I watched the first hour and 20 minutes of the Board of Education Board Policy Review Committee that met 03/09/2021. The Committee is currently comprised of Kay Eggert, Barry O’Connor, and Kris Sauter. Judy Baseman and Greg Hartjes also attended.
I’ve probably remarked upon this in the past, but this meeting really, to me, illustrated an aimlessness and lack of focus within the Board of Education. And that has absolutely nothing to do with political leanings such as they may be for a non-partisan government body. I would wager Mayor Woodford and many of the current city of Appleton Alderpersons hold political views that are similar to those of much of the Board of Education, but the people who hold office in the city of Appleton know how to run meetings and keep things focused, moving, and relatively on time. The policy review committee spent over an hour discussing a renaming policy for the Appleton Area School District and made no motions, no edits to the draft policy, and no final proposal. They left with just a vague plan to make changes to the draft policy and it was not clear to me what those changes would be or even who exactly would be making those changes–Kay Eggert? Judy Baseman? Someone else on the leadership team? It also seemed odd to me that they did not have their lawyer present to help them craft a policy that would accomplish what they want it to accomplish.
They came to the meeting with a couple examples of policies from the Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) that they believed were relevant as well as some draft language they had taken from those WASB samples and inserted into the District’s current 940 “Naming School District Facilities” policy as a starting place for discussion.
The inserted language would not allow school facilities to be renamed “except for compelling reasons as determined by the Board”.
Barry pointed out that it all comes down to what “compelling reasons” is.
At this point, I would normally try to do a basic play by play recap of the meeting, but the conversation was so muddled, circular, and stagnant that I don’t think such a thing would even be readable much less interesting.
The two example policies included some bullet points that the committee discussed. Barry mentioned that one of them stated that a person should be deceased for at least 10 year. [I thought that was an interesting restriction in light of the fact that, per Greg Hartjes in an email to a parent, one of the reasons the committee to honor Ron Dunlap chose not to wait until a new school building was constructed to honor him was because the earliest that could happen was in 2024 and they were afraid the community would forget him by then and not be interested in naming a school after him.]
At any rate, the committee seemed to shy away from making a policy that would be too specific or narrow.
Barry wondered if, in the case of renaming, the current name had to be a negative and the new name a positive. Ron Dunlap is an excellent role model and connected to the school directly, but Abraham Lincoln is recognized as a pretty good role model also.
The committee acknowledged the fact that adding renaming to the policy would open things up for renaming more than just Lincoln Elementary. Kay said that updating the policy to add language about renaming was really important because she didn’t think this would be their last conversation about renaming a school. Given that they needed to figure out what they were comfortable with and figure out what kind of language in the policy they wanted to approve? Would it just cover facilities or all areas? The draft language was very open to interpretation and doesn’t say what the compelling reasons are. Every Board could come up with their own ideas of what compelling reasons are.
Elsewhere in the meeting she said that, ultimately, it would come down to a Board decision, but what should happen first in considering a renaming? She thought it would be wide to have thought about the policy because the policy is what will guide the process.
It was also confirmed during the meeting that AASD has not really done any renamings of areas of buildings such as auditoriums, etc. Per Superintendent Judy Baseman they have named areas but they have not changed those names. Greg Hartje also could not recall any time when they renamed an area of a school.
Barry mentioned that when he was in Kaukauna that there were areas in the high school that were renamed. Typically it was an area named after someone 40 or 50 years before who was now largely forgotten. He mentioned the North Auditorium which is named after someone whose name I couldn’t hear well, then he said that he thought some of those things are pretty “sacred”. [I didn’t really understand the point he was making. It sounded like he was saying sometimes things named after people are sacred, but he also seems to be in favor of removing Abraham Lincoln from an AASD school building, and beyond that I’m not sure how the Board of Education would determine what is and is not “sacred”.]
The one really limiting thing Barry was in favor of was a recommended policy which stated that once something was named it could not be renamed for at least 10 years outside of exceptional circumstances. That way they could avoid a constant barrage of renaming.
There was general agreement that public feedback or hearings were important. Kris said that in the case of renaming Lincoln she found it interesting to hear the feedback from people who had attended Lincoln Elementary in their early days and that they were concerned about the renaming because that was part of their personal identity. She thought that holding a public hearing would perhaps bring out perspectives that, as a Board member, she might not always think about.
After discussing renaming regular District facilities there was an involved discussion about naming and renaming charter schools. There are several issues that need to be hammered out.
Charter school names are part of their contract and overseen by the Board of Directors for the individual charter school. Would renaming a charter need to go through the renaming procedure that the renaming of a facility would need to go through or could it be handled during the charter renewal that happens every 5 years?
There are some charter schools that exist within an existing larger school, but some, such as Roosevelt and Stephen Foster that are neighborhood charters that occupy an entire building and are the neighborhood schools even though they are also charter schools. Should the process for renaming be different for those than for other charter schools?
If a charter school occupies an entire building do they have control over the name of the building? Stephen Foster Elementary Charter School specifically named themselves after the neighborhood school it replaced. Kaleidoscope Academy never actually renamed the building they occupy and is technically known as Kaleidoscope Academy on the Roosevelt Campus. Classical Academy occupies a building that is still officially named after Ken Saeger.
Those are the issues, but I have no idea what the committee actually determined about any of it other than that they seemed to want to keep things very broad and open to give the Board lots of leeway. It was not even clear to me who was going to be making revisions. Kay mentioned either doing it as a committee or her doing it herself. Superintendent Baseman also stepped in to give some advice and it wasn’t clear to me if anyone on the administrative team would be helping hammer out a draft.
At any rate, they decided to put together a draft and then reconvene as a committee to discuss it some more before presenting it to the full Board of Education.
And, after all of that, it’s not actually clear to me that the draft language they started with would even allow them to rename Lincoln Elementary the way they would like to. The policy as it currently exists in draft form states “The Board shall hold a public hearing prior to taking any action to approve the opening of a renaming process as to (1) any school; (2) any major facility of the District; or (3) any area of any facility that is currently named after a person.”
I didn’t hear any discussion about altering that language, and Kay stated that the basic point of that is that a decision is made first as to whether or not something should be renamed–that the Board makes that decision before alternative names are come up with. That obviously hasn’t happened in the case of Lincoln Elementary. The name change has already been proposed before the renaming process was ever officially opened by the Board, and the process that led to the renaming proposal was not public. Neither AASD nor the city of Appleton have any agendas or minutes posted on their websites for the committee that created that proposal, and both have denied being the organization who ran the committee. The community feedback the committee sought seems to have been carefully curated and gathered only from individuals with a close connection to Lincoln Elementary and not from the public at large. In fact, I’m not sure that the Board of Education has in fact officially started a renaming process because they still, as yet, have no policy delineating what that process looks like. So how could they have started something that doesn’t even exist at this point?
You can view the video of the meeting here: https://youtu.be/tkTEl1G8-2s
And the meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=BYHLMY54C191
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