I attended the public listening session with Board of Education members Amanda Stuck and Deb Truyman that was held at Copper Rock on 11/17/2021.
Members of the public on both sides of the masking issue were there. I would say that predominantly it appeared to be a polite and productive conversation, and both sides seemed to find value in a meeting of this nature.
A point that was brought up again and again was the importance of dialogue and the value being able to talk back and forth. Various attendees voiced a desire for communication and interaction and felt that the community was very divided right now.
Deb Truyman expressed the benefit of meeting face to face. She thought it was easier for a person to not send a nasty email to someone when they had been able to interact personally with the person they were emailing.
A mother expressed concerns that currently the only way people can give in-person comment at a board meeting is to wear a mask and which goes against their convictions and everything they were standing against. She was also scared that parents were not allowed to have a medical say in their children at school. [I took that to be a concern that a parent’s observation that their child responded physically or emotionally poorly to masking was not taken seriously by AASD, and that they were required to find a medical professional to attest that the child should not be wearing a mask.]
The parents at the meeting wanted to know that they were being heard and would be able to actually talk about issues. One man felt that structure of public comment at board meetings caused issues because it is established ahead of time by the rules of the meeting that the Board will not respond to the things that are said. The perception of people is that they aren’t being listened to. People come into that hot. He thought there was a lot of benefit to holding these more informal meetings. The idea of holding them every month with a rotating slate of Board of Education members was raised.
Deb Truyman noted that a Community Linkage Committee was supposed to be formed at the upcoming Board of Education meeting. This would be a committee of the Board of Education focused on communicating and forming ties with the community.
Andrea Klitzke said that for the last year it has felt like parents were talking to a brick wall and she felt that they needed to work on building community.
Nick Ross, who mentioned personally holding different views than Andrea, also expressed a desire for people to have relationships in the community and thought that people with different views needed to converse. They didn’t necessarily need to compromise, but they could have more community cohesion.
Multiple people in various ways mentioned the division currently being experienced by society from the lockdowns and politics.
A woman pointed out that her tax dollars were paying for the Board and the school buildings and the district. There was no emergency order in place, but she, as a taxpayer, was being stopped by a police officer from entering the public schools’ building and attending Board of Education meetings. How was that okay? The public was supposed to be able to attend these public meetings, but instead those meetings were closed off to the public.
Prompted by that comment Amanda Stuck asked City of Appleton Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) who was attending and participating in the listening session about public access to city meetings. Alderperson Hartzheim said the meetings were open. Amanda asked about the city mask mandate and what would happen if someone came to a meeting without a mask. Alderperson Hartzheim indicated that there was a mayoral order mandating the masks inside on city property but if a person came to a meeting unmasked they would be allowed to stay.
A woman pointed out that Governor Evers’ mandate had included exemptions and the public was told that, if they saw someone without a mask, that they should assume that person had a reason for not wearing one. There are no exemptions for AASD’s mandate. She told a story about a friend whose child was having problems with masks but was unable to get a medical exemption because the doctor was pressured not to provide exemptions. The woman who was speaking said she herself had to pull her son from AASD because he had major issues and wasn’t being accommodated. He had an IEP, but now that he wasn’t at a public school, he couldn’t have an IEP. Her tax dollars were paying for public education but her son did not have access to his IEP because she couldn’t send him to AASD anymore because they were not accommodating his need to be maskless. She started crying.
Deb Truyman was deeply touched and said she didn’t know what to do.
Amanda stuck said this was the first she was hearing of this sort of situation and mentioned finding out how these types of situations were being handled.
Andrea Klitzke felt that the district could have been planning alternatives all along but they never really found those alternatives. They should have been working on ways to accommodate everybody. She threw out the possibility of having masked and unmasked classrooms and someone suggested improving airflow.
Sheri Hartzheim asked if the district had been able to use ESSER III funds to address air quality in school buildings to allow for masking being optional.
Deb said the Board was told they were doing things but she didn’t know the extent of those actions. Andrea said she had asked AASD Financial Officer Greg Hartjes about that but she felt his answer had been vague.
Nick Ross thought this was an area where they could find some common ground and mentioned reading studies that showed improving school HVAC systems led to a 1% increase in student achievement.
There was a brief discussion on ESSER I, II, and III dollars, what they could be spent on, and how much of those funds had actually been released by the state to schools.
A woman touched on the idea Andrea had thrown out of having masked and unmasked classed. She voiced strong hesitation at the idea of any sort of segregation because we have seen throughout history how segregation plays out and she felt it was counterproductive.
The lack of any plan by the Board of Education to end masking requirements was mentioned by a couple people. One said vaccination was widely available and, at this point, anyone who was 12 and older had ample time to get vaccinated. The elderly had access to booster. The only vaccine eligible group that hadn’t had time to get vaccinated yet was the 5–11-year-old group.
Another woman wanted to know what the Board’s standards were for ending masking requirements. 0 Covid was not possible. She wanted to know where the accountability was from the school board for the choices they were making. They had no plan and they were giving no numbers for when things would change.
One woman mentioned that she had 3 grandkids who had left the district. She was a former teacher and used to be proud of this system. At some point during the meeting, she stated that she had been a substitute teacher but she couldn’t sub because she had health issues and couldn’t mask so she couldn’t sub at AASD anymore.
There was a discussion about who was making decisions regarding this—the Board or the Administrative Team.
Deb Truyman said the Board was given a recommendation by the administrative team. Amanda Stuck said that there had not been clear direction as to what the administrative team was looking at when giving these recommendations.
Some of the parents expressed a desire that these things be made clearer, and Sheri Hartzheim thought it was important that they be things that could actually be obtainable vs something that was impossible to achieve. Multiple people voiced the opinion that coronavirus was never going to go away.
A woman in a mask said that the Board had been presented with a recommendation at the August meeting and at that meeting they voted to let the administrative team change their policies based on Covid numbers Once that happened it became a one man show, as it were. She didn’t see why the Board needed to vote; they gave it to the administrative team.
Deb Truyman said she had asked about that at the time and about how they would know when it was time to go masks-optional and had been told there would be discussions. She didn’t feel that the Board had given anything up.
Andrea Klitzke expressed concern that the recommendations being made to the Board came from Superintendent Judy Baseman but she was getting those recommendations from other people. Shouldn’t those meeting be open? She thought that the people Judy was getting the recommendations from should just come to the Board and make their recommendations directly and that the entire conversation should happen out in the open.
Another parent expressed suspicion about the medical professionals advising the administrative team. She thought that there was a conflict of interest in having school nurses provide advice because they were employed by the person they were advising and were not likely to go against whatever their boss wanted. She also didn’t understand what a geriatrician was doing giving advice.
Nick Ross thought the process of the admin team bringing recommendations was part of the Coherent Governance model, and there followed a discussion regarding the way staff recommendations worked in government and the need for staff, at the Board’s request, to be able to provide evidence to back up their recommendations.
There was little understanding of what was driving AASD’s decisions because there were schools in the area and in Appleton that had optional masking and those schools did not have high cases. A desire for some kind of objective standards was voiced. Masking would make sense if the numbers demonstrated that it was impactful, but mask-optional schools had low numbers.
There was a complaint about how the arbitrariness of the district’s quarantining and isolation rules worked. A student had gotten Covid, recovered, and been cleared 10 days after her first symptoms but then because a household member got Covid after her, she was not allowed to come back until a full 14 days was over even though she couldn’t have been contagious or infected at that point.
A woman who had been listening but had remained quiet up until then was asked if she wanted to say anything. She said she was vaccinated and had had her booster. She thought the comparison made earlier to the segregation of Black people was inappropriate. She thought masks weren’t so bad, and that some children could die from Covid. She thought kids should not have to stay home if they had a medical exemption for masks, but she also thought kids shouldn’t be looked at badly for wearing masks.
The woman who had expressed concerns about segregating masked and unmasked children said that nothing she had been discussing meant other people couldn’t wear masks. She absolutely supported people wearing masks if she wanted. She further stated that the mention of racial segregation was used as an example of the pattern of segregation and what segregations does. It was an obvious historical example meant to demonstrate the overall pattern of segregation and not to draw further inferences.
The first woman said she didn’t think it should have been brought up if she had known it was a bad example. She went on to say that although she wasn’t wearing a mask right then, she thought masks were important for some people. They were trying to keep everyone safe.
The second woman responded that if local numbers showed there was no difference between masked and unmasked schools. Masking was essentially a formality that was based on false hopes and did not actually make kids safer. Instead of engaging in this formality, why did the district not look at what could genuinely make a difference? Here she three out air purifiers and increased outdoor time as possible options. Was the district going to go through formalities or was it going to actually help the children?
Andrea Klitzke pointed out that AASD uses the terminology of “safe”, but “safe” means different things to different people. That term should be defined so everybody knew what was meant by it.
Another attendee found it concerning that the CDC came out with masking guidelines at the request of the National Education Association, not at the recommendation of doctors. She thought there were problems caused by masking, both in how kids learned because words spoken through masks can’t be heard well, and also in people’s emotional wellbeing. She said that her young neighbor had recently committed suicide.
Another attendee thought teachers were doing the best they could at the moment, and she didn’t think it was appropriate to try to tie suicidal ideation to masking. There was no correlation between those two things. She thought that, as Americans, we should try to think of everyone. If someone didn’t want to wear a mask then they could get vaccinated.
Another attendee who was opposed to mandated masks got testy at this and the conversation grew a little heated. This woman had also interjected some things earlier in the discussion, but parents had told her to let others speak. Her back was to me so I was not able to hear the things she said.
At any rate, the pro-mask woman continued and said that she had 4 siblings who were all find wearing masks. She herself wore masks and had no problem. She said the parents weren’t in school and didn’t know how it was. The focus should be on the people in school.
Another pro-mask woman said that she was in the schools and her perception was the and kids at school don’t have a problem with masks. They don’t take them off at recess even though they are allowed to. She thought the problem came from parents.
Andrea thought they should talk to the kids and get their opinions on masking.
Another parent said that they were all there to represent their experiences. A lot of people are in favor of masking, and many people could go either way. She had four kids who were in school and were affected by this. While she believed the experiences of the people who said they had no problems with masking there were other people who had experienced the last couple years and reached other conclusions. She wondered how many people would wear masks if they had the option not to. Half the kids might not mind it but have might and just went along with it because that was easier. She didn’t think it was good to be forcing people to wear them when they wouldn’t if they had a choice. She also thought requiring masks was different than saying “No shoes, no shirt, no service,” and she had a legal argument about why that was, but I didn’t follow her argument enough to be able to accurately represent it here.
The woman who had said she and her siblings wore masks with no issue said that if people didn’t want to wear masks, they should get vaccinated. She was concerned that kids with parents who opposed masking would grow up to be cruel. A 5-year-old might naturally not want to wear a mask, but if a 9-year-old claimed they didn’t want to wear a mask because “masks are fake” then that 9-year-old had been conditioned to think that way by adults.
Someone responded that she was contradicting herself. Earlier she had said that kids should be consulted about masks and school conditions, but now she was saying kids were being conditioned. She also pointed out that kids were conditioned all the time by teachers to wear masks through, for example, constant reminders to pull them up and not touch them. Teachers were controlling kids and their mask-wearing all the time.
At that point Copper Rock was about to close, so Amanda and Deb wrapped things up and asked for any last comments.
A parent said she had come to AASD from another district and she and her children did not like the Canvas internet program AASD utilized. It was archaic and not user-friendly. Her kids thought that AASD dumbed things down and were teaching her kids they had already learned the year before. There was a concern that kids were being passed simply because the work was so easy. She thought that the district should consider reaching out to people who come from other districts to get feedback and an outside perspective on what AASD is doing.
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