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Wisconsin school districts: 2014 in review and a 2015 election preview
January 6, 2015
By Abbey Smith
From lawsuits to recall efforts, bomb threats to truancy initiatives and superintendents retiring, leaving for other districts or being pushed out of office, 2014 was a busy year for the top 20 school districts by enrollment in Wisconsin. With school board elections in 19 of these districts coming up on April 7, 2015, there is plenty of news to look forward to in 2015 as well.
Issues in 2014
Collective bargaining and teacher pay plans
Districts across the state started looking at collective bargaining and teacher pay plans in new ways in 2014, a trend largely stemming from Wisconsin's Act 10 law. The law cut back public employees’ collective bargaining rights and in the process changed the way school districts negotiate teacher contracts. Those districts that wished to keep their old models have encountered legal conflicts.[1][2][3]
On behalf of Madison resident David Blaska, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) filed a lawsuit against the Madison Metropolitan School District on September 11, 2014, claiming taxpayer money was illegally spent in the district's employee contracts and asking that an injunction to prohibit those contracts be enforced. District officials and Madison Teachers Inc. believe they were on solid ground when the contracts were negotiated and that they are valid through June 2016. The dispute comes from different interpretations of when Act 10 was implemented.[2][4][5]
After it was passed, Act 10 spent some time circulating the court system, with portions of it being declared unconstitutional by the Dane County trial court in 2012. On July 31, 2014, however, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Act 10 as constitutional in a case brought by Madison Teachers Inc. and Milwaukee AFL-CIO Local 61. However, the ruling did not clarify whether or not continuing to use existing contracts that contain provisions barred under Act 10 was illegal. Madison Metropolitan School District administrators say the contracts are valid because they were entered into after the trial court declared portions of the law unconstitutional and before the state Supreme Court reversed that decision. As their lawsuit demonstrates, WILL disagrees with this position.[5][6]
Kenosha Unified School District faced a similar lawsuit from WILL in 2014. Instead of defending their contracts in court, the district settled with WILL, agreeing to pay $10,500 in legal fees and to nullify their former contracts with the Kenosha Education Association.[3][6] This may have resulted from a change in the Kenosha Board of Education's governing majority following their 2014 school board election. The two newly-elected board members, Gary J. Kunich and Dan Wade, faced significant opposition from the Wisconsin Education Association Council during the election. Both voted to settle the lawsuit and to nullify the contracts.[7]
Though Act 10 has caused all school districts to view teacher contracts in a new way, not all of them have faced lawsuits like Madison Metropolitan and Kenosha Unified. Many have instead decided to experiment with new pay plan models. Oshkosh Area School District, Wauwatosa School District and Sun Prairie Area School District changed their teacher pay plans in 2014. In Oshkosh and Sun Prairie, teachers now have to take professional development courses in order to receive a pay raise. In Wauwatosa, teacher pay plans are now based largely on performance.[1][8][9]
Bomb threats and student protests
In the first half of the 2014-2015 school year, both the Stevens Point Area Public School District and the West Bend School District dealt with student unrest severe enough to lead to arrests. After five bomb threats early in the school year, Stevens Point caught the culprit of a sixth threat in December 2014, and in November 2014, dozens of West Bend students protested a new hall pass procedure by running through the halls, knocking down trash cans and ripping down posters.[10][11] These were the two most serious school security incidents in Wisconsin's 20 largest school districts in 2014.
The latest Stevens Point bomb threat was written on a stall in a girl's bathroom at P.J. Jacobs Junior High School on December 9, 2014. It stated that someone was going to bring a bomb to the school on December 10, 2014. The student who reported the threat to school staff later confessed to being the one who wrote it and also admitted that the threat was not real.[12]
Repercussions for the student could include suspension or expulsion from the district, and if she is tried as an adult, felony charges that are punishable with up to three and a half years in prison and a $10,000 fine or a maximum of three years probation. Being tried as a juvenile could result in the student being sentenced to secure detention. The decision between those two options is the responsibility of the local police department.[10]
Students in West Bend also face serious consequences for their protest. On November 20, 2014, district administrators sat down with students from the West Bend East and West Bend West high schools to discuss a new hall pass procedure. What started out as a peaceful meeting turned ugly when one student stood up on a lunch table and started "speaking his mind and swearing," according to one student at the meeting. When administrators tried to pull him off the table, a fight began. The student was arrested by police, but dozens of others started tearing through the halls, ripping down posters, flooding sinks and pushing furniture. Fifteen more police officers arrived to help contain the students, and the school went under a soft lockdown until things settled down. No students or staff members were injured during the protest.[13]
The student protest led to 75 students receiving three-day suspensions from the school district. After reviewing video of the incident and interviewing administrators, staff and 137 students, the police then charged 23 of them with disorderly conduct, which is a criminal misdemeanor. Another 23 students were issued municipal citations for disorderly conduct. The misdemeanors are punishable by up to 90 days in jail and/or a fine of up to $1,000, and the municipal citations range from $376 to $439, depending on the age of the student.[11][14]
Superintendents
Four of the top 20 school districts by enrollment in Wisconsin experienced turnover at their top administrative positions in 2014. Both Milwaukee Public Schools and the West Allis-West Milwaukee School District lost their former superintendents in July 2014. Milwaukee's superintendent left to work for another school district, and West Allis-West Milwaukee's left for retirement. The superintendents for Stevens Point Area Public School District and Beloit School District also tendered their resignations in 2014, but they will stay on through the 2014-2015 school year. Both of them experienced some conflict with the school board and the community before deciding to resign.[15][16][17][18]
Milwaukee is ahead of the pack in finding a new superintendent. The school board took the vacancy in the top seat as an opportunity to hire the district's first permanent female superintendent, appointing Dr. Darienne Driver in October 2014. She has served the district since 2012 and took on the role of interim superintendent after former superintendent Dr. Gregory Thornton left the district to work for the Baltimore City Public School System. Driver served as interim superintendent for three months before getting appointed to the position permanently.[15]
West Allis-West Milwaukee, Stevens Point and Beloit are still in the process of searching for replacements. Kurt Wachholz, former superintendent of the West Allis-West Milwaukee School District, served the district for a full decade before retiring. The district named Paul Strobel, former superintendent of the Mukwonago School District, as the interim superintendent in August 2014. The board hopes to name Wachholz's permanent replacement by April 1, 2015, and to have the new superintendent start by July 1, 2015. To help them accomplish that task, they hired the firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates to conduct the search and had community members fill out surveys to share what qualities they want to see in their next superintendent.[16][19][20]
Attila Weninger, superintendent of the Stevens Point Area Public School District until July 2015, served in his position for four years before resigning. During those years, he had been unable to come to an agreement with the teachers' union in the wake of Act 10. Weninger received a vote of no confidence from teachers during the 2013-2014 school year, which prompted the school board to vote against renewing Weninger’s contract in May 2014. That vote, however, occurred in a closed session, which brought up possible legal complications. The vote was retracted after it was deemed to be "unenforceable" under the law. Before the vote, Weninger had submitted his resignation effective the last day of his contract, July 30, 2015, which the board accepted after retracting their earlier vote.[17][21]
Business and municipal leaders in the Stevens Point community disagreed with the board's actions. At a school board meeting in August 2014, CEOs and business leaders from companies such as Skyward, Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection and Sentry Insurance were joined by Stevens Point Mayor Andrew Halverson and other county officials to request the school board to rescind Weninger's resignation and keep him on after his contract ends.[21] The school board did not carry out that request. Instead, the board formed a committee to look into going without a superintendent once Weninger retired. Instead of having one person in that position, the board looked into creating an "Office of the Superintendent," which would have included a group of administrative decision-makers. That idea, however, was rejected on September 15, 2014, when the board voted 5-3 to stop pursuing the "Office of the Superintendent" model.[22][23] In November 2014, the school board moved forward in their search for Weninger's replacement. Like the West Allis-West Milwaukee School District, they asked community members to take a survey to share which qualities they wanted to see in their next superintendent.[24]
Like Weninger, Steve McNeal, superintendent of the Beloit School District until June 30, 2014, also experienced conflict with the school board before submitting his resignation. He was given a formal reprimand for using an offensive image at a school convocation. Instead of siding with him as members of the Stevens Point community had with Weninger, Beloit community members participated in a protest in October 2014 that requested McNeal step down as superintendent. McNeal said those events did somewhat influence his decision to resign and to leave the education field. He will be moving into a job in the private sector after the 2014-2015 school year. School board members said they are looking for a replacement for McNeal who can help them address diversity concerns in the district.[18]
Truancy initiatives and grant programs
Both the Green Bay Area Public School District and the Beloit School District created new initiatives or programs to combat problems in their districts in 2014. Green Bay started an initiative to address their 11.6 percent truancy rate, and Beloit is in the process of implementing a minority-recruitment scholarship program to address the lack of diversity in their teaching staff.[25][26]
Green Bay's truancy initiative started with a letter sent early in 2014 to families with a history of truancy, signed by the school district, the district's attorney, the Green Bay police force and the municipal judge. Then, over the summer, social workers identified which families had the highest truancy rates and met with them individually to work on getting their kids to school. This new initiative is trying to avoid traditional methods of dealing with truancy, such as writing tickets or punishing students, and instead helping families overcome the barriers that keep their children from going to school.[25][27]
According to Erica Winkler, a social worker in one of the district's elementary schools, those barriers, such as a lack of warm clothing to wear in the winter months and having no transportation and no adult available to walk children to school, are more often the cause of truancy in elementary school than a student's desire to skip class. The district's $7.9 million budget for student transportation allows around 9,000 students out of 22,000 to receive transportation, but expanding student transportation would be fiscally irresponsible, according to district officials. Instead, they are looking into cab options, gas cards and bus tokens for those who have transportation issues.[25]
The more students fall behind when they are young, the more anxious they become and the less likely they are to want to go to school, which creates a learned behavior, according to Winkler. This is why Green Bay's new truancy initiative is focused on elementary school children. The district believes that getting younger students to school should help to eliminate truancy problems in the future.[27]
Beloit's minority-recruitment scholarship program is designed to award scholarships to Beloit students who agree to major in education and, after graduation, apply for teaching positions in their home school district. A similar program is already underway in the Janesville School District. The reason behind the program is that there is a clear link between student learning and staff diversity, according to Tim Vedra, president of the Beloit Education Association, and the demographics of Beloit's teaching staff doesn't match its students.[26]
The district received a $5,000 grant from the National Education Association in December 2014 to help pay for program fundraising as well as administrative costs to increase the scope of the program.[26]
2015 elections preview
School board elections
Nineteen of the top 20 school districts by enrollment in Wisconsin will hold school board elections in the spring of 2015. A total of 50 seats will be up for election on April 7, 2015. If more than two candidates file for any board position, a primary election will be held on February 17, 2015. To get on the ballot, school board candidates must file their campaign registration statements, declarations of candidacy and nomination papers with their county election offices by January 6, 2015.[28]
Wauwatosa School District, with a student enrollment of 7,204 during the 2013-2014 school year, will not have any elections in 2015. The other 19 school districts are listed in the table below.[29]
Madison Metropolitan referendum
Residents of Madison, Wisconsin will be asked to approve a $41 million referendum in the school board elections on April 7, 2015. The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education approved the referendum question on December 15, 2014. If approved, $39 million of the new funding would be used for school additions and renovations. The remaining $2 million would be used for technology improvements. The cost of the referendum would raise homeowners' taxes by approximately $63 per year on average.[30]
Possible recall effort
Stevens Point Area School District Board of Education members Lisa Totten and Kim Shirek could face a recall effort in 2015 if discussions started in November and December 2014 come to fruition. Both Totten and Shirek have been criticized for their behavior in board meetings, including insulting district employees and fellow board members and delaying votes due to being unprepared. Both members were elected in April 2010, and their terms are scheduled to end in 2016.[31]
To officially launch a recall effort, supporters of the effort must form a recall committee and register a specific intent with the district's business services office. The committee would then have 60 days to circulate a petition in support of the recall. In order to get the recall on the ballot, 25 percent of voters from the district who voted in the last gubernatorial election must sign the petition. This means a possible recall committee would have to collect a total of 6,549 signatures to have a recall election.[31]
The cost of a possible recall effort could vary from $3,000 to $40,000. Having the recall election occur at the same time as another election would help keep costs down. Recall elections must be held on the sixth Tuesday after the petition has been verified, which means a petition would have to be verified by late February if recall supporters wanted to include it on the school board elections ballot on April 7, 2015.[31]
See also
- Wisconsin school districts
- List of school districts in Wisconsin
- Wisconsin school board elections, 2015
Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "In wake of Act 10, school districts changing teacher pay formulas," August 18, 2014
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 The Badger Herald, "Madison School District faces collective bargaining lawsuit," September 15, 2014
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Kenosha School Board settles lawsuit over Act 10 dispute," June 6, 2014
- ↑ Channel3000.com, "Madison teachers' union leader: Act 10 ruling ‘morally bankrupt,’" July 31, 2014
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 The Cap Times, "Madison school district, teachers union say labor contracts still valid after Act 10 ruling," August 1, 2014
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 The Cap Times, "Madison school officials, MTI say claims regarding union dues, teachers' rights don't belong in Act 10 lawsuit," October 9, 2014
- ↑ Kenosha Unified School District, "Meeting Minutes," accessed June 23, 2014
- ↑ The Northwestern, "Oshkosh school board approves new teacher pay plan," August 13, 2014
- ↑ Wisconsin State Journal, "A teacher 'marketplace' emerges in post-Act 10 Wisconsin," September 7, 2014
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Stevens Point Journal, "Update: Bomb threat suspect faces host of consequences," December 10, 2014
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Fox 6, "'There’s anxiety:' West Bend students suspended over protest that turned ugly," November 21, 2014
- ↑ Stevens Point Journal, "P.J. Jacobs student arrested after bomb threat," December 9, 2014
- ↑ Fox 6, "'It was actually scary:' One arrested after West Bend students become unruly over new," November 20, 2014
- ↑ Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Police take action against 46 students in West Bend high school dust-up," December 5, 2014
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 BizTimes, "Driver to lead MPS as permanent superintendent," October 1, 2014
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "West Allis-West Milwaukee names interim superintendent," August 12, 2014
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 Stevens Point City Times, "Growing Support for Weninger to Culminate at Monday’s Board Meeting," August 11, 2014
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 Channel 3000, "Beloit superintendent retires for private sector," December 16, 2014
- ↑ West Allis Now, "Wachholz retires as superintendent of West Allis-West Milwaukee schools," July 31, 2014
- ↑ West Allis Now, "West Allis residents to name qualities needed in new superintendent," November 24, 2014
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 Steven Point Journal, "Business leaders want Weninger to stay," August 11, 2014
- ↑ Stevens Point Journal, "School Board considers going topless," August 20, 2014
- ↑ Stevens Point Journal, "UPDATE: District drops superintendent-by-committee idea," September 19, 2014
- ↑ Stevens Point Journal, "School Board asks for input on superintendent search," November 19, 2014
- ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 Fox 11, "Green Bay elementary school truancy rate raises concerns," December 11, 2014
- ↑ 26.0 26.1 26.2 Channel 3000, "Grant will help Beloit diversify teaching staff," December 4, 2014
- ↑ 27.0 27.1 ABC 2, "Green Bay Schools, Police, Courts Tackle Truancy in New Way," December 11, 2014
- ↑ Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, "Ballot Access Checklist for 2014 School District Candidates," accessed December 18, 2014
- ↑ Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, "Wisconsin Information System for Education: Enrollment (Single Year)," accessed December 17, 2014
- ↑ WKOW, "$41M referendum question up for vote in Madison Metropolitan School District," December 16, 2014
- ↑ 31.0 31.1 31.2 Stevens Point City Times, "School Board Watch Column: Details on Recall Election Requested," December 3, 2014
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