The school board met on January 23rd: some highlights

Fights in school, open enrollment, Superintendent Demond Means says the word "genie" over and over.

→ During a period for public comment on non-agenda items at the beginning and end of the meeting, several parents and former and current teachers expressed their concerns about violence, bedlam, and low academic achievement in Wauwatosa schools.

One former teacher of 33 years who retired last year said she did so at the urging of her family and because she could not, “do another year of the same old, same old: watching students not be able to learn in the classroom because of the behavior of a few, and the non-follow through of some of our administrators.” According to her, she and other teachers were told not to write-up students or send them to the office for misbehavior, and she worries about her former students. “Because I really care for the kids. I miss the kids, I don't miss the—[I] can't even think of a nice word for it—the garbage that goes on that's not addressed in our schools. It interferes with student learning.”

Other parents reiterated concerns about fighting, teachers being instructed not to report problems, and the addition of administrative staff that didn’t seem to be helping. One resident added, “the school board needs to take ownership of the discipline and do something. We need a policy. We need to get rid of a handful of people who are disrupting our schools and causing all the issues.”

Board President Eric Jessup-Anger informed attendees that an email had been sent out that afternoon to all families outlining the steps the district has taken so far. The email mentioned new administrative hires, more hallway monitoring between classes, more consistent punishment for misbehavior, and training for teachers and staff. Also, more expulsions [emphasis in original]:

The Wauwatosa School District has held a total of 52 District level disciplinary hearings during the 2022-23 school year (34 were held in total last year). Forty six of those hearings were due to physical altercations/fights. The District has issued a total of ten expulsion notices. Six students withdrew after receiving the notice of expulsion and were subsequently withdrawn in lieu of the expulsion hearing. The District moved forward with a total of four hearings, and two of those expulsions were approved by the School Board. Additionally, 16 students have had alternative placements outside of a traditional Wauwatosa school. In total, after 16 alternative placements, six withdrawals and two expulsions, 24 of the 46 students - more than 52% - did not return to a Wauwatosa School District building after a physical altercation/fight. We respectfully disagree with the narrative that the District is not responding to fighting behavior, as illustrated by this data.

Superintendent Demond Means said that "this narrative that we're looking the other way isn't accurate" and that "if you fight in our school system, many students are not coming back. The data's right there. It’s as clear and it's as plain as day. Is there more that we can do? Absolutely. Are we going to do more? Yes.” He asked for patience from parents and the board for more resources.

The most detailed comment came from a current teacher at Whitman Middle School:

When Dr. Means stated teachers need to be in the hallways to stop the fighting please know that the teacher's physical presence is not enough to stop fights. A recent example at Whitman includes a group of 15+ students running down the hallway to encourage a fight. The group ran past teachers who were trying to redirect the unsafe behavior. Not only did the large group ignore and run past the teacher supervising in the hallway, the group of students also directed a slew of profanity at the teachers.

She also mentioned understaffing at Whitman specifically:

This lack of consistent staffing has led to a large group of seventh-grade students expressing great satisfaction in a process they call “getting rid of teachers.” They are groups of seventh-grade students who go out of their way to verbally harass teachers with profanity and personal verbal attacks in hopes of getting rid of new teachers or subs covering for the unfilled positions. There was a situation recently when a teacher had to ask another teacher to take over after being verbally attacked with profanity, personal insults, and other ridicule. Many of the students in that class then applauded and cheered loudly when the original teacher stepped out for a break. Furthermore that same antagonizing group of students then continued yelling and chanting that they got rid of another teacher in the hallways after school and created a commotion in the lobby.

[…]

I know personally two of the six students who withdrew when they received expulsion notice had at least a two-year history of multiple fights and unsafe behaviors at school yet they were allowed to continue attending.

→ Chief of Talent Sarah Zelazoski provided an update on staff recruitment, employee retention, and compensation. The district has 17 candidates for the open principal position at the Wauwatosa Montessori School. New teacher and support staff compensation plans will be presented in February and March. The district continues to have difficulty filling substitute teacher positions at some schools despite additional incentives.

→ Superintendent Means said the district will not be going forward with the Strong Start program he had proposed last month due to negative feedback from parents (I wrote about this before). The Strong Start would have required the district to seek a waiver from the state to begin school before September 1st so that

[T]teachers would return to school on August 21-24 for “professional learning” and children would have school August 28-31. This would allow teachers and staff “to focus on building trusting relationships with students” and “develop a culture of collaborative ownership in developing school rules and expectations.”

Mr. Means cited results from a survey of parents asking for their input. Of the 158 respondents, 44% didn’t think the extra school days would “prepare teachers and students to have a productive school year” compared to 39% who did.

Board member Sharon Muehlfeld seemed disappointed that the program was not going forward. Mr. Means said that many parents during listening sessions he completed last year had expressed concerns about "building community and linking young people to their school community and building relationships between teachers and families" and that the program had been meant to address some of those desires.

→ The School Board voted on the number of open enrollment slots for the next year. Applications will open in February. The district made some adjustments to the numbers presented during the last board meeting based on parent feedback.

Original Open Enrollment proposal.

New Open Enrollment Proposal.

Ms. Muehlfeld brought up the concerns of parents in the Underwood Elementary School about the low levels of resident enrollment and the idea of expanding the Underwood STEM program. Mr. Means responded that the board has the option of giving preference for enrollment in that program to families in the neighborhood. Board member Mike Meier reminded the board that the whole point of creating the Underwood STEM program was to increase diversity and "help people who were far away from the Wilson STEM," so giving Underwood neighborhood residents a preference would defeat the original purpose of having created it in the first place.

In response to questions from parents about the lack of open enrollment spots for special education students over the last six years, Chief of Pupil and Family Supports Luke Pinion said, Something, something, “current staffing matrix,” something, something “weighted caseload analysis.” It’s never entirely clear what these terms mean, but his argument seemed to be that even in a best-case scenario where all their vacant special education staff positions were filled—which they aren’t—those staff would still have as much work as they can reasonably handle and “accepting more students would come at the cost of how we are currently servicing our existing students with disabilities.”

The school board unanimously approved 73 open enrollment spots for the 2023-24 school year.

→ The legislative advocacy committee proposed their legislative agenda for 2023-2025. They’ll be asking the state legislature to establish a “predictable and sustainable K-12 funding model” by automatically adjusting state aid based on inflation, provide more state funding for mental health and safety and security improvements, provide more funding for special education, allow schools to start before September 1 without a waiver, and several other items.

→ The policy committee presented several updated policies to the full board for approval. These included policies for the School Resource Officer program, administration of medication, purchasing and invoice payment, vendor relations, and alternative expulsion procedures. The policy committee also introduced several other revised policies that will be voted on at the next school board meeting including the district’s policies governing open enrollment, the assignment of students to schools within the district, and animals in schools.

There was a strange digression where one board member wanted data on how many class pets were dying in classrooms each year, another board member said something like, “I think we would need to do animal autopsies which could get expensive,” another board member wondered aloud whether this also applied to gold fish, and then everyone just sort of moved on.

There was a more substantive but also more confusing discussion about policy 5120 governing how students are assigned to schools. Mr. Means and members of the policy committee wanted some students that start at McKinley elementary school to be assigned to Wauwatosa East high school when they reached ninth grade and some to attend West high school. There was a good reason for this, but then Mr. Meier and Ms. Muehlfeld said this would eventually cause East high school to have several hundred more students than West high school, this is bad, there “was a rather bitter fight […] 20 years ago” when this policy was originally created to make sure this didn’t happen, and that this change would undo that.

Mr. Meier then added that these discussions about changing school boundaries risk creating a lot of ire in the community and that “we are letting a genie out of the bottle if we go down this road.”

Mr. Means responded that:

That genie seems to have been out of the bottle in this community for a long time. I think if anything, Mr. Meier, we’re acknowledging the genie publicly. So I think the genie has been floating around, and we haven't called out the genie. […]

We're starting to have the deeper conversations that some in the community—since I've been here—have said maybe should have happened during the referendum discussion. Maybe this should have happened at other points. So I'm really excited that we're starting to discuss these in a very deliberate intentional way.

Mr. Meier: “Oh, there’s going to be excitement.”