Daniel Gugala, candidate for school board
Part 1 in a hopefully-7-part series where I talk with every single school board candidate
Daniel Gugala is running for seat #6 on the Wauwatosa School Board against Lynne Woehrle. He has a website. This is the first 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. My interview with Daniel was completed several weeks ago.
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? God, why?
When I meet Daniel, I ask him, “Why the hell would you run for school board?” He laughs a little.
For me, it was very reluctant[ly]. But ultimately, I have two sons in the district. I’ve been a community member for 25 years. I’ve lived in almost the same location for most of that time. […] I’m just seeing the trend in our schools. When I first moved here, even before I had kids and even when I did first have kids, I thought, how amazing. I love this community, it’s such a great place, the schools are so well-regarded. And over time I’m seeing that that’s declining. Not just test scores, recent safety issues—and it’s not even that recent—just those kinds of things. So, the experience for my younger son and my older son are dramatically different. [They’re] four years apart, and their experiences coming through school seem very different.
The “tipping point” for Mr. Gugala came when his younger son’s well-regarded English teacher “ended up leaving the district as a result of a physical altercation [with a student] over a phone. Over a phone,” he emphasizes with some amount of incredulity. “That just seems broken to me,” he says, “And so I guess that got me fired up enough to say, ‘What are we doing? How are we addressing these concerns around safety?’”
Later in the conversation, we come back to this particular incident. Mr. Gugala admits that he doesn’t know all the details, but from what he understands—through conversations with his son, other parents, and a video circulated widely online that he shared with me:
Essentially the kid wouldn’t get off his phone, so the teacher said, “I'm taking your phone, you can get it back at the end of the school day. So the teacher confiscated the phone. The student went to the next class. I think it was after the next class the student came back to say, "Well, yeah, I want my phone back now." And the teacher was like, “You’ll get it back at the end of the day.” And that wasn’t good enough for the student so he tried to basically force his way into the classroom and it resulted in a physical altercation.
Mr. Gugala says that “The teacher’s essentially standing in the doorway, and at some point the student basically rushes him.” That teacher resigned and so did two others from the same school at roughly the same time. Whitman Middle School, Mr. Gugala says, has something like a “33% teacher turnover.”
He tells me about a presentation he attended where school officials presented survey data from students at West High School. “Basically,” he says, “half of all high school students at West don’t feel safe at school1 [...] That was alarming to me.” At the same time, the message has been, according to Mr. Gugala, “This is 24 kids.” [Note: He also uses the number 22] But he feels this understates the problem: “It’s 500 kids. There’s a thousand students in this school, 500 kids say they don’t feel safe, that means 500 kids are impacted by these 22. You can say it’s 22, but it’s 500. [...] because if I don’t feel safe at school I’m probably not learning as well as I could be.”
Background
Mr. Gugala is a lawyer by trade and has worked in a number of different industries and in various capacities and believes his experience could be useful to the board.
I’ve been general counsel for a couple of different companies. Currently I’m chief compliance officer for a company that basically does financial services software based out of California. So I’m working with things like policy. Historically, I’ve worked a lot with legislatures on passing regulations—this happened to be around school safety. Restraint, seclusion regulations, and what was allowed, and what wasn’t, and how to set up those kinds of things.
[…]
I was working for the Crisis Prevention Institute. It’s an international training organization focused on verbal de-escalation, physical restraint techniques in schools, hospitals, mental health centers. But in a corporate capacity. I was the attorney. I worked on the legislative side, I worked on policies. I worked with a lot of schools to help establish policies that made sense.
“From a board perspective I view that as nice, tangentially. It’s good to have that experience,” but what really matters, and what he worries doesn’t happen enough, is “just being able to hear opposing sides to a matter and kind of figure out what makes the most sense and then analyzing how do we get to a resolution.” A moment later, he reiterates his point: “Like being able to hear two sides of a story and then actually determine, Is there a data point that we can get to to say this is making a difference or this isn’t? […] Can we actually come to something that’s going to be a meaningful outcome for—in this case—for our students?”
Mr. Gugala is running against Lynne Woehrle and thinks she has a “great background” and that her expertise in restorative justice “could be a super useful contributor to a particular program.” But, he sees the board’s role as something broader than “day-to-day operations” or “setting up programs for implementation.”
The school board is intended to be an oversight committee for the school district to ensure they’re staying focused on the key things that the community wants out of the school district. So I feel like I bring a much broader set of skills that apply to that. [I] understand metrics and analytics. [I] understand policy and procedure. [I’ve] been in front of legislative groups to talk about legislative and regulatory changes. [I] have been a part of boards where [we’re] talking about the issues, having these debates about where funding should go. [I] have experience working with budgets and funding and understanding the ebb and flow, influx and outflux, of expenditures.
Fighting and Discipline
I ask Mr. Gugala what he thinks about the behavior problems and fighting within schools that so many parents are concerned about, and I characterize one side as leaning towards more rehabilitation—by offering more support and help for misbehaving students—and the other side as more inclined to deterrence and punishment—through suspensions, alternative placements, or expulsions.
To be honest with you, I was actually texting with someone last night who I worked with at this prior place, and we were kind of having this dialogue. Because I was actually helping her to think about and frame that issue. Because I feel like it’s very divided...I mean—and to your point earlier—it goes to a bit of the broader societal pieces around bail reform or these kinds of other things, right? It’s like where should the pendulum be on that, in terms of victim’s rights versus perpetrator rights?
I feel like for this, the distinction at least for me in my head right now is, absolutely we should have other support systems. We should have support mechanisms, capabilities for students that are doing wrong. And try and give them the types of systems and individuals that they need to help them address those types of issues.
But, he adds, “when it comes to these situations where it’s a clear, almost like a pre-meditated physical violence” something more needs to be done. While he doesn’t think the response can or should be “one-size fits all,” he does feel that “we should be able to look at the severity of impact of each of those situations” and say “suspensions or even expulsions are the things we should be thinking about.”
Despite claims to the contrary, he worries that this is not always happening: “I have anecdotal evidence from teachers at one of the middle schools that says there’s somebody who’s been in seven fights and has been suspended seven times and they’re still back in school.”
When I ask him whether he thinks some of the measures put in place by the Superintendent, including a new disciplinary framework intended to standardize the response and punishment for various infractions has been effective, he says he’s not sure.
I don’t know that we really know. At least for me, I’ve heard two sides of the coin, and I don’t know which is the correct answer. I’ve heard that yeah, it’s happening. I’ve heard other people say, “No it’s not.” Or if it is, it’s just they cycle—where let’s say there’s a suspension, okay? There’s a suspension, and the person’s back in school and the cycle just starts again. So, I don’t honestly know what the right answer is.
He says something similar when I ask him about a meeting with the Superintendent he had mentioned on his Facebook page—that it’s just difficult to know what people are really thinking or planning or doing:
I believe this: that nobody does things because they think it’s going to cause a problem or it’s not going to be a good thing. Like people do the things they think are the best for themselves […] And I think at the end of the day, he has to appease the board, he has to appease potential new board members, he has to maybe appease the community. I don’t know how much of that there is, but I think he has to walk a line. And I think I’ve met him two or three times now, and I have more meetings with him to come. But I mean, I’m not sure I know what he feels yet.
I followed up with him after the most recent school board meeting on February 13 where Luke Pinion, Chief of Student and Family Supports provided an update on the number of expulsions, office referrals, administrative hearings, and other disciplinary measures broken down by school and various other factors, and asked what he thought. “It's definitely a step in the right direction. I think the team seems fairly new so as they better understand how they can utilize the data, I hope that helps them to refine what they are collecting and presenting.”
At the same time, he worries about the financially sustainability of some of these new hires as many of them were funded with temporary pandemic assistance provided by the state legislature that will eventually expire:
I think there’s been three rounds that have come through—I don’t know the dollar value of it—but I know that one of the concerns has been that some of those funds have been used for ongoing positions, so they’ve been used for administrative positions which are ongoing. But those funds aren’t ongoing.
[…]
The administration—I feel like it’s getting a little top heavy. But it’s something I haven’t, I don’t exactly know what all the roles are doing and how they’re impacting the learning. Like those are the things that I have to better understand before I can really make decisions or offer insight.
The Community
At one point, Daniel checks his phone, and I ask him how much time he has left. But it’s not the time he’s worried about, it’s the fact that running for the school board has turned him into a central node for the constant electronic chatter between parents, teachers, and residents about the state of the school district. And that, despite the ease and speed of communication, it’s become more and more difficult to have substantive discussion.
“I’m trying to turn it off,” he says while putting his phone away. “As you can imagine, I get like three or four-hundred texts a day on, Should we be doing this? Did somebody see this? Did you see this on this? […] Did you see this thing on Facebook? These are things people are doing.”
And I mean, I would love for you to somehow work this in to this piece. Because I do feel like it’s a struggle. Like, I’ll give you the example of the thing that, this morning, is popping up. Because we specifically made a point not to have comments on any of our Facebook posts. It was a conscious decision. Because, Facebook or any social media is not a place you’re going to have a meaningful conversation where [differing] opinions come in and actually come to a resolution.
And I think when we’re talking about the future of our kids, it’s far too important to leave to one sentence anecdotes or people being able to make quick and irrational comments on a social media platform. These are difficult decisions, and there is no simple solution.
As an example, he mentions financial constraints and the necessity of tradeoffs.
Like the budget thing is a great example. If we had unlimited budget then I would say yeah, let’s create a 30-person group who does nothing but address disciplinary matters. But we don’t have that. We don’t have an unlimited budget. So we have to balance how much teacher time or administration time is spent doing this versus how much is spent creating academic success.
[…]
But if I came to you, and I said, “Here’s the bucket of money, where do I spend this bucket of money to get this and this? I could spend it all over here, and this’ll be the result, I could spend it all here, and this’ll be the result, or I can split it and this’ll be the result. Which one’s right?” That’s a conversation. That’s a dialogue. That’s not a quick—it’s very difficult.
I ask him if he’s begun to regret running for school board. He laughs hard and says, “Yes.”
And not in the way you think. I was foolish to think that people are looking for the best candidate. I think people are looking to poke holes in people. They’re looking to find the issues that they think are lurking. And for me, if your goal is [to] set it and forget it, like—I’m going to vote in April and then I hope to never look at the board again—I think that’s terrible. I just think that’s the wrong attitude. The board is supposed to be a representation of the community, and I think that comes through community involvement. That comes through soliciting feedback from the community. And it doesn’t mean I should or could align with every single person in this district in the way that they think I should.
[…]
Do I have some of my own perspectives? Of course I do. But what I hope to do is bring perspective to a debate, to be able to come to a resolution which gets the best outcome for our kids. And I don’t think that should be a bad thing. But everybody wants to say, “Well, tell me how you’re going to vote on every single issue that’s going to come in front of you in the next three years.” And I just think that’s unrealistic, because there’s so many unknowns. And I need to know what are the metrics, how are we going to measure it? Those things are really important to me. And if you tell me we need to do this, but then you can’t give me a rationale for it, I’m going to discount that a lot more than if you give me something else and say, “Here are the hard ways we’re going to be able to measure success with this spend.” That’s going to garner a lot more support from me. Regardless of what the topic of it is.
The Board
At one point in our conversation, Daniel says that he worries about a lack of diversity of thought on the current school board. He doesn’t necessarily think there needs to be any “dramatic shifts in paradigms” but that it’d be good to have additional “financially-minded” people. He also worries that they sometimes “spend too much time reinforcing the same thoughts” or trying to pin down a perfect solution right off the bat and getting bogged down on non-essential details. He says people who do this, “grab on to the noise,” and mentions the recent memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the Wauwatosa Police Department and the school district on the duties and responsibilities of school resource officers (SROs) as an example. I follow up with him via email where he elaborates:
For me the SRO issue is this - We have had SROs in schools for 20 years without an MOU. It has taken 3 years of ask and 1 year of work to get us to an agreed MOU (nearly agreed). The noise to me is all the effort that went into trying to over-engineer this arrangement. I am not aware of any issues with the Tosa SROs and the kids trust them - so why not put a basic MOU in place on day one and then do periodic reviews to refine. Instead this has been a 4 year process in an effort to address assumed or perceived concerns (the noise).
He says something similar about how the district is dealing with disciplinary problems in its schools:
On discipline we clearly have work to do. The "noise" is trying to solve all the issues at once - data issues, concerns about disproportionality, inconsistent referrals across schools, what supports are in place, etc. - I would instead like to see a focus just on fights and ensure that we have a clear and consistent policy that is being applied to all individuals who fight. Addressing the fighting feels like a path to progress on safety and allows more focus to address the other behavioral challenges.
“When you overengineer things,” he says to me during our conversation, “you tend to make a lot of wrong assumptions.” Instead of trying to plan everything out from the beginning, we need to be more flexible and work to “build [our] capability to be able to make adaptations, to change, […] it’s when you try to guess what this is going to look like, it just becomes really difficult to do.”
Some people want you to say, “Well, this is what I stand for and then that’s what I stand for for perpetuity.” But […] if I think the exact same things tomorrow that I do today, I’m probably not learning. And so that’s where I feel like we get...it kind of goes back to this whole—some of the social media, and all this stuff, and people trying to create buckets. We should constantly be learning and evolving as people and in our thought processes, and as we encounter new things, as we hear new perspectives, as we see new measurements, we should be able to make adjustments to the way we view an issue or a topic or a matter and make appropriate changes.
The election is on Tuesday, April 4, and early voting begins two weeks prior.
Daniel was kind enough to send me this presentation. In the 2021-22 school year, 52% of students said they “always” or “usually” felt safe at school. The remaining 48% '“never” or “sometimes” did. Since then, there’s been some improvement. For the current school year, 60% of students said they “always” or “usually” felt safe at school. The remaining 40% '“never” (6%) or “sometimes” (34%) did.
Thank you for taking on this project. It really helps to decide which would be the best school board candidate.
I would be interested in seeing more of a breakdown in regard to the 48% of students who said that they "sometimes" or always feel unsafe. In what situations? Could this be in regards to catching Covid, considering the time frame that this survey was conducted? Are the unsafe feelings influenced by the increase in school shootings? I think just saying that students feel unsafe is too much of a vague blanket statement.