Trying times

Candidates wade through complex issues facing the Madison school board

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TJ Mertz says it’s been a trying time to serve on the Madison school board.

He ticks off the reasons: multiple accusations of racial slurs being used in classrooms, an alleged assault of a student by a Whitehorse Middle School administrator, an explosive school board meeting, and an open letter on racism penned by the district’s superintendent. Madison’s schools appear to be in crisis.

“The board, the district, the community, are all struggling with a lot of things right now and my position puts me in the eye of the hurricane,” says Mertz, the only incumbent running for one of three open school board seats. “I’m very limited in what I can say about things [due to] privacy issues and that makes silence usually the option. And it’s difficult to be silent.”

Mertz urges families and administrators to seek common ground. “I think that that is getting harder and harder and it scares the hell out of me. Schools are the heart of the community,” Mertz says. “Schools are the best opportunity we have to build a better future.”

Ananda Mirilli, who is challenging Mertz, says now is not the time to be silent. It’s the time to be working with communities of color to restore trust. “If you’re a white person in Madison and … your job is to serve people of color in whatever capacity, you need to be in communities with people of color,” Mirilli says. “And to be there with people in the successes and in moments of grief.”

Six people are running for three school board seats in the April 2 election. Here is a rundown of the contests.

Kaleem Caire and Cris Carusi each hope to take over Seat 3 from Dean Loumos, who is not seeking re-election. Carusi came in first in the Feb. 19 primary with 49 percent of the vote, while Caire nabbed 43.6 percent.

A co-founder of Madison SCAPE, which advocates for public education, Carusi says that both she and Caire have similar goals. “How we go about getting there is where we differ,” she says.

Carusi would like to see police officers (SROs) removed from schools, but says it can’t happen quickly. First, the district needs to make sure that students of color are getting their basic needs met and feel welcome and empowered in schools. “I’m hoping we’ll reach the day where we can ask police to leave our schools and we’ll all feel safe,” Carusi says.

Caire would also like to see the day when police are no longer needed, but acknowledges that there are students and families who don’t feel safe without officers. “We must work on a values-centered plan to build a stronger and more welcoming and inspirational school culture in each of our schools,” Caire writes in an email. “These plans should include how we discipline students, staff and volunteers who violate school rules and policies, but should significantly promote ways we build, promote and maintain positive discipline and a healthy culture among our school communities.”

Caire and Carusi do disagree on charter schools. Caire is the founder of One City Schools, a public charter school for 4K and kindergarten that operates independently of the district. The UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity in February approved One City’s application to expand its charter to serve children through sixth grade.

While Caire believes charter schools can be “laboratories of innovation in K-12 education,” he says he’s not running to promote them. “[The district] should be able to innovate within its current schools without having to solely rely on others to do this innovation for them,” he says. “We have a great opportunity to create the next generation of world-class schools.”

Carusi opposes charter schools — especially those not run by the district. “In general, charter schools often don’t educate all children and leave the most-difficult-to-educate children behind in public schools,” Carusi says. “You’ve got to think about the kids who are left in the public schools.”

While Carusi is less opposed to district-run charters, she still worries that they’re diverting resources from neighborhood schools. “I think you should invest in the public school system and not have a parallel system,” she says. “Every kid should have the opportunity for a world-class education in their local, public school.”

To improve achievement gaps, Carusi wants the board to reduce class sizes, improve staff retention, expand culturally relevant curriculum, and increase access to early childhood education. She’d like the district to expand extracurricular out-of-school activities, and eventually, to offer all-day 4K.

Carusi also wants to give teachers more power. “If you look at examples of school districts across the country that have narrowed gaps, one thing that they have in common is that they give their staff a lot of voice in coming up with ideas about how to meet the needs of their students,” she says.

Caire would focus on children in their first five years by expanding early childhood education and increasing parental engagement through partnerships. “I see a school district where principals, teachers, school staff and parents are truly supported by the greater Madison community, and where everyone digs a little deeper and goes a little further to make young people the number one priority in our city,” Caire says. “I will help rally the community around creating the school district of the future and putting children first among our policy priorities in our city.”

Ali Muldrow and David Blaska — who are vying for Seat 4, now held by James Howard who is retiring — offer the starkest contrast in candidates in all of the races.

Muldrow is a lifelong progressive who has always voted for Democrats. Blaska is the lone conservative running for the board. In February’s primary, Muldrow dominated with 55.7 percent over Blaska’s 23.1 percent.

A former Dane County supervisor, Blaska is focusing his campaign on safety and keeping SROs in schools. “Parents want them, students want them, the teachers want them, and I want them,” Blaska says.

Blaska scoffs at the idea that students of color are given more scrutiny by police. “Race has nothing to do with it, it’s all about behavior,” Blaska says. “It just so happens that there are more of a certain demographic in a certain particular time period that committed offenses that required correction.”

Muldrow, co-director of GSAFE, says race is clearly a factor. During the 2016-2017 school year, the district reported that 81 of the 105 students arrested in schools were black. Muldrow disputes that police make schools safer. “Nobody says the neighborhoods with the most police are the safest,” Muldrow says. “So why would the school districts with the most police be the safest?”

Muldrow wouldn’t immediately push to kick SROs out of schools, but would work to ensure they’re utilized appropriately. “It’d be asserting that we know it is inappropriate to arrest black students six times more often than anybody else and then taking the steps to stop doing that,” Muldrow says. “So, I’m not against the police, I am against racial disparities.”

As for charter schools, Blaska says the more the better. “Competition is what made America great,” he says. “My whole pitch is to bring Madison schools back to their former excellence status and we’ve gone the opposite way. We have parents voting with their feet.”

Muldrow supports charter schools — like Nuestro Mundo — that are overseen by the district, because they create an opportunity to develop creative curriculum. She notes that two independent charter schools — Isthmus Montessori Academy, where her daughters go, and One City Schools — would prefer to be part of the district. Both applied but were rejected.

To address the achievement gap, Blaska sees a lack of discipline as the problem and would revise the district’s Behavior Education Plan. Muldrow champions making arts a core part of curriculum. She’d also encourage the district to step back from standardized testing and make schools more inclusive and welcoming.

“Our attachment to ‘sit still, in a desk, fill out a worksheet,’ I don’t think we’re attached to that because it’s a necessity of learning, I think were attached to it because we’re used to it,” Muldrow says. “And I think we’re attached to the achievement gap because we’re used to it. And I think that we need to get used to something else.”

In the primary for Seat 5, Mertz was disappointed that Mirilli beat him by 52.1 to 36.5 percent, but says his campaign “didn’t really do much before the primary.”

Mertz has been involved in the district’s discussion about SROs since the beginning. “The first time the [SRO] contract came before the board, and I’ve said this before, I wasn’t really ready for it,” Mertz says.

For Mertz — a member of the Education Resource Officer Ad Hoc Committee — the district’s current contract with the police department provides a framework for a more cooperative relationship between the schools and the officers, who are stationed in the four high schools.

“We know historically that police will be called to our buildings. We also know that recently passed legislation … requires our staff, if there is a perceived serious threat to safety, to contact the police immediately — under threat of fine,” Mertz says. “No police in schools is not a possibility. So then the question is, how do we have police in schools?”

Mirilli, education equity consultant at the state Department of Public Instruction, would terminate the SRO contract. Growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Mirilli saw law enforcement become militarized. She doesn’t want that to happen in Madison.

“Thinking that schools are going to be a place of punishment is contradictory to what we want to foster as far as an educational place,” Mirilli says. “This is a space where people make mistakes and we learn from the mistakes instead of being arrested or suspended or pushed out of the schools.”

Instead she would like to look at ways to make sure students feel welcome in their schools — and their community. “What the research has shown is that when we invest in people, we reduce violence and bullying and fights in schools.”

Both Mertz and Mirilli are happy that Gov. Tony Evers included a moratorium on new independent charter schools in his state budget, because they want those resources going to neighborhood schools.

To address the achievement gap, Mertz would like to see smaller class sizes. He also advocates for more shared decision-making with classroom staff. “The board doesn’t teach, right? We don’t know the students,” he says. “[Classroom staff] know what their students need…. If they tell us that it’s not the time to change curriculum or they tell us please, please, please change curriculum, we need to listen to that.”

Mirilli wants to move away from a one-size-fits-all approach. She’d focus on helping schools that are underperforming. But to make any progress, she says everyone needs to have a seat at the table. “No one person can do what we want to have happen … it needs to be more people and we need to build capacity for all the folks to come.”