Wauwatosa School Board's September 27 Special Meeting
A three act play with moderate drama, much therapy, and no resolution. Some attendees unsure why they're there. Most leave early.
[Reminder: I will be out of town next week. The next newsletter will be on Thursday, October 13]
Act I. Kind of a Let Down
It was a packed house Tuesday evening in the Fisher Administrative Building's Conference Room C. Expecting lively displays of pathos, pairs of well-coiffed reporters sat primly while their disheveled and ruddy-faced cameramen lugged gear, routed cables, sweated, and positioned strings of microphones in enfilade directly above my head to catch any potshots, outbursts, or raucous jeering from the quickly gathering crowd.
On my side of the room, attendees, like disaffected soldiers returning to the front, suffused their grave and weary resignation with light hearted banter.
“Why are we back here?” one woman asks another in mock confusion.
“I don't know, but I'm back,” the other answers, and then they talk about the “reckoning” one of the school board members will have when the next election comes around.
As Board President Eric Jessup-Anger calls the School Board to order, one reporter in a blue blazer pops in his earpiece, and the cameras begin to roll.
Mr. Jessup-Anger says they’re here to do three things:
The first is to consider a motion by fellow member Mike Meier to rescind the board’s previous approval of the Human Growth and Development curriculum. This is pretty much the only thing people are here for.
The second is to hear updates from the school district’s legal counsel, Attorney Lori Lubinski, on the status of what Mr. Jessup-Anger refers to vaguely as “a few items,” but which mostly revolves around a potential lawsuit that Mr. Meier has threatened to file against the board for alleged violations of Wisconsin’s Open Meetings laws.
The third is “the reason we originally had planned to be here tonight”—to discuss the board’s “governance work.” Mr. Jessup-Anger waxes poetic whenever he mentions the school district’s Strategic Plan and tonight is no exception:
We have a really thoughtful strategic plan that is focused on a lot of really outstanding different initiatives. I realize a lot of us may not be excited to stick around for them, but it is really at the core of the work that the board is doing in governing. So we'll be talking about how do we work effectively together, how do we organize ourselves, how do we structure ourselves? What are the values that we want to approach in how we lead the district forward?
Mr. Jessup-Anger then asks Mr. Meier to read his motion, and for the next six minutes, he reads, verbatim and with occasional labored breathing, his “Motion to Rescind Human Growth and Development Curriculum Renewal of August 22, 2022”
In a soliloquy only a lawyer could love, he claimed that members of the board had directed school administrators—referred to as the “Data Exclusion Group”—to exclude some of the survey data they had collected in order to influence the board's decision. He felt that “the Data Exclusion Group conducted its business out of sight of the public, in violation of the Open Meetings Law,” and that “the work product of the Data Exclusion Group was unlawfully produced in secrecy and used by the full Board during deliberations and vote on the Human Growth and Development Curriculum.” Therefore, he felt, the “Human Growth and Development Curriculum should be rescinded as an outcome of an unlawful secret and closed process.”
Mr. Jessup-Anger asked the board if anyone would like to second the motion. After a long and pregnant pause, he states, “Seeing no second, this motion dies.”
At this point, some in the crowd, visibly deflated by the rapid denouement, get up and leave. Others, perhaps having already cleared much of their evening for this event, remain.
Interlude:
One cameraman who had positioned himself in a dark corner of the room over Mr. Jessup-Anger’s left shoulder leaves. But another man, clearly without press credentials (a tie, an earpiece, or a giant camera) remains, and Mr. Jessup-Anger asks him to sit with the crowd.
“I’m the only person you told to leave,” he says, “There were other people here, and you didn’t say a word to them.”
“I didn’t see them.”
“Yeah, I’ve got your number.”
Act II. A Fractured Board
Overall, I found the second act, with it’s heightened drama, a vast improvement over the first However, it’s lack of resolution on major plot points ultimately left me dissatisfied.
Ms. Lori Lubinski, the lawyer retained for the school district by the district’s insurance company in the event of a lawsuit, holds center stage. She frames her presence before the entire board and in a public meeting as highly unusual:
I’ve been a lawyer for 25 years [and] I have never had a circumstance where I’ve been called [...] to talk about the status of litigation when the threat of litigation is one of our own.
She recaps her previous appearance before the school board in mid-May when Mr. Meier previously threatened to file a lawsuit over alleged Open Meetings violations. She acted almost as a mediator, tried to determine what each side wanted as a condition of agreeing to drop the threat of a lawsuit, wrote up as accurately as possible what she believed the group’s consensus to have been, and mailed it to Mr. Meier’s lawyer. But, she says:
I thought I had a good understanding of where the board was at. [...] I can’t communicate directly to Mr. Meier so I had to communicate through his lawyer, and I sent that agreement to Mr. Meier’s lawyer. And to this day I have not received any feedback. [...] I can’t give you an explanation for why it didn't happen.
I thought this was a real mic drop moment, but I was the only one who audibly gasped.
Ms. Lubinski went on to explain that while no lawsuit has been filed, Mr. Meier and an unnamed citizen have sent two complaints to the Milwaukee District Attorney. They include an allegation that the board violated Open Meetings laws by using a shared Google Doc to collaborate on the district’s Strategic Plan prior to an official meeting, and that he was cut off by the board president when he tried to raise his concerns.
The second complaint concerns an alleged violation of Open Meetings laws in December, 2021, when a closed-session discussion went beyond the scope of the agenda. Mr. Meier also asserts that former Board President Mr. Steve Doman then replaced him on the board’s Policy Committee through a secret appointment process in retaliation for mentioning this alleged violation of Open Meetings laws to the press.
Once the complaints have been filed, the Milwaukee County District Attorney (DA) has twenty days to file a lawsuit after which Mr. Meier has the option to file his own lawsuit if the DA does not. Ms. Lubinski called Mr. Meier’s first complaint a “novel” interpretation of Open Meeting law requirements and one she was unsure how courts would interpret.
After Ms. Lubinski’s presentation, there are several questions from board members, and then Board Member Jenny Hoag tells her that she finds this whole situation very stressful and time consuming and needs advice:
I guess I’m looking to you for advice or legal guidance about how we’re supposed to function when we are continually facing these threats. And we’re trying to function as a board but then multiple times lawsuits are being threatened against us.
To which Ms. Lubinski responds:
I have in 25 years worked with boards that are fractured, and I [will] say what is probably on everyone’s mind, which is: you have a fractured board. You are going to have to get past this. How you do so I can only speak from legal experience by telling you that time will be your friend and that you stick with your values, your mission, your duties, and try to avoid the chaos as best you can.
Around this time the phone of someone in the crowd loudly begins providing driving directions to Myrtle Beach. There is much sniggering. Mr. Jessup-Anger calls a ten minute recess.
Interlude:
All the television news stations call it quits and head into the hall to get some quick takes for tonight’s segment from other attendees also making their escape. Mr. Meier heads slowly into the hall and returns to his seat with a bag of chips, saying nothing to the other board members. A gaggle of parents turn to one another in their seats to express worry that the current board is carrying on the bad practices they learned from much-maligned former-Superintendent Phil Ertle, including acting as if they actually care what parent surveys say and haven’t already made up their minds.
Act III. Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Pull Me Back In
The third act was really an extended whipsaw between some members trying to do practical and pragmatic things like choose how to divide work among multiple subcommittees so everyone wasn’t in six-hour board meetings multiple times per month and other members seeking some sort of therapeutic resolution to the underlying psychic discomfort created by Mr. Meier’s general disagreeableness.
An initial discussion begins about what subcommittees the board needs but is momentarily derailed by Ms. Hoag who doesn’t feel that any headway can be made on anything so practical as the creation of subcommittees until the Board has a firmly established moral imperative and foundation of trust:
I sort of feel like we’re putting the cart before the horse here a little bit honestly. We had a meeting. We wanted to start with like What is our moral imperative? What is our Northern star? and we couldn’t do that as a board. And that meeting ended with some tension. I think we really struggled with just that starting point, and I think you know Ms. Lubinski’s acknowledgment that this is perhaps one of the most fractured boards that she's ever seen in her career [My note: Not actually what she said.] is, I think, striking and very, very concerning.
And I guess I question jumping ahead to committee structure when we don’t have a foundation. And to your point, Mr. Meier, if trust is what we need to have a committee structure then I think it’s frankly dead in the water. This is not a group that has trust.
Board Member Sharon Muehlfeld says she thinks a solid committee structure based around their Strategic Plan could get people excited about helping children in the district. Board Member Mike Phillips proposes a potential committee structure and discussions resumes for seven minutes before Board Member Jessica Willis pulls everyone up short:
I have a really hard time conceptualizing these policies when there’s this looming distrust that not only our legal counsel has acknowledged but so did the WASB reps who came in to facilitate a workshop for us. [...] I think that issue needs to be resolved, and I don’t know that I have the answer, but I’d look into our bylaws and and norms and code of ethics, the things that I’ve been asking for and, and I don’t think we have that so I don’t know how we talk about this work.
Mr. Meier responds that a good committee system might help rebuild some of that trust, and Ms. Fraley adds that people need to be given the benefit of the doubt that they’re acting in good faith. The conversation again starts to veer toward discussions of a potential committee structure, and this time it’s Mr. Jessup-Anger who can’t handle the conversational dissonance and begins to relate a long anecdote about the time Kareem Abdul Jabbar came to talk about being a Muslim to a student association at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee but kept getting questions about basketball instead:
Throughout the conversation one person asked this basketball specific question and then the next person would ask this question about faith and spirituality in the Midwest […] The Q&A was fascinating because it went back and forth and it was almost like there was two different lectures happening. […] I don't want to lose this strand of where the board is at. […]
We still have to rebuild trust, and as I read social media in the community…and there’s narratives being made that I experience as being false narratives. Unfair. There's some fair ones. But they’re being fed intentionally, and I think we have to talk about that. We have to talk about: Can we move past it? What sort of practices for us have to occur for us to be effective?
And so I'm not going to let the board not engage that tonight. I think it’s really important.
Well, this time it sticks and the final hour of the meeting consists mostly of some members of the board airing grievances and others trying to mediate. Fortunately, they agreed when the meeting started that they’d stop by 9:30 p.m. and that’s when it ends.
I’ll leave you with three quotes from the last hour of the meeting and three thoughts:
Some Quotes
Mr. Meier threatening I’m-not-sure-what after an extended statement on how school board bylaws are trumped by state and federal law so stop trying to get everyone to agree to follow the bylaws:
I’ve been a student of politics for 55 years. I've been a lawyer for decades. I can take this interaction to a level that the rest of you don’t know.
Ms. Hoag expressing her feelings about Mr. Meier’s motion to rescind the Human Growth and Development curriculum:
I felt like my character was being maligned, and I felt like it was framed and then shared with our community before it even got to the board in a way that made me very much feel like there was an effort here to sow distrust in our community about the board and how the board functions and to ultimately—and I use this because of conversations you and I have had offline—that you are trying to take down this board. And I feel very much like this exact motion is one of the ways in which you are trying to take down this board.
Mr. Meier after expressing his disappointment that even his small attempt at a concession for parents opposed to the Human Growth and Development Curriculum—that Superintendent Means come back to the board with a timeline on how long it would take to set up an alternative curriculum—was denied:
That was a very small ask. And you wouldn’t do it. […] I struggle with these things. About what to tell a kindergartener, what to tell a fourth grader. And I had to go through those decisions alone, because I was widowed, and it is distressing. And for me to try to figure out how to make the right decisions for two little girls on those things.
So when somebody comes to the microphone and says they have a heartfelt distress over what we’re doing with their children—I don’t know if the rest of you are widowed or whatever. I’m sure everybody has their journey and their challenges. But I am heartfelt in wanting to provide an answer for those people. Was it 20, 30, 40%?
It’s a lot. It’s a lot. And we offer choices for everything else. What was it? What was wrong with us, I said, that we couldn’t at least try to see if there could be something?
Some Comments:
It’s not obvious to me that members of an organization need to define and agree upon a shared moral imperative before they can reliably assign tasks and work together. I’ve never had to do this in any organization I’ve worked for and it seems like a lot to ask, especially a political body composed of individuals elected to their positions by people with different values and beliefs. At one point a board member says that one way she deals with all the criticism she receives from parents or even other board members is by reminding herself that they all just want what’s best for their kids. I agree that this is probably true in a shallow sense but as a basis for common understanding and coordinated action it doesn’t seem particularly helpful since it obscures the very, very different things people sometimes mean by that statement.
‘Trust’ is not an undifferentiated mass that either does or does not exist. I trust my kid to know when he has to go to the bathroom, and I don’t trust him to cross a busy street by himself. It seems like most relationships involve more trust in some domains and less trust in others. And that trust is most often established through repeated experience of having someone meet your expectations, first in small things and then in larger things. So insisting that the board establish some ideal Form of Trust before doing practical things seems precisely backward since it’s the doing practical things that creates trust.
The board talks about creating norms and an effective culture. Sometimes norms require everyone to buy in to them and enforce them. They are difficult to establish for this reason, and a single defector can weaken or destroy them. But sometimes it only requires one or two to enforce a norm. At one point in this meeting, Mr. Meier mentions that some board members he’d previously worked with thought all motions should be seconded, no matter what, in order to allow the board to discuss them and the community to comment on them. Even if the person disagreed with the motion and would ultimately vote against, it was a point of collegiality and respect for other people’s opinions that the motion be seconded and discussed. This was interesting to me because it’s a norm that can be enforced with the cooperation of only two people. Because of this, it seems much more likely to persist, and it suggests that one way to create positive norms in an environment of mutual suspicion and low trust would be to look for those that can be enforced with a minimum of coordination. I can’t actually think of any others at the moment, but this seems like a worthwhile avenue for further thought.
Have a good weekend.
Insightful analysis as always Ben. Thanks for your work. To the point of discussion on a moral imperative or North Star, it seems to me that it’s educating kids. Let’s not make it more complex than it has to be.
Spot on Ben, with the last line in your #2 observation. Ask any middle or high school kid who did a group project. You learn who are trustworthy partners while working through the project. The next time groups are formed, you know who you can and can’t work with.