Jenny Peek
Ali Muldrow, left, and Ananda Mirilli ran for different seats, but supported each other's campaign efforts. Both finished first in their primary races.
On Tuesday night, school board candidate Ananda Mirilli had lots of love for Madison.
“Madison just made me really, really proud right now,” Mirilli told a crowd of about 100 people gathered for her and Ali Muldrow’s election watch party at Robinia Courtyard.
Both had just finished first in their respective primaries and Mirilli was hopeful that change was afoot. “This is not about Ananda and Ali, this is about our children, this is about our babies,” said Mirilli, an education equity consultant at the Department of Public Instruction. “We can no longer accept a school district that is the best school district for white children in the state of Wisconsin and the worst school district for black and brown children in the state of Wisconsin. That is no longer acceptable.”
For the primary, the two candidates with the most votes in each race advance to the April 2 general election.
According to unofficial results from the Dane County Clerk, Mirilli finished first in the race for Seat 5 with 52.1 percent of the vote, while incumbent school board member TJ Mertz got 36.5 percent.
While Mertz admitted he was a “little bit disappointed,” he looked forward to having a stronger ground game between now and April.
“We’ll do more knocking on doors and things like that,” Mertz said. “But the things I spoke about in the primary, about the need for transparency, about the need for accountability, about the need to make the rhetoric of shared responsibility a reality, are still the issues that I’ll be talking about primarily and we shall see what happens.”
In the race for Seat 3, Cris Carusi, an education advocate and co-founder of Madison SCAPE (School Community Alliance for Public Education), came out on top with 49 percent of the vote to Kaleem Caire’s 43.6 percent.
Still, Caire is happy to be moving on to the general election. “I was trying to push Madison in new directions, and it was encouraging for us because it’s a sign that people who really do pay attention to elections like this, your normal, routine voters, they want change,” said Caire, founder of One City Schools, a public charter school for 4K and kindergarten.
Muldrow won handily in the race for Seat 4, claiming 55.7 percent, followed by David Blaska, who secured 23.1 percent of the vote.
But in her victory speech, Muldrow said she’s not taking her first place showing for granted.
“This is definitely not a victory speech, right? This is a primary, so what this means is onward, and I think that that is something to celebrate,” said Muldrow, co-director of GSAFE. “We live to fight another day tonight.”
Blaska, a former Dane County supervisor, said running against Muldrow was going to be “a hell of a lot of fun,” and said he’d continue to talk about the issues that matter to Madison parents.
“We’re going to give voice to issues that have not been talked about, issues that will help students of all races or all socioeconomic categories,” Blaska said. “I think it will help improve Madison schools so that they can compete with the growing number of independent charter schools that are out there.”
The diversity of the school board became a theme in this year’s races. “For Madison, people want more diversity on the board; I think people want the issue of the achievement gap to be addressed,” Caire said. He said the victories of Mirilli and Muldrow show that “people … want change.”
Muldrow echoed that sentiment Tuesday night. “I feel like our community is ready to transform the way we treat one another,” she said. “Everything you face you can change but you can’t change anything you don’t face. And so I think right now we are facing ourselves, and we’re doing so courageously, and it feels like a good time to believe in change and I’m proud that this is where I come from.”
