Two hours in the vicinity of 3TosaDads

On attending a school board candidate meet-and-greet.

I pulled up to Leff's Lucky Town at 6:59 p.m. Leff’s is a bar on the corner of West State street and North 72nd that in the summer is bright and green and replete with outdoor seating and where my wife and I once sat for a long afternoon and talked about nothing and mostly appreciated that our kids were not around. But by January 31st, the outdoor chairs and tables were lined-up and unused, the patio abandoned and solemn in winter air that had just approached the temperature—12 degrees—where the snot in your nose enters into some sort of phase change and begins to crystallize. There is snow piled high along the curb, too wide to leap across from the street so that when I inevitably try anyway, my left foot plunges into the drift and snow immediately fills my brown loafer.

Cold, wet, breathing partially obstructed, I approach not the main entrance to Leff's accessible directly at the corner of West State and North 72nd streets but a second door along North 72nd itself that blends into the beige brick wall of what appears to be, according to Google Street view, a recent expansion of the Leff's Lucky Town footprint. It leads into a shadowy, soon to be cramped, but at least warm part of the bar that seems like the right sort of spot to meet an insurgent band of suburban school board candidates in the Year of our Lord 2023. Wasn’t the American Revolution, too, planned in a tavern?

I don’t know. Maybe this is not the right analogy. It doesn’t quite have that feel. Inside I find two, young bartenders listlessly dispensing free beer and on the long, opposing table assorted soft pretzels and pizzas cut into little five-bite squares manageable with a single hand for the gathering crowd. And also the insurgent band of school board candidates—Chris Zirbes, Mike Zollicoffer, and Daniel Gugala—refer to themselves as the 3TosaDads, a moniker that sounds like the name for a pizzeria run by novice restaurateurs, and evinces something between crass commercialization and unpretentious, what-do-I-put-on-the-LLC-paperwork? levels of marketing polish.

But boy is that perception not shared by everyone. Among some subset of fellow Tosa School Board observers who congregate in out-of-the-way corners of the internet, the 3TosaDads not only limit feedback on their social media pages and fail to respond promptly to queries via Facebook Messenger but through their choice of name suggest a potentially malign and faintly misogynist undertaking by several men to marginalize their female opponents.

Others on Facebook share group photos with giant red arrows pointing at what looks like one of the candidate’s heads and other giant red arrows pointing at other people’s heads and descriptions of what those other people said one time in an unrelated context on Twitter. Anonymous Twitter accounts call the 3TosaDads “conservative extremists” based on who they like or follow on social media. One mother at Leff’s, reflecting the general tenor of suspicion and acrimony in the running-for-school-board-in-2023 scene tells me, “I thought about running for school board and started removing all the people I follow, but I knew I’d get crushed anyway.”

But another demographic that a hot, super-contested school board race like the one going on right now tends to draw out are the city’s educational-political heavyweights, and the turnout at the 3TosaDads candidate-meet-and-greet was no exception. By 7:30 the crowd is approaching a least sixty and with no place to doff their coats, the whole bar becomes a real pressure cooker of heat, chatter, bodies, and the swish of nylon as people struggle like crabs in a stock pot to move past and around and occasionally over one another—a man mills about with a digital camera and periodically mounts the low rung of a barstool and holds his camera above the fray to blindly snap pictures of the crowd while his most definitely really bored son trails in filial and resigned silence behind him.

I mostly cannot move now, but am content to chat loudly with one elder statesmen of the Wauwatosa School Board. She tells me she is “counseling” one of the candidates and assures me he’s asking all the right questions. Referring, at one point, to several of the other candidates running against the 3TosaDads, she says that while they might make great teachers or district employees, she feels that something different is needed on the school board. As if to emphasize her point, she motions toward another retired school board member moving somewhat unsteadily through the crowd. We served together on the board, she says, and didn’t exactly get along at first. But we were able to overcome our differences.

That’s what I’m talking about, she emphasizes. People can’t work together anymore.

I learn that there are certain figures that loom large in the collective conscious of the school district. One of those is Lois Weber, doyen of the Wauwatosa school board, who served for nearly 40 years and according to this woman, kept all the emails she received from staff and constituents over her nearly four decades of service printed and stored in giant file cabinets in her basement, an institutional historian who knew the why behind every policy and procedure and for whom there was nothing new under the sun. She seemed, by the accounts I’ve both read and heard, to be a perceptive, keen, equanimous woman who never judged an issue before she’d heard the details.

But Lois is gone now and I sense, at least from the retired board member’s perspective, that so too is the less acrimonious, less internecine school board she once oversaw and which has been replaced by something that seems now to be misfiring rather badly and steadily rattling itself to pieces.

After forty-five minutes, the candidates wander to a clear patch of space in front of the pizza table to give short, seemingly unrehearsed, and more-or-less unremarkable stump speeches. Chris Zirbes says he’s running to end the constant fighting in schools and the loss of good teachers and something, something financials, and $1.5 million dollar deficits, and fiscal cliffs, and operational referendums.

The mention of another referendum elicits scattered boos from the crowd. A man in the back says loudly that maybe we should think about getting rid of all these administrators first. While I do not hear any verbal assents, I don’t get the impression that this sentiment is exactly out-of-line among the gathered attendees.

Mike Zollicoffer is more spirited but less specific about what it is exactly that he wants to fix. He wants the schools to be safe and the children to be safe. He talks about “getting back to basics.” We have a great district, he yells, and “we’re all Wauwatosans” but we need more representation from the West side of the city.

Dan Gugala tells the assembled crowd that he’s been a resident for the last twenty-five years, describes his wide-ranging experience as an attorney, and refers to himself modestly and endearingly as “a normal person.” He too is worried about safety in schools, and the markedly different experience his younger son has had compared to his brother, a mere four years older.

Shortly afterward, a harried Mr. Gugala stops by the small table I’ve planted myself beside, the one with sign-up sheets for yard signs and door hangars and a fastidious volunteer campaign manager who takes from him several white envelopes and deposits them into what I assume is Mr. Gugala’s personal, small, plastic donation-collection container. He says to her that the thing he hates most about running for the school board is asking people for money, and then he turns to me. He has copies of all the progress reports that each school in the district has been presenting if I’m interested, he says, whipping out his smartphone to show me an email with lots of attached pdfs. He clicks on one and begins to scroll frenetically, pinching and swiping and finger-zooming to show me a particular statistic he considers to be quite worrisome. A majority of students at West High School felt unsafe? Or sometimes unsafe? I can't remember! He was pinching and swiping too quickly. He promises to send them to me before he fades back into the surrounding crowd.

The volunteer campaign manager is the mother of a high school student at West and occasionally sends me text messages about whatever recent apoplexy has incapacitated the school board—one board member suing the others, a local radio show host doing an expose on violence in Wauwatosa schools. I listen to snippets of conversation as parents drift in and out of conversation with her. One woman tells her she appreciates that the candidates have different backgrounds than the present members of the board. Another mother with a senior at West High school says she would like to see more debate at board meetings.

A father of two girls at West High School tells me he tries not to make a big deal about the fights, because his kids don’t seem to. They tend not to see them, except when videos are posted online, and what they do see in person seems relatively minor—two girls pulling each other’s hair in the cafeteria or something. He wouldn’t say they’re afraid. Nor would he say that he’s particularly afraid for them. But he still finds it shocking—how often he hears about the fights that do occur, and he says the kids doing these things have problems, a lot of issues. He’s worried one of them will really get hurt. Or hurt a bystander. Things are bad now, he says, but if someone gets a concussion or is “knocked flat”, the parents are going to go crazy.

The 3TosaDads seem worried about a lot of things—financial cliffs and teacher retention and declining test scores. But the main thing they seem concerned about is safety. Fights, kids afraid to use the bathroom in schools, bullies, general disruption, defiance, delinquency, viral videos of same.

[Update 2/9/23: Some readers were confused by the following two paragraphs and wondered if race was a topic of conversation at this candidate meet-and-greet. To be clear, I didn’t hear anyone mention it. I mention it because it seems bad when people worried about their kid’s safety or ability to learn in class also have to worry about being labeled a racist for bringing it up. This strikes me as uncharitable and makes solving real problems difficult.]

Another theme, most notable by it’s absence in any of these conversations, is race. A recent email from the school district’s Department of Pupil and Family Services informed parents that there has been, in the first half of the 2022-2023 school year, “a total of 52 District level disciplinary hearings” with forty-six of those hearings due to fights. “Unfortunately,” it concludes, along with the statistics on the proportion of non-resident and special education students involved, “83% of the students involved in the hearings this school year are Black.”

This creates all the hand wringing and long pauses when responding to questions and carefully chosen words and subtle accusations of coded language and sadness and worry and cynicism and despair you would expect in 2023. The beats are so predictable that I won't bother getting too long winded about them other than to say that in a medium-sized, liberal-leaning, midwestern suburb it’s like an acid that dissolves the goodwill and charity among residents. Where parents complain about the schools on Facebook and other parents complain that there's too much complaining on Facebook and why air this sort of dirty laundry and no one will want to teach here if you keep doing things like that. Where parents worried about their kids also worry that being too vocal about it might be, and frequently is, interpreted as a more unseemly and bigoted worry about race.

The volunteer campaign manager and I don’t talk about this, but I do mention the division within the community of which this school board election appears to be one example. She’s lived in Wauwatosa for twenty-five years, she says, and has of course come to know and been on friendly terms with her neighbors or the parents of kids who go to school with her own. She is not optimistic about what’s happening at all. But, she adds, as much as the problems over the last several years have seemed to divide the city, the last year-and-a-half has also led her to meet residents she would never have known otherwise, and that many of the resulting ties and friendships are much deeper than anything she had before.

I am not sure what to think of this. It is something, I suppose.