November 14: School Board Highlights

Misinformation, conflicts of interest, school repairs, enrollment projections, and a $10 million dollar pool.

[Note: There will be no newsletter next Thursday. It is Thanksgiving. There may be one…Saturday.]

While the special education audit and corrective actions took up a large portion of Monday’s school board meeting, it wasn’t the only topic discussed over the four-and-a-half hour period.

→ An argument between several board members occurred following a public comment from the parent of a Whitman Middle School student concerned and frustrated about a recent episode where a teacher had resigned after being punched in the face by a student (wait, what!?).

Board Member Jenny Hoag kindly informed the upset parent that

We're getting a lot of these kinds of questions and one of the things I've been trying to work on doing in response to some of this is making sure that people recognize the difference between kind of what the board does and kind of what our our role is in oversight […] I hear your concerns. I also want to be really clear that the board doesn't have a role in kind of that day-to-day oversight. That's not kind of what we're supposed to be doing at this level.

Board Member Mike Meier informed Ms. Hoag that, um, no, the board can definitely summon district employees to ask questions and investigate complaints.

Then Board President Eric Jessup-Anger starts to say, “I think what Dr. Hoag is saying is accurate—”

Mr. Meier interrupts: “No it is not, sir. You're misstating the law. You're misstating how this board can operate. So, I just put that out there on the record. You're providing misinformation to the public as president of this board.”

*[awkward silence]*

Mr. Jessup-Anger: “Mr. Meier you're out of line right now.”

Mr. Meier: “Sir, to provide misinformation to the public is the most out of line there can be.”

Etc., etc.

→ A consent agenda is a list of items that the board can vote on as a single unit because they are considered mostly perfunctory and unlikely to spark significant debate or disagreement. However, disagreement did ensue over the hiring of Lakeisha Myers as the new Dean of Students at Whitman Middle School. Mr. Meier asked to vote on the motion separately and then asked asked Superintendent Demond Means whether Ms. Myers was a member of the Wisconsin State Assembly.

When he said that she was, Mr. Meier responded that, “I have some heartburn about someone who approves the state budget that funds us being an employee receiving payroll derived from that funding.”

There was about twenty minutes of debate, Board Member Sharon Muehlfeld expressed consternation that the board was only finding out about this now, and when Board Member Jessica Willis said she had already started working, Ms. Muehlfeld seemed even more irritated.

Mr. Means said that conflicts of interest were for the employee to manage and that it wasn’t up to the school district to make hiring decisions based off those considerations.

I think…he might be right? But also, I was having a difficult time constructing hypothetical conflicts of interest and what specific scenarios people might be worried about.

One scenario that seemed to concern Mr. Muehlfeld involved actions by the Board’s Legislative Advocacy committee: “I am concerned about the ability to be able to advocate on behalf of our district because now we won't be able to […] there could be an appearance of a conflict of interest.”

I don’t know. Surely this isn’t the first time something like this has come up.

The board, including Ms. Muehlfeld, still approved the employment contract by a vote of 6-1. Mr. Meier dissented.

→ I spoke at length the other day about the district’s focus on something called Multi-Level Systems of Support (MLSS) and how unclear it was what such a focus actually entailed. I should have stayed at the meeting a little longer, because there was an entirely separate presentation provided by Chief of Pupil and Family Support Luke Pinion and others on the district’s desire to hire two additional psychologists to function as MLSS Coordinators.

From the executive summary:

In collaboration with the two Student Growth Coordinators, these additional school psychologists would provide knowledge, guidance, and support to create and refine academic and behavioral systems at the universal, selective, and intensive levels to increase student achievement for all students. These positions support the goal of improving student achievement through sustainable systems and integrated school initiatives with a focus on equitable outcomes for all.

There was a lot of discussion during the presentation about disproportionality in the rates at which white, black, and special education students receive disciplinary referrals, suspensions, etc. I think the idea is that if special education students are 13% of the student population, they should have 13% of total disciplinary referrals. Or if black students are 30% of the student population, they should have approximately 30% of disciplinary referrals.

While they don’t really explain why a priori we should expect all groups to break rules at equal rates, the memo for these new positions did state that the Special Education Audit and Strategic Plan “identified a root cause of the district over identification as a lack of systematic implementation of Multi-Level Systems of Support.”

I actually could not find this claim in either report. Also, Mr. Meier asks at one point:

What do you mean when you say over identify? Do you mean that they should not have been identified because the substantive behaviors were not there or you were saying that we have not provided services, as is our obligation as an educational institution, to shepherd them away from the behaviors that are suspension-type behaviors?

To which the school administrator responds, “Those are great questions that we want to be asking consistently within our teams […] and then digging deeper [to ask], What are [the] underlying causes of that and are we addressing those underlying causes?”

Hmm.

→ Director of Buildings and Grounds Gregory Choinski along with Chief Financial Officer Keith Brightman discussed preliminary ideas for the district’s long range facilities planning over the next two decades and presented the district’s more detailed 5-year plan for capital improvements. They’ve even given each of the schools a report card, complete with individual grades for different parts of the school infrastructure, and an overall GPA. They would like the board’s and the community’s input on what projects to prioritize.

The highest ranked schools were the newest and scored a 3.9 out of 4. The lowest ranked school was Jefferson Elementary with an overall grade of C+ and a 2.2 GPA. Despite it’s highly-rated water mains (A!, “replaced in the last 2 years”) it suffers from the lack of an emergency generator, poor hallway and classroom lighting, and boilers past their rated life expectancy.

One student representative to the school board expressed gratitude for the new report card format saying, “It’s just a very ingenuitive way of identifying what we need to work on.”

Mr. Choinksi humbly declined to take full credit, responding, “[Communications Director] Sarah Frittata in th—Frittitta in the district actually did find the template for this.”

Board Member Leigh Anne Fraley liked the report cards but worried it might galvanize parents:

Report cards are great and report cards can become a pain in the tush because now you’ve got every single parent in Jefferson saying like, “Why are we—?” You know, “How come Jefferson doesn't get anything, and Lincoln's got an A?”

[…]

I foresee excitement about the report cards and some heartfelt, um, feedback coming your way when folks dig into these a little bit more.

She encouraged administrators to be very transparent about how they prioritize projects.

→ Some board members were unenthusiastic about a proposed $30,000 contract with MDRoffers Consulting to conduct a long-range student enrollment projection through 2035 so the school can plan maintenance, services, and capital investments over the next 10-15 years. These projections would be “based on [an] understanding of shifts in neighborhood lifecycles and appeal to modern families, detailed analysis of demographic and student-per-home changes, expert assessment of community and developer plans for new housing development and housing market conditions.”

Ms. Muehlfeld said she would probably vote against it at the next board meeting because the last study, completed sometime between 2003 and 2005, “just wasn’t helpful” and she “would rather spend the money on encouraging enrollment and in marketing.”

Mr. Meier concurred stating that, “This is a lot of money for something that really had—last time we tried it—it didn't help. In fact, it was incorrect, and the community voted otherwise in the election to disagree with the projections in the studies. And the community was correct, and the studies were wrong.”

Board President Eric Jessup-Anger then, somewhat gingerly and elliptically, added that such an analysis would still be useful as a basis for potentially contentious decisions including how many schools there should be in the district and which ones might need to be closed:

I think there's questions the community has grappled with—we’ve gotten emails as a board of, ‘Should we close certain schools or not?’ [or] ‘We should adjust things.’

And all this data may help us land on either, ‘Right now how we’re set up is exactly the way as a community we want to be set up’ or it gives us a grounding to […] grapple with some questions that are being asked in the community: Is this the right number of elementary schools? Is it the right number of high schools?

Mr. Brightman then reminded the board that this enrollment projection was explicitly called for in the strategic plan they approved several months ago. If approved, he hopes the study would begin by December and be completed by April, 2023.

→ A final payment of $628,654 for the Wauwatosa East High School pool project was approved using remaining funds from the 2018 referendum. During the short discussion of this item, Mr. Meier asks, “So we're entirely happy now? More or less?”

Mr. Brightman replies, “I will answer that ‘yes’ with the caveat there are some things that were still—there’s some stainless steel issues that we have in the structure but there aren’t any major structural or design issues that we're still wrestling with.”

Mr. Brightman does not put the mind at ease. The backstory, which I gathered from two or three articles by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel from the fall of 2019 and the spring of 2021, involves an alumni couple who donated $4.7 million for a new pool Tosa East. Unfortunately, the district realized that the steel columns supporting the roof were in the way of the bigger pool they had envisioned. They needed to somehow support the roof while they cut out the columns and moved them somewhere else. But this seemed hard, so they just took the entire roof off. The couple gave another $1.7 million (seems kind of embarrassing for the school district) and the school district matched it with another $1.7 million to cover the additional costs.

And then for reasons that aren’t clear to me, the school put in another $3 million in interest income from the $128 million referendum bringing the total cost for the new pool to $10.4 million (I realize these numbers don’t add up. The Journal Sentinel is kind of inconsistent on the size of the original donation.)

Anyway, minor issues remain, but I’m sure the roof won’t fall in.

Have a good weekend.