volunteer positions, I’m on other boards. Kids have sports and practices, and I didn’t think I had time to do it.” But he realized there was a lot of potential support. “One day I went and met with some people and...I don’t have a Facebook, I don’t know how to design a website, I don’t how to campaign, I don’t, you know—all these things. I realized there was a group of people willing to help.”

And, of course, he’s running because he’s concerned about his children.

We have a junior at West and two seventh graders at Whitman. If we only had the junior at West, I probably wouldn’t be doing this and sticking my neck out, but we have five-and-a-half years left of the Tosa school district. My daughter has anxiety. She’s one of those kids that you hear about that refuses to go to the bathroom all day long at school, because they’re afraid to go in the public restrooms. Something could happen. There was a fight a couple weeks at West in the bathroom.

He shares a website (3TosaDads.com) with two other candidates—Daniel Gugala and Michael Zollicoffer. He’s known Daniel for many years, because they are in essentially the same situation. “His oldest and my oldest are the same age,” he says, “And I mean, if we didn’t meet in 4k, we met in 5k, and the boys played Pee-wee football together, and went to McKinley [Elementary School] together, and I’ve known the guy twelve years.” Daniel in turn was friends with Mike Zollicoffer, and Chris explains the decision to coordinate their campaigns:

We talked about it one night and were like, Sure let’s do this. [Board Members Eric] Jessup-Anger and [Jennifer] Hoag combined resources last year. They had doorknockers, they had marketing stuff very similar to ours. It’s just the two of them. I mean, doing this is not cheap. We’re gracious enough to get donations, but you still put your own money in.

Despite sharing financial resources, Chris emphasizes that “We’re running independently. We all have different ideas, we have some of the same ideas. Mike’s big thing is this, Daniel’s big thing is that, and my big thing is [everything below].”

He continues, it’s worth it “if we can save X thousand dollars by having door knockers that are the same or a 5-by-8 card that I pass out that’s the same,” or, referring to the candidate meet-and-greet at Leff’s Lucky Town in early-February, “sharing the thing Tuesday. I thought that was a great turnout.” He says that while there have been some comments about the significance of this, with some members of the community “saying that we’re together, and we’re sexist because it’s three moms and we’re three dads. We’re not. This wasn’t planned—that we can only run against three women. It just happened that way.”

Safety and Staffing

Chris describes a PTA meeting he attended where Wauwatosa West High School’s principal, Corey Golla, presented data on the number of fights since 2019. Since the end of 2021 and through the first semester of 2022 “the average is like four a month at West” where before it might have been “one or two a semester.”

“There was maybe twenty-five of us there, and a couple of these moms were breaking down crying, talking about their child being bullied. And what’s happening to the person that’s doing it or the group of kids that are doing it?” He asks. Many parents feel dissatisfied with the school’s response in these situations.

Drawing me into his example, he says, “If Ben and Chris get in a fight at school, the principal is sending out an email to the parents at that school saying, ‘Today there was a fight [between] two individuals, [and] per the district guidelines, they will be appropriately disciplined’ or something like that. What did they get? What was their punishment? What does that mean?” he asks. While acknowledging that privacy laws potentially prohibit divulging all the details, he suggests, “Why can’t the email say, ‘There was a fight today at West. The perpetrator got suspended for four days, and the other individual got suspended for two.’ just so parents know that discipline’s actually going on? […] I think it would give parents a little bit of peace of mind.”

Part of the problem, according to Chris and one of the Associate Principals at West, is that the school is short on supervisory staff. “The people that are in the hallway, they meet the kids in the morning, they walk the hallway,” Chris says, “they only have two or three of them now.” He wonders if it may have been wiser to use the district’s ESSER funds for roles like this. He knows the teachers are overwhelmed too, and he’s worried that resources are potentially being misallocated.

Teachers need aids, teachers need help with the kids that need more help. So I mean they’re spending a lot—and I’m not saying it’s bad—but they’re spending a lot of time with the kids that need the help. That’s a great thing, but there’s kids in that middle area that might not be getting all the help they need. The higher, more proficient kids still need help too maybe², but they’re not getting it.

Chris mentions some of the recent hires and worries their roles are vague and not centered on helping children and teachers in concrete ways. “Thee Dean of Students, the Assistant Dean of this, the Associate Dean of that, it sounds like a lot of middle management people. No one’s really quite sure what their role is. How does it help?” he wonders. “How does it help my kid? How does it help my kid do better in class, feel safer in class, be able to walk the hallway safely? How does it help the teachers that are there that have thankless jobs?”

Overall, while he has no doubts about the school board’s intentions and their motivation to do what’s best, he’s not sure “if they know what that is.” But for him, it means, “getting the teachers the help that they need.”

District Finances

Chris tells me that he has started to attend meetings of the school board’s finance committee. In January, he attended one that included, among others, board members Mike Meier and Mike Phillips, the district’s Chief Financial Officer, Keith Brightman, and the district’s financial auditor.

That budget for next year showed a a million and a half dollar shortfall. Meaning, based on state levies, and taxes our top-line revenue wasn’t enough to support our expenses that we had. That’s a little bit of a concern. And it’s complicated because I know the school puts their budget out—the school calendar year is July 1 to June 30, the state funding doesn’t come out until October—so there’s a little bit of a window there where the school is putting out a budget before they know exactly how much they’re going to get. But at the same point I’m not sure how much that number changes either.

This, coupled with the referendum and reduced enrollment, leaves him worried. “The board used the term financial cliff,” he says, and the state pandemic relief funding that was used to pay for a number of new staff positions will eventually cease. “The program ends, and they’re still funding these 3-year contracts without the revenue to support it once the ESSER money goes away. […] How else are you going to raise enough money?”

I mention that his opponent, Liz Heimerl-Rolland, felt that the district was in good financial shape after speaking with Mr. Brightman. He says he’s personally never met her and admits to not quite understanding what is driving this difference in their respective perceptions. After he posted something on Facebook about the financial committee meeting he attended,

a week or two after that, she posted a similar thing. She met with Keith Brightman […] and they were all like, How well we’re doing, there’s no cliff, there’s all this good stuff. I was like, Keith Brightman was in the room presenting with Mike Phillips, Mike Meier, and I and that other group that I told you about. I don’t know where this came from.

This week, I followed-up with him via email and asked if his opinions on the school district’s finances had changed in the intervening month as he’d learned more. I also mentioned that one explanation I’d heard for the $1.5 million budget deficit was that it was partly an artifact of receiving ESSER funds as revenue in one fiscal year but spending them in another. He responded:

For the fiscal year ending 6/30/22 the board did take $1.6m of ESSER funds and did put that into the fund balance account.  The budget for the ‘22/‘23 year still is showing a $1.46m deficit.  The January 31, 2023 year to date financials are showing a drop in revenue (partially from declining enrollment) versus the same period dated January 31, 2022 of $900,000 or a 8.8% drop. They are all banking the state legislature and Robin Vos to give the districts some portion of the $6.5b operating surplus at the state level. Dr. Means said at Monday’s board meeting that there are tough budgetary decisions coming in the future.

Trust

Chris is worried both about the level of trust between the community and the board and the trust internally among board members themselves, although he did not seem particularly sanguine about the latter. “I don’t think the current board’s going to build trust amongst themselves anytime soon,” and a big component of that, he thinks, is the suit Mr. Meier has filed against the rest of the board. “Once the lawsuit happened, how do you…if you and I were business partners, and I accused you of something and all of a sudden you got a lawsuit slapped on you, you probably wouldn’t ever trust me again.”

Nevertheless, one of the things Chris thinks set him apart from other candidates and board members is his experience in the banking industry and his professional expertise in sales and communication. “I mean, skill-set wise I can talk to people. I could have met you in the parking lot and said something to you and we could talk. I do it at work all day long. I can pick up the phone and call somebody I don’t know and get a meeting. I can go and network with a group of people.”

When it comes to communication and transparency between the board or the school district and the community, he mentions the debate surrounding the approval of the human growth and development curriculum and how it seemed poorly timed given the inherent contentiousness of the topic within the community. “It’s summer, you know? They had all these big topics in summer when people weren’t there,” and there is, of course, the inevitable suspicion—reasonable or not—that such a decision generates. “You talk to all these parents and they’re like—in the summer when the growth curriculum came out it seemed like it was posted at the last minute before the 24-hour rule so it could be on the agenda.” This reflexive suspicion becomes hard to quash and some members of the community feel increasingly alienated by the school board’s decisions. “It seems like there’s votes sometimes that are thrown in at the last minute or discussion that’s thrown in at the last minute. I mean, a lot of people just seemed frustrated with the current situation.”

The Community

I ask Chris what’s been most surprising to him since he decided to run for the school board.

“I mean, realizing the divide that we have...I mean, it’s crazy,” he says. While he lives off North Avenue, “if I go fifteen blocks east, if I’m on the East side all of a sudden, I didn’t think anything ever changed. I thought I was just in Tosa.”

But since running, “it just seems like East people are East people and West people are West people, and it’s almost—not confrontational—but there’s a way about them.” He wouldn’t have anticipated something like this “in a million years.”

He thinks that the ability to communicate or engage charitably with other people’s views has been lost since the pandemic or, more subtly perhaps, that the pandemic has caused residents to think that their neighbors have changed in ways that they really haven’t.

Honestly, I think so much has changed since the pandemic, that people think everything has changed. I mean, I can’t say like, “I’m just trying to do the right thing for my kids” without somebody saying, Well, your kids are white, normal, you’re privileged, you’re a racist. I can’t say I’m trying to do something for my kids.

This has generated criticism of him during the campaign, though he tries not to let it bother him. “I’m also relatively thick-skinned,” he says. “There’s been posts about Daniel and Mike and I being right-wing extremists. It’s from people we’ve never met, never heard of, never seen. And I read it or somebody might share it with me, and I’m like, ‘I don’t care.’”

“This is not a get rich scheme. I’m not being paid for this. I’m literally just trying to do right by my kids and everybody else in Tosa’s kids. It’s not a political witch hunt. I didn’t want it to be a political witch hunt. I try to take the high ground.”

Nevertheless, despite the occasional unpleasantness, he sees an upside to it all:

You live in Tosa for 22 years, you know people, you’re in specific organizations, you volunteer. You make friends with your kid’s friend’s parents and stuff like that. But that’s just this small group. There’s a mass of people that I have never met or maybe have not even heard of. And since December 20th, you know, it’s blossomed.

[…]

You can never know enough people. You can never have a big enough circle or inner circle of people. So I mean, win or lose, I still gain something out of it, I think. Not to get sappy, but yeah.

1. Covered previously here and here

2. Somewhat relatedly, I did hear in this week’s school board meeting that without ESSER funding only 0.5 FTE staff would be dedicated to the gifted and talented program in the school district. Superintendent Demond Means said, “In a school district with 7,000 students, I don't know—that’s unbelievable to me.”