The Appleton Area School District Board of Education Business Services Committee met 05/14/2021 with the aim of putting together a set of recommendations regarding gathering community feedback on the proposed renaming of Lincoln Elementary to Ronald C. Dunlap Elementary – Home of the Lincoln Lions.
The two voting members of the committee consisted of Jim Bowman and Ed Ruffolo. Superintendent Judy Baseman and Chief Financial Officer Greg Hartjes also participated.
Jim Bowman’s initial recommendation was to ask survey respondents to gauge the question through the lens of the mission of AASD then make a limited decision between keeping the current name or changing specifically to the recommended name and leave any open ended comments they wanted to make.
Working together, students, family, staff, and community will ensure that each graduate is academically, socially, and emotionally prepared for success in life.
Every Student. Every Day.
An important factor in pursuing this vision is the environment in which students learn. Students learn best when they are challenged and feel supported, welcomed and respected.
You are asked to consider renaming a school using the AASD vision as the criterion. The naming options reference two respected leaders.
Is progress toward the AASD vision better facilitated in a school named Lincoln Elementary School or Ronald Dunlap Elementary School? Select one name and, as needed, add your comments.
Lincoln Elementary School
Ronald Dunlap Elementary School
Jim Bowman’s initial proposal to gather community feedback regarding proposed Lincoln Elementary name change
He believed that limiting the criteria to judge the proposal would be a way to gain consensus.
[I’m a little dubious that limiting the way people are allowed to approach the question is an effective way to gain consensus, but, beyond that, it seemed a little odd to me to try to limit the manner in which the public is supposed to judge the name change, given that that metric was not what drove the initial name change proposal to begin with. Rather, the proposal came out of a committee that was not even an AASD committee and which was created specifically to come up with a way to honor Ron Dunlap not to promote student success.]
Although Ed Ruffolo approved of the “preamble” as they called it that Jim recommended, he favored a survey format that asked respondents to give their approval or disapproval on a 5 point scale for a number of questions. He felt this was preferable because it would allow the Board to judge the intensity both of support and of opposition to a question. It also avoided giving the question the feel of a referendum as a simple yes/no question would give. He said that, through emails, there had been other options presented such as renaming the school Lincoln-Dunlap Elementary or naming a different school or facility after Ron Dunlap.
They ended up keeping Jim’s introduction and then asking people to respond on a 1-5 scale of Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree what their preference was for five different options.
- Lincoln Elementary School
- Ronald C. Dunlap Elementary School – Home of the Lincoln Lions
- Lincoln-Dunlap Elementary School
- Retain the Lincoln Elementary School name and recommend renaming a different facility after Ronald Dunlap
- “Ronald C. Dunlap Elementary School – Home of the Lincoln Lions” now and recommend naming a different facility after Abraham Lincoln
They also decided to make the survey available only to residents of the Appleton Area School District. Although they were not necessarily going to give special weight to the respondents who live within the Lincoln Elementary School boundaries, they did decide to ask which respondents live in that area so that they could pull that information out and see if it differed in any way from the rest of the responses.
During the last survey, they had asked respondents to identify their connection to AASD (Student, Former Student, Parent, Former Parent, Staff, Former Staff, or Community Member). Given that this time they were limiting responses to AASD residents, they did not think it was necessary to differentiate by association.
They also decided that because it was a completely new survey asking questions substantially different from the previous survey that they would allow all AASD residents to respond and not try to separate and throw out responses from individuals who had responded to the previous survey.
The committee decided that the survey should be translated into Hmong and Spanish in addition to being available in English and that it should be available both as an online survey for those who are internet savvy and as a paper survey available to be picked up at the Leadership Center or mailed out upon request for those who have difficulties filling out the online survey.
As far as timeframe goes, the committee decided that if the Board of Education approves their recommendation at the 05/24/2021 meeting, the survey should be made available on Friday, May 28th and be open for a full three weeks until being closed on Friday, June 18th. That would give the community plenty of time to respond and also AASD staff plenty of time to compile the results for the June 28th Board of Education meeting.
They recommended publicizing it by sending an email to parents, putting it on the front page of the district website, and releasing a press release to local media.
Superintendent Judy Baseman thought that the committee captured a lot of good options but she thought their recommendations were not necessarily what the Board of Education might have been expecting when they referred the item to committee. She thought it was creative and did both make an attempt to build consensus and give options. She thought they should be prepared for these recommendations to not be what the Board was expecting.
At the end of the meeting they were very careful to reiterate to the public that the things they decided in the committee meeting were simply recommendations and not the final word on the process. The full Board of Education does still need to vote on the recommendations and changes could be made to any aspect of the survey–content, participant parameters, or timeline.
View full meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=C2WKJQ5126F2
View full meeting video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXgBPxWLlAw
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