As Superintendent Judy Baseman reported to the Board of Education, a team composed of community members, Appleton Area School District employees, and City of Appleton employees came together in February of 2020 to discuss how best to honor Ron Dunlap’s legacy. At some point during their meetings they settled on the idea to rename Lincoln Elementary to Ronald C. Dunlap Elementary School – Home of the Lincoln Lions. I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at the agendas and minutes for any meetings that this group conducted and see how discussions progressed and when that proposal was first presented. When I tried to do this I quickly discovered that I could not find any publicly posted meeting records, or any publicly available indication that such a group had met at all.
Greg Hartjes informed me that “the committee was not an AASD committee, so is not included in Board Docs. Mayor Tim Hanna and the City’s Director of Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion, Karen Nelson, presented to Superintendent Baseman the idea of a committee. The committee was then formed and met several times over the course of nine months.”
There are, as far as I can tell, no records on the City of Appleton’s Legistar page of this committee, its meeting dates, its agendas, or its minutes. I contacted the mayor’s office which knew nothing about it. They put me through to the City Clerk’s office which also knew nothing about it and told me it must have been an AASD run committee. In fact, the only information she had about the committee was what she read in a recent Post Crescent article.
As far as I can tell, since last February this committee has been working outside of the public eye, quietly running this proposal past limited groups of people who would be most friendly to the concept of renaming Lincoln Elementary. Now, they’ve brought forth their proposal for the Board of Education to vote on, and the timeframe for the public to provide their comments is only February 9th (the day after the Board of Education meeting) through 4 pm on February 19th.
It’s difficult to see how this is an equitable or open situation.
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