Lynne Woehrle, candidate for school board

Part 2 in a hopefully-7-part series where I talk with every single school board candidate

Lynne Woehrle is running for seat #6 on the Wauwatosa School Board against Daniel Gugala (His interview is here). She has a website. She’s also an associate professor at UW Milwaukee and its Director of Peacebuilding Programs (somewhat related book she wrote here). This is the second 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 Lynne 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 run?

Lynne has lived in Wauwatosa since 2002 and has been involved in politics ever since. She's helped with local, state, and national-level campaigns, and was one of the founding members of TosaTogether, an organization that, according to it's website, exists to:

Advocate for Equity in Our Schools

Welcome Everyone

Confront the Structures of Systemic Injustice

Push for Change from Public Officials

But she really started to get involved with the school district when Superintendent Dr. Demond Means asked her if she might be willing to volunteer her expertise in “conflict transformation and restorative justice” to look at how those types of efforts were being applied within the schools and whether there were ways to improve them. She saw the challenges kids were having coming back to school after the pandemic and attended a listening session that the Superintendent held in the fall of 2021 where he mentioned implementing some of these restorative justice practices. She told him afterward, “If you ever decide to go forward with that, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.”

He took her up on the offer, and Lynne focused her attention on three schools within the district that had recently seen a large turnover in staff. She began to catalogue the practices she was seeing implemented and how staff were being involved. By the end of the school year, she was able to provide some insight about what was happening in these schools. “The analysis just really showed—it was that different schools are doing different pieces of things. And that a next step would be to get an even better survey and decision about where to emphasize.”

She pointed him toward resources that other school districts were using and also helped the district apply for and ultimately receive a restorative practices grant for Madison Elementary school from the Wisconsin Department of Justice that would fund, according to the website, “training, coaching, consulting, and supplies to help move from the stage of reading and theory to the stage of application and implementation” of restorative practices with a core focus on 4th and 5th graders and a plan to “invite peer staff from the associated middle school to expand the restorative justice program to older youth as well.”

But she also admitted that part of the reason she decided to run was simply that “A lot of people asked me to.” She says, “I’m a humble person, but a lot of people asked me if I would and what would it take to convince me. And I was basically—Well, there has to be enough people to make this work. I have to really understand that there’s support. Because a campaign—especially an all city-campaign—is a lot.”

Kids these days

I asked Lynne what she found in her research for the Superintendent and whether she had gained any insight into the challenges facing the district. She said that “it’s an incredibly complex issue” and that it mixes the “personal-emotional, the person’s intellectual understanding” and “policy that can be at [the] school level, state level, even national level.” However, she did note that “our district, as difficult as it was last year and even going into this fall, from what I can see, our district is not off-the-charts abnormal.”

She identified what she considered to be four important factors underpinning the district’s current problems. These included some worrying trends that had appeared prior to the pandemic and were perhaps exacerbated by the pandemic itself as well as teacher turnover and the district’s priorities upon returning to in-person learning.

I think probably the biggest, hardest frustration is you can’t just pinpoint Here’s the one cause, now let’s deal with it, and it’s gone. It’s multiple sources. Everything from frustration to how we changed our habits during Covid because we didn’t have to be as interpersonal with people. A lot of us, a lot of people didn’t have to. Kids in schools lost a lot that year, and I don’t just mean academically. You can statistically see that. But emotionally they lost a lot. I was for having the virtual option, I took advantage of it due to health reasons in our household. So we didn’t really have a choice. […]

So I think Tosa school district did a great job offering an alternative. But the reality is, kids lost a lot. And a year to us, is like...you know, take my youngest one. It was two-and-a-half years, and she’s only nine. That’s like a third of her life. And so when you think about that, that’s a lot of things where they didn’t have the classroom. When kids go to school, they’re learning and trying to learn how to process difference. They’ve got the really strong family core—and it should be that way—but how we interact with people in our lives, how we moderate our own experiences and opinions in order to work with others and in order to collaborate and grow with others—a lot of that was hard to do online. It just wasn’t set up that way. So that was a big loss.

But there were also troubling signs even before the pandemic. “If we look at the numbers [with] school violence, and [mass] shootings—some of that was already there. So it’s not like, Oh, Covid caused this.”

Another potential factor was the district’s emphasis on learning loss and regaining lost ground on academics rather than an emphasis on rebuilding stunted interpersonal skills. “They weren’t the first priority when we came back to school,” she said, and noted that while research can only take you so far there had been some interesting studies “looking at schools that have put more emphasis on social emotional [learning] in the first semester. And then turned to, Let’s really push the academics.” Those that did, she said, had students that “tended to come back in a little easier. And in the end, maybe they weren’t as strong academically that first semester, but by the end of the second, you know that was kind of made up. In contrast, schools in Wauwatosa didn’t “do as much of the social-emotional first as some of those districts.”

Finally, “we also had a huge staff turnover. People made choices in all industries. We shouldn’t hold schools to any different standards. Lots of change, and loss, and cycling. So what [students] came to was a whole lot of teachers that hadn’t had relationships with them.”

I ask if whether, because the pandemic was such a large component of the problems we are seeing now, things might just settle down on their own. Teachers will stop quitting, kids will become used to being in school again, and a lot of these problems will resolve themselves. Lynne says that could be, but argues that the issue is “Kids aren’t in school that long. Parents, and maybe the kids, want it to settle faster. So you’ve got to push that. You’ve got to put some things in place. You’ve got to give the extra resources in that direction.”

The other piece that I would say is the research on Covid. [Covid] tended, in a lot of areas, to exacerbate inequalities—economic, racial, even to an extent, gender. Because who the—not in every family but in general—who ended up taking their work and taking it home or setting aside the workplace to be the family support? It kind of exacerbated those inequalities. Again that throws a hook into the system.

[…]

How do we come back? We don’t just turn around the next day and say, “Okay, let’s go back to where we were.” We’re a different society now.

School finances, staff retention

Those extra resources she mentioned have consisted partly of temporary pandemic relief funds (called ESSER funds) from the state that were not meant to fund long-term obligations but to serve as “something that will help with the recovery now.”

When I ask whether she shares the concerns of other board members—well, really just Mike Meier—that it was risky to fund the creation of all these new mental health positions with ESSER funds when that money will disappear in 2024, she was more sanguine. She felt the money, despite its temporary nature, provided a way to experiment with different staffing models than they might otherwise have been able to and mentions the new Dean of Students position the Superintendent had created. “That hasn’t been a practice, but we’ll find out with these ESSER funds. If that then freed up the principal and associate principal to have other kinds of relationships with the students and with the staff and take professional development to a new space. [...] we can find that out under the ESSER funds in a way we didn’t have the capacity for before.”

“So you see these new positions as truly temporary based on how well they do the things we thought they would?” I ask.

“Yeah, we'll find out.” she says. Overall, she considers the funds to have been “wisely organized to not be something that has to be kept going forward. It’s been aimed at trying to meet some of the goals that families have in terms of Covid recovery. Which was it’s whole point in terms of the government funding it anyway.”

As far as the school district’s finances as a whole, given her experience reviewing and managing budgets as a professor and department chair, she doesn’t “feel that I’ve seen a big red flag the district is doing all these things wrong.” However, it is clear to her that teacher salaries and retention are interrelated. “I do think that we learned last year that what the region is offering teachers—we have really good benefits but we don’t pay as much—and that’s a negotiation over time to figure out the people we want to attract into teaching. What are they looking for? Which kinds of things are important to them?”

“To me it’s not just hiring, it’s retention” she adds, “It wasn’t easy being a teacher during Covid. I myself, I’m a faculty member, and I had to start figuring how to teach things online that I’d never taught online before.”

“I know the district’s working hard,” Lynne says. And she thinks they are “making good progress with special education” though the staff, especially the special education assistants who interact with students most intensively, need to be paid more as well. “I was surprised to learn last year that […] they’re paid sometimes in our district not enough to live in Wauwatosa.”

The school board and strategic planning

She realizes that school board members cannot “manage the day-to-day life in the schools” and that the board is a “way for people—whether they’re community or parents or alumni—to have input.” She thinks the board has an important role in ensuring “fiscal integrity” and that while she is happy to leverage her expertise as a social scientist and thinks it could be helpful to the board, she doesn't consider it a prerequisite. “I do think a school board member needs to have some capacity to research. But that could be the average person who reads the newspaper and listens to the radio.” She also considers it important to pay close attention to what other districts are doing and what we can learn from them. “That doesn’t mean, I’m going to like, Oh that district over there is doing it. We should do it too. But I think that there’s informing that can happen by paying attention to what’s happening on big issues across the country.”

She thinks the district's current strategic plan is pretty great. “Honestly I feel like right now they’re doing—they’re using it so well.” In her own experience, strategic plans often get made and then promptly ignored, but “as a parent and as a member of Tosa Together, I was meeting with new staff coming in and seeing how the legs that they were putting down really had a lot to do with the strategic plan.” While the strategic plan can’t foresee everything, she believes that future revisions and course corrections will come from the plan's encounter with reality. “I think that as they try to practice what’s in there, that’s where some of the requests for changes are going to really grow from.”

A good strategic plan has a North Star which is like, Where do we want to be at this point [in] like 3-5 years? And then it’s got these near stars that are, you know, what are we trying to implement? And then within that, there’s sub areas, what’s our strategic goals on this, what’s our strategic goals on this, on this? So living that out, when you’re down to the near stars, you need metrics. And I do think that the strategic plan had some strengths […] because of the way it was developed and also because it has metrics. Once you have those metrics that gives people who are implementing a way to actually figure out [whether] what they’re implementing has changed things.

I ask whether she, since beginning her candidacy for school board and meeting with parents and teachers, “anything you found particularly surprising about other people’s viewpoints, things you didn’t recognize were important [to them]?”

First, I will say that the years of working with Tosa Together very intentionally—that group brought together people who didn’t always agree. Especially around school. I didn’t have the same set of priorities or the same opinion on certain policies so if we were going to make a public statement that was always a process. I was often writing those.

“I’m fine with that,” she adds, “I really enjoyed that. And I always felt like it was stronger than where I started, and what we ended up saying as a group was stronger.”

She admits that she’s still learning the “bigger picture of school boards”—what they’re responsible for, and the wide range of items they’re required to keep abreast of and maybe haven’t been in the recent past, and how little these responsibilities were understood by many parents.

I know that there’s this process of curriculum review on everything. But I heard from a parent the other day, that they wished science would get reviewed sooner than it is. So I think I’m starting to learn that the system of how things happen in schools and how the main office makes decisions is not necessarily completely understood by parents. And I think they’re getting more and more transparent in what they’re doing and when but probably—even though I know I’ve been involved for a long time—probably there’s a lot more that could have and should have been attended to for ten years and then a lot set aside during Covid in order just to make it through. So that’s been part of what I’ve been learning. There are parent frustrations in a lot of different areas. More than I had imagined.

Other things she learned from staff and parents since she started running include parents’ concerns about special education, how the lack of a consistent employee to manage data analysis at the district level has impaired decision making, and the wide variations and differences across schools within the district though she sees the latter issue as a way to conduct more experimentation.

“That’s where data can be helpful. How similar are these buildings? And how are they different?” She mentions the English Language Arts curriculum as an example where the Superintendent is looking at taking what some of the better performing schools in the district are doing and replicating those practices in lower-performing schools. “I mean, you can’t just write off the school […] you at least have to say, look, couldn’t we take this model that works at this age group and this classroom and try it and see if it has a similar impact?”

Ultimately, Lynne thinks there’s a tension in education between between content (the what) and process (the how). “How do you talk about things you don’t agree about? That’s what I mean by process. Education isn’t just what’s written on the page. It’s also that we want people to grow up and be independent thinkers.”

The same idea, she says, applies to the school board. “School board members, you voted for them for a reason: to talk about it.” But some conversations are hard. Referring to declining enrollment within the district and some residents’ suggestions that maybe we should consider closing a few schools despite the passage of a $100 million+ referendum to renovate several of them only five years before.

I think it’s tricky right now to enter into a Let’s shrink, because it wasn’t that long ago that we decided—and we being the community writ large […]—we want to keep community or neighborhood schools. So, there was this big investment. It would not be fiscally smart for the next board to just turn away and say, now let’s make a change that ten years ago we said, We’re going to go in this direction.

Instead, she thinks, “You’ve got to modify.”

We spend a lot of money as a district to upgrade buildings. So, [the] next things are adjustments and what that’s going to be will be for the board to look at going forward, along with the administration, along with parents giving their input about what they care about.

This goes for other changes as well, including the contentious revisions to the district’s Human Growth and Development Curriculum:

You make a big change, and then you have to adjust over time. What are we going to learn this year about the new curriculum that’s been put in? We’re going to learn that there are things that teachers [think] didn’t go exactly how they wanted it to in the classroom. The people who opted out don’t have enough content. That’s one thing I have heard [from] parents—my kid needs more to do. [More] learning time. It shouldn’t just be a sitting out time. So you adjust then. You don’t throw it all out. You adjust and learn from the experience.