The Appleton Area School District Board of Education met 04/12/2021. One of the items they took up was the 5 year contract renewals for the Fox Cities Leadership Academy charter school and the Foster Elementary Charter School.
[I found this entire discussion interesting because it revealed a lack of organization on the Board’s part. I really think they could benefit from talking to employees in the City of Appleton about how the city manages Common Council and committee meetings. I think the city does a really good job of making all the reports, memos, and additional attachments associated with the items on their meeting agendas easily accessible both to Common Council members and the public. Every attachment is linked to right on the agenda, or, if one prefers, there is one big agenda packet PDF that is downloadable and contains all of the relevant documents for a meeting in one single file. It’s really straightforward and extremely helpful. However, as this portion of the Board of Education meeting made clear, all of that comparable information for Board of Education meetings is not easily accessible even for Board members much less the public.]
Barry O’Connor gave a brief, high level overview of the charters during the Programs and Services Committee report he presented.
Gary Jahnke asked if he could share specific data regarding the accomplishments at each school. Given that these were 5 year contracts, he wanted to know what the schools’ accomplishments were.
Barry said that information was included in some document packet he referenced, but he did not have that information on hand. It was apparently attached to the Programs and Services Committee meeting entry in BoardDocs.
In fact, nobody had that information in front of them.
Assistant Superintendent Ben Vogel said that the students at the Leadership Academy mirror the students at North and that they graduate at a high rate and are doing well.
Barry said that both schools have a pretty broad spectrum of students that attend and who represent the overall population in both areas really well.
Gary said that his question falls in line with their new Coherent Governance policy guidelines. He thought it would be nice if this information was included in the BoardDocs executive area, but that he would look for it in the other area. He wondered if AASD could have a middle school that offered a leadership mission like Foster does at the elementary level and the Leadership Academy does at the high school level.
Superintendent Judy Baseman and Barry both suggested that all of the AASD schools promote leadership and that that mission didn’t have to come from a charter school.
Deb Truyman said that since she was not a member of the Programs and Services Committee, she couldn’t see everything that they were referring to in Board Docs. She wanted to know when that information was put on BoardDocs–before or after the committee meeting?
Judy told her she needed to log in and that it wasn’t public.
Deb said there have been times she has thought she should have information and wondered if only the specific members of a committee could see it.
Jim Clemons asked if the renewals were time sensitive. He thought there were some legitimate questions. He thought as they work to implement the Coherent Governance model that they should make sure that everyone is comfortable before they move forward with approval.
Gary said he wanted to know specific accomplishments over a 5 year period. For any contract renewal they should reflect and see where they were compared to where they are and determine if there’s a path for improvement. Instead, all the was seeing was the contract which was ambiguous regarding things such as
- Overall test ranking
- Math scores
- Reading scores
- Student to teacher ratio
- Diversity score
- Student enrollment
- Graduation rate
- What students are eligible for free or reduced lunch
He just wanted to see trends.
Judy said that the contract for charters sets out the measures that the charter will report to the board. If the board wants to reassess what they want to have reported, that would be a different discussion. She said the charters were compliant with the contract. But it sounded like three of the board members didn’t have that information.
Jim Clemons again asked if the contract renewal was time sensitive.
Ben Vogel said that it was not time sensitive in that they would not need to be renewed that night. The contracts go into June. They typically renew the contracts ahead of time because they have to go to DPI for approval.
Jim Clemons said he planned to make a motion to hold this item until the next meeting.
Barry said that typically the measurement of achievement is agreed on in the prior contract by the Board, although they do require charter school students to take the standardized test. He wasn’t sure what data they were asking for. He didn’t think the comparison information that Gary wanted was available. He stated that the Fox Cities Leadership Academy graduation rate is higher than the rest of the district.
Gary said there is data available on some websites, so that information would be interesting to see. He thought that maybe this was a learning moment for some of them there.
Jim Clemons said it may not be a bad time because they are at the beginning of a 5 year renewal.
Barry asked if they were going to revise the report.
Superintendent Baseman said she didn’t think anyone was looking to revise the current contract.
Gary said that he was just saying that whatever information is out there that was being reported to the board, he missed. He didn’t see it. If there are standards and parameters that are being reported, he wanted to view them.
Jim Clemons said, if there were no time requirements, it was a standard courtesy to hold an item so that a board member could have more time to review it.
That all happened during the report section. When the meeting got to the point where they were actually going to vote on items Barry O’Connor moved (seconded by Kris Sauter) that they approve the 5 year charter school contract renewals. [That didn’t make any sense to me because they had talked about it and the entire Board was well aware that both Gary Jahnke and Deb Truyman had not been able to access some of the documentation related to the charter contract renewals and that they wanted to look over that before they voted. The entire Board was also aware that Jim Clemons had already stated in intention to move that the item be held until the next meeting.]
After Barry made his initial motion, Jim Clemons stated that he wanted to make a counter motion (seconded by Gary Jahnke) that they hold the item as they discussed until the next available Board meeting.
None of the Board members or other meeting participants knew how to handle a situation with dueling motions. Clara Kopplinger had to look it up.
Barry thought that his motion should take precedence because it was made first.
Jim Clemons pointed out that another option was for Barry to withdraw his motion. Jim didn’t want to vote to not support the contract renewals. He just wanted additional information. He said that if Barry withdrew his motion and Kris withdrew her second then there wouldn’t be a motion and they could hold the item without voting Barry’s motion down and sending a negative message that the Board did not intend to renew.
Gary said that they were simply asking for more information, and that to deny that and go into a vote wasn’t acknowledging that request for more information and he was kind of surprised at that.
Kris wanted to make a point of clarification. She said that she knows that she is able to access information from committee meetings she’s not a member of and so it seemed like there might be some confusion as to the information that’s supplied to all board members. She was wondering if they needed to get some clarification on that.
Clara said that for the Policy Review committee which she handles documentation for, that what she adds depends on what information she has ahead of the meeting. Typically if they’re looking at a policy that already exists she will put the current policy in Board Docs and make it available for the public to view. If there is additional work on the policy or a change, then that subsequent policy or draft policy will be attached to the action item.
Superintendent Baseman said her understanding is that it’s similar for all committee meetings in terms of accessibility. However, she was hearing that that information was not accessible.
Clara said that the information she links to in “the chat” [presumably the Zoom meeting chat?] is all public content in BoardDocs. If the question was about where that information is located from the last Programs and Services meeting she wasn’t sure if that was added before or after the meeting. But the links that she added were directly to BoardDocs attachments.
Kris thought that would help going forward.
Kay Eggert pointed out that Clara was trying to look up the answer about how to handle dueling motions at the same time as the Board members were asking her questions.
She thought that, given that not all Board members felt they had access to the information ahead of time, and that holding the item would not reflect on the charters or the validity of the contracts, she thought it would be appropriate to hold off on a vote until the next meeting so that Board members felt they had enough information.
Barry was willing to withdraw his motion.
Clara found the answer regarding how to handle dueling motions. Jim Clemon’s subsidiary motion ranked higher than the main motion so they would be voting on Jim’s motion before they would vote on Barry’s main motion.
Jim Clemons said he thought it would be cleaner if Barry withdrew his motion and they just voted on one motion. He reiterated that it was a legitimate request from a fellow board member for additional information. He thought that as the Board moved forward, unless it becomes a habit, that they should conditionally grant those types of requests.
Gary said that it would make sense for this type of information to be included in BoardDocs along with the meeting agenda, whether it was under public content or executive content. He was surprised that there was nothing there. He would have thought that the agenda would show the contracts. From a time management and preparation standpoint it made sense to include that information with the Board of Education meetings instead of just having it in the committee meetings.
Kay thought that was a good point and they would look into linking all the pertinent information.
Barry withdrew his motion and Kris withdrew her second, and they then voted to hold the item until the Board of Education meeting on the 04/26/2021.
Watch the video of the meeting here: https://youtu.be/lRnp5vueza0
View full meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=BZSGZA4633F0
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