Tommy Washbush
After winter break, the Madison school district delayed in-person school by a week, but scrambled to return students to the classroom on Jan. 10 — even as COVID-19 cases hit record-levels in Dane County. A few days after reopening, hundreds of students at La Follette High School were sent to the auditorium for part of the day for a large study hall. Nearly 20 percent of the high school’s educators were absent and the district was unable to staff all regular classes.
“In the effort to bring kids back into the building, we stuffed them en masse into one space. That’s almost the exact opposite of how we planned to safely get students back into the classroom,” says educator Michael Jones, president of Madison Teachers Inc. “What used to be extreme measures that occurred infrequently are becoming increasingly more common.”
With the ongoing pandemic, the staffing shortage in Madison schools has reached a breaking point. But it is a problem that has been building for years and just one sign of a troubled school district, according to 18 current and former Madison teachers and a number of local education advocates (most teachers requested anonymity for fear of retaliation and to protect the privacy of their students). The vast majority of educators interviewed say they feel ignored and not supported in the classroom. Many also say poorly implemented behavioral policy initiatives have created chaos in schools and that academic standards are slipping as a result.
“This perfect storm has been brewing for quite some time,” says Jones, who taught special education and was most recently the dean of students at West High before becoming the president of MTI. “COVID has added an extra layer that has gotten people’s attention. But it mostly just exposed the underlying issues to the point where it’s obvious to the community.”
So where does the buck stop? Carlton Jenkins became superintendent five months into the pandemic in August 2020. He’s facing his own staffing shortage in the central office. He declined to be interviewed for this story.
The educators and advocates Isthmus spoke to, in general, believe Jenkins may be a good fit for Madison while acknowledging he’s still relatively new to the job and is taking over during particularly difficult times. But there’s far less sympathy for the Madison school board. Critics say there’s been a lack of leadership from board members for several years now and that’s contributed to the district’s current difficulties.
The upcoming school board races this April are a sign, themselves, of a school district in trouble. Of three races, only one is contested.
“It’s disappointing that we aren’t seeing more people running. The board races are a chance for the community to have the public debate over what our schools need,” says former school board member TJ Mertz. “That isn’t going to happen in uncontested elections. I think we’ve allowed the school board to become purely about symbolism.” Symbolism is important, he adds, “but it can’t stop there. The board should guide decision-making and ensure policies are being implemented successfully.”
District spokesperson Tim LeMonds acknowledges that the district is currently grappling with a “critical staff shortage.” But it didn’t start with the Omicron variant causing a record number of COVID-19 cases among students and staff in 2022.
Finding substitute teachers has grown harder in recent years. According to a Jan. 4 report from the district’s human resources department, the district was able to cover more than 90 percent of staff absences in 2016, 2017 and 2018 with substitutes. That dropped to below 85 percent in 2019 and 2020. At the start of this school year, the district was only able to find subs to fill 71 percent of vacancies and that tumbled to 55 percent in January 2022.
Part of the problem is the pool of eligible substitutes decreased by 40 percent in fall 2021. And some full-time teachers even left before the end of the first semester. LeMonds did not provide requested information on how many unfilled staff positions remain in the district. But according to a Jan. 31 district report, there have been 132 resignations, retirements and terminations since November; during that time 34 staffers were hired.
“It’s not like anyone in the district is twiddling their thumbs. We have administrators from the central office subbing at schools. School psychologists are on classroom duty,” says Jones of MTI. “But we have a responsibility to be honest with the community and say this is not sustainable.”
Alex, a second grade teacher who requested that we use a pseudonym, says the lack of staff is adding to the daily struggle of trying to keep kids on track academically.
At the beginning of the year, Alex’s school had a reading interventionist who provided “intensive reading support” to help students from falling behind in class.
But when a teacher left mid-year, the reading interventionist was reassigned to that class because the district was unable to fill the position or find a long-term substitute teacher, says Alex.
“It is super disheartening. With young kids, there are core skills that need to be mastered in order to move on to the next skill,” says Alex. “So you just watch some kids skid over and over again.
“It’s just hard when you don’t have enough teachers and you don’t have enough support staff. I don’t even blame the district. The entire American education system is broken.”
Michael Jones, president of MTI: ‘COVID has taken a real toll on the mental health of many of our students.’
The current staffing crisis is compounding a broader morale problem among teachers that started long before the pandemic and has contributed to educators deciding to retire early, leave the district, or change professions.
Sam is one of the teachers who left. The educator, who requested a pseudonym for the online version of this article, worked at a Madison high school for more than a decade.
“Teachers are expected to be superhuman in Madison,” says Sam. “The teachers I deeply admired and I know were doing the best work, very, very, very few of them are still in the classroom. Most of them have left not just the district, but the education field completely.”
According to most of the teachers and education advocates Isthmus interviewed for this story, teachers have not been a priority for recent school board members, nor were they for former Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, who led the district from 2013 to 2019 before leaving to take a position at Harvard.
“Cheatham had a very top-down management style and with our union weakened by [former Gov. Scott Walker’s] Act 10, teachers really started to lose their voice,” says Sam.
One of Cheatham’s most substantial reforms during her six-year tenure was her Behavior Education Plan, implemented in 2014, which eliminated “zero tolerance policies relying on punishment and exclusionary practices to correct misbehavior” in favor of “a progressive and restorative approach to behavior and discipline.”
In 2019, Cheatham told Isthmus the plan has an “explicit equity imperative” and represented “a fundamental shift” from the district’s former policy, which disproportionately punished students of color and students with disabilities.
“What are we doing as educators to see students for all of who they are, to not make assumptions about them, to deeply inquire into who they are so we know how best to meet their needs,” Cheatham said. “How do we use additional supplemental supports, as appropriate and needed, when a student needs more than a classroom teacher can provide?”
Almost three years later, teachers are still waiting for district leadership to answer that question.
Addressing behavioral issues “doesn’t work unless you actually do restorative justice and have counselors truly addressing the root causes,” says one La Follette High School teacher. “The staff just wasn’t ever there to support it so it fell on classroom teachers. But the real gut punch is when issues with the [Behavior Education Plan] emerged — which is bound to happen with any big change — administrators didn’t try to fix it. They blamed teachers and told us we must be the problem.”
Sam embraced the district’s move to “promote anti-racism and stop punishing kids for being kids.” But the former Madison teacher believes administrators and school board members used the effort as a convenient reason to dismiss teacher concerns.
“I’m not saying there wasn’t equity work to be done particularly around white supremacy. And there was a lot of identity work that needed to be done with some of the white teachers,” says Sam. “But the word equity gets used and then anything goes regardless of whether it’s effective, whether it works, or whether teachers are in support of it. It just seemed like that was used as a guise to take away any and all power that the individual teacher had as a professional.”
Alida LaCosse is a music education teacher at James C. Wright, a magnet middle school for about 250 students. At Wright, LaCosse says they have no security staff and behavioral challenges are dealt with holistically. She says restorative justice is working at her school, engagement in the classroom is “extremely high,” and it’s a team effort.
“Implementing restorative justice takes staff and it takes time. You have to have social workers, you have to have counselors. And you have to work the program in an authentic and honest way,” says LaCosse. “Most importantly, you have to restore the harm that was done. Restorative justice doesn’t mean a kid can do whatever they want with no repercussions.”
LaCosse was one of the few teachers interviewed who found the new plan was working. An educator at East says the biggest difference in behavior he’s witnessed is that now “students are allowed to check out and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“There was a half-assed attempt to control the use of cell phones initially. But never a unified response. It was inconsistent at best in the high schools,” says the educator. “Kids are addicted to their cell phones. It is a major scene if you even try to get them to put it away because the phone has almost become an extension of their identity.” The students have essentially won the battle, he adds, and are now free “to be on their phone whenever they want, headphones included.”
TikTok. Group texts. Snapchat. All the drama of high school is playing out, during class, virtually. And often at the expense of learning.
“I’ll be standing in front of a class, talking about this cool research project where students have a lot of say in what they choose to learn. And a huge majority of the class is just on their phones not paying any attention at all,” says one high school teacher. “The students come to school and pretend to learn. Teachers come to school and pretend to teach. We are all just trying to get through the day.”
And there is pressure to ignore the realities of missed work: “A kid zones out the entire semester, doesn’t do any work, and we’re being told [from administrators] to get them to quickly make up a couple of assignments and give him a passing grade. It’s a terrible message we are sending.”
Data shows the Behavior Education Plan has largely failed to substantially reduce disparities in discipline. Black students represent 18 percent of Madison students but accounted for 62 percent of out-of-school suspensions in 2015 and 57 percent in the fall semester of 2020. Black students also received more than half of all in-school suspensions during the same period. In total, the number of students who received out-of-school suspensions increased every year from 2015 until 2020.
Data from September through October 2021 showed some improvement in suspension rates but the disparities continued.
Four candidates for three school board races, top left to bottom right: Shepherd Janeway, Nichelle Nichols, Laura Simkin and Ali Muldrow.
Voters will elect three members to the Madison school board this April (interviews with the candidates can be found here). School board president Ali Muldrow is running unopposed for a second three-year term. Nichelle Nichols, a former district administrator, faces no opponent to replace one-term board member Ananda Mirilli on the board. And Laura Simkin and Shepherd Janeway (who will appear on the ballot as Shepherd Joyner) are running to replace outgoing board member Cris Carusi, who also served one term.
When the new school board is sworn in this spring, four of its seven members will have never faced an opponent at the ballot box. Former Madison school board member and teacher Marj Passman says the new board will have its work cut out for it.
“What I’ve consistently heard from teachers is that the board doesn’t seem concerned about what’s happening in the classroom,” says Passman, a former teacher who worked for the school district for 25 years and served on the board from 2007 to 2013. “And now the district is desperate for just warm bodies because so many teachers have left. That makes it difficult to focus on anything else.”
Carol Carstensen served on the Madison school board for 28 years, starting in 1990. She doesn’t remember district administrators ever filling in as classroom substitutes except during a handful of political actions — like sick-outs — by the Madison teachers’ union. She’s alarmed it has come to that.
“We need board members to be more active in identifying and addressing issues — like this staffing shortage — before it gets so bad. It’s hard to do that when you don’t have the experience,” says Carstensen. “There have been numerous board members who seem to have very little concept of what it means to be on the board.”
LaCosse, the music teacher at Wright, would also like to see some specific action by the board devoted to teacher recruitment. “I hear school board members talk about how we need more Black teachers,” she says. “I’m a Black teacher and I couldn’t agree more. But if you can’t afford to buy a home in Madison on a teacher salary, good luck with recruitment. Sun Prairie, Verona, even Milwaukee pay better than Madison. What’s keeping me in Madison is I feel supported at my school. You got to treat your people right or you’ll lose them.”
Muldrow, elected president of the board by her colleagues in 2021, was the only school board member who agreed to an interview request for this article. She rejects the charge that the board is not supportive of teachers.
“I don’t know how any school board member could think anything gets done without your staff being supported,” says Muldrow. “Especially now, the district knows how important it is to retain teachers so they can give the best education possible to our students.”
Muldrow has pointed to her championing of mental health days for teachers as an accomplishment of her first term in office; the board also voted in November to increase pay for substitute teachers.
She says she can’t speak for what happened on past boards but acknowledges that it takes time to “know when and how to course correct policies as a board member. I’ve learned to be way more confident in that way. But I don’t believe in pushing back or challenging the administration in order to virtue signal to the community.”
For one veteran teacher at East, that lack of pushback has looked more like a rubber-stamping of whatever the central office is proposing.
“I do think some of them are starting to wake up. I’ve seen Ali Muldrow way more engaged here at East when we needed it; that was appreciated and made a big difference,” says the teacher. “But that kind of involvement by a school board member has been pretty much nonexistent.”
James Howard, who served on the school board from 2010 to 2019, is hopeful for the board’s future. “I think some of the candidates running this year have the experience needed to do a great job.” But he acknowledges that board members are “definitely pretty green” and that it takes a while to get up to speed. “I had kids in the district for 30 years and was active in the schools; that really helps because it’s a steep learning curve even when you come in with a lot of experience.”
One key item the new board will likely be grappling with is the continued fallout from the elimination of police officers from the district’s high schools. A number of fights at East and La Follette made the news this fall, including one at East involving dozens of students, sparking debate among many parents about the wisdom of removing school resource officers.
When the school board voted in June 2020 to end the SRO contract with the Madison Police Department, former school board president Gloria Reyes — who did not seek re-election in 2021 — said the district owed it to students, especially students of color, to “pursue a viable alternative to SROs in our buildings.”
MTI supported the removal of cops in schools, but also recommended a specific number of nurses, counselors, social workers, and psychologists be hired as part of the “viable alternative” cited by Reyes.
“If we remove police officers from our schools, but do not adequately staff those same schools with social workers, nurses, counselors, and psychologists, we are perpetuating harm upon our most vulnerable young people,” MTI said in a June 2020 statement. “If we are serious about being anti-racist as a Madison community, we must fully support our students, not just by subtracting one group, but significantly adding another.”
Isthmus has confirmed from multiple sources, including Jones at MTI, that the additional support staff that was promised has been slow to materialize.
“No, we still haven’t gotten the mental health support that we knew was needed to go hand-in-hand with removing SROs,” says Jones. “COVID has taken a real toll on the mental health of many of our students and we are noticing it in several ways at our schools.”
At its Jan. 24 meeting, the board considered whether to create an ad hoc committee to address school safety and security but didn’t vote to formally establish it. A similar ad hoc committee was formed in 2020 and produced 16 recommendations focused on restorative justice, including the immediate establishment of a “Superintendent Advisory Committee” to oversee that recommendations were acted upon. But that advisory committee never got off the ground.
Jenny, a parent of a student at East High who asked that her last name not be used, says some parents do want officers back in schools. “But the majority were upset that the school board promised to hire counselors and other staff — and then didn’t make it happen. If the idea is that it’s harmful to have police in our schools, 15 squad cars in front of East and police using pepper spray to break up fights seems like the opposite. This totally sums up my criticism of the school board. They don’t follow through and then sweep the repercussions under the rug.”
Muldrow says the district is working to provide the additional support staff as promised. But she is comfortable with the elimination of the SROs. “We continue to address safety in our schools with an emphasis on mental health. Kids are suffering, like all of us, from the strain of the pandemic.”
She is also confident that the school board is helping move the district in a better direction.
“The board bringing Dr. Jenkins to Madison to be our superintendent is a major accomplishment. He came on during a global pandemic and it’s been hard. We are dealing with challenges that are nationwide. I’ve been reassured this last year that we picked an excellent leader,” says Muldrow. “COVID has also forced the district to rethink how we do basically everything. I’m focused on getting the district through the next three years and ensuring we are doing even better by our students and staff. The whole world has to heal from this pandemic, including us.”
