Seat 6 candidates Maia Pearson (top, from left), Christina Gomez Schmidt and Karen Ball will compete in the Feb. 18 primary. Seat 7 incumbent Nicki Vander Meulen (bottom, left) is being challenged by Wayne Strong; the two will face off on April 7.
It’s been a difficult year for the Madison school district.
A barrage of high-profile incidents has taken over the narrative of what it’s like in Madison’s schools, from the use of racist language, to a teacher being arrested for attempting to produce child pornography, to issues of safety at a district middle school.
The district is also in the midst of changing leadership as Matthew Gutiérrez takes over as superintendent, following Jennifer Cheatham, who announced her departure last May.
Amid the change and turmoil, voters will begin the process of electing two new members to the Madison school board. A primary for the general election is Feb. 18, and will include a narrowing down of candidates for the board’s Seat 6, currently held by Kate Toews, who is not seeking re-election.
All those running for Seat 6 — Maia Pearson, Christina Gomez Schmidt and Karen Ball — have children in Madison’s schools. The top two vote-getters will face off in the general election on April 7, where they will join incumbent Nicki Vander Meulen and challenger Wayne Strong, the two candidates running for Seat 7, on the ballot. Savion Castro, who was appointed to Seat 2 in July, is running unopposed in a special election.
Leading up to the primary, Isthmus wanted to know what each of the candidates in contested races thought about the overwhelmingly negative press the district has been getting in the last year — and how it’s affecting students. We also asked candidates to explain how, if elected, they would address the critical issues facing Madison’s schools, while also ensuring students feel valued and supported.
Pearson: “I want all children to be successful, supported and valued.”
For Pearson, 32, academic achievement goes hand in hand with the things students care about.
She references an excerpt from Crossing Over to Canaan by UW-Madison professor emeritus Gloria Ladson-Billings: “Rather than seeing students’ culture as an impediment to learning, it becomes the vehicle through which they can acquire the official knowledge and skills of the school curriculum. However in order to capitalize on students’ cultures, teachers have to know the students’ culture.”
As a board member, Pearson would make it her top priority to help schools create an environment where students can “realize and develop their gifts and talents.”
This is especially important for the district’s students of color. Pearson — who works as a revenue agent for the Wisconsin Department of Revenue and has three kids in the district, all at Lincoln Elementary School — tells a story of when her oldest daughter, now 10, went to a kindergarten playdate to make friends before school started. The playdate turned toxic when the kids said they wouldn’t play with her daughter because she’s black.
“How do I as a parent have that conversation with my child at six? And why should I have to have that conversation with my child at six?.…If it’s right off the bat, and a six-year-old can go to kindergarten assuming that she’s not welcome, how do you teach that kid?” Pearson says. “And what happens to that kid? They automatically start to form ideas of what school and academic achievement looks like.”
If elected, Pearson would work to expand the conversation around school safety, and work with the community to uncover what is and isn’t working.
She says she would “leverage Madison’s cultural wealth of our diverse communities, students, teachers [and] parents” to look at what hasn’t worked and create school-based strategic plans with student’s physical, emotional and mental safety at the forefront. “I want all children to be successful, supported and valued,” she says.
Gomez Schmidt: “We have to know what’s working, what’s not working...[and] why.”
Gomez Schmidt, 48, points to the added challenge of the leadership transitions that have occurred in the district the last few years, from the superintendent to members of central administration to school principals.
“It can make implementing policies and plans and practices at the school level — the hard work that Madison schools are really focusing on — more difficult,” she says.
Gomez Schmidt works for Galin Education developing after school and summer enrichment courses. She has three kids, including a graduate of Memorial High School, a current Memorial student and a daughter who attends EAGLE School in Fitchburg.
She wants to make sure both the district and the board are focused on giving students and teachers the resources they need to create environments that are conducive to learning.
“The board needs to make sure it is getting timely and accurate information on all of the different initiatives, programs, strategic framework, implementation of plans and policies in order to inform key decision making,” she says. “We have to know what’s working, what’s not working, and we have to know why.”
She also says it’s time to be positive.
“We have to change the narrative to getting away from a deficit thinking [model] and really look at how we make sure that students believe they can succeed,” she says. “And that’s not to say we shouldn’t recognize when things are not going well, we absolutely have to deal with the very urgent and very real problems when things aren’t working in the schools.”
Ball: The district needs to “aggressively improve” reading and math scores.
As the director of academic success at Edgewood College, Ball, 45, has seen firsthand how unprepared many Madison school district graduates are for college.
“I have the privilege of seeing a lot of students come out of MMSD and they are very, very, very underprepared to do the work they need to do to live the lives they want to live,” she says. “We’ve done all this incredible work inspiring students and motivating them…but then we haven’t equipped them with the skills they need.”
Ball — who has an 11-year-old at Nuestro Mundo, and a 13-year-old at Sennett Middle School — says the way to address this, and the district’s behavior issues, is to “aggressively improve” reading and math scores for black and Hispanic students.
“People will say, ‘Oh I’m so afraid to send my kid to La Follette. Oh I’m so afraid to send my kid to East.’ And then I see these kids who come out and come here…they’re amazing. They have so much grit and tenacity. What they don’t have is enough reading skills,” she says. “And we’re working our tails off to address that. We do it really well [at Edgewood]. We’ve been given the infrastructure to be able to do that work. I think we need to do the same in our high schools, middle schools and elementary schools.”
While both Vander Meulen and Strong will advance to April’s general election, Isthmus also wanted to hear from them.
Vander Meulen: Classes must be “accessible to everyone.”
Vander Meulen, 41, says the district does its best when it focuses on the root causes of problems, whether it be systemic racism or a lack of disability support.
And one way she’d like to focus on the root problems is to have a board that writes its own policy.
“We found that out in the handling of other investigations that if you don’t have a proper policy, if it’s not written down and voted on by the board, then trouble can arise,” she says, referencing the district’s unofficial zero-tolerance policy.
As for supporting students, she says meeting with them is key.
“We don’t often ask students, ‘What do you need to be supported?’ I think that’s No. 1. No. 2, you make sure that classes are accessible to everyone. And that includes advanced placement classes and honors, regardless of race or disability.”
Strong: The district needs to “really focus much of our attention on anti-bullying.”
Strong, 60, who is making his third run for school board, says it’s paramount to address school climate.
“We certainly need to really focus much more of our attention on anti-bullying, as well as anti-harassment,” says Strong, a former Madison police officer who works as a program associate for the National Council on Crime & Delinquency. Strong favors an overall focus of “creating a climate that is much more conducive to learning and eliminating the distractions that have a tendency to curtail the learning environment for our students.”
One way Strong suggests doing that is by increasing the diversity of the district’s staff. “It’s certainly not a panacea, but I think it will go a long way in showing that the district is making a concerted effort to eliminate some of the disparities that we see in terms of the suspensions that we’re having right now, and other behavioral issues that we’re finding.”
The father of two Madison La Follette graduates says his goal is to make the district as good as it can be.
“I know that we have a lot of challenges. And I know there’s a lot of issues out there that people are talking about. But I think that having a strong board that is working together to really address the issues that we face, whether it’s racial slurs in the schools or the disparities in terms of our discipline…I think are issues that the board can address.”
