Help Wanted: One advocate. Duties include defending me from any and all attempts to hold me accountable for my actions. Required skills include: A talent for framing accountability as unwarranted punishment, a willingness to paint those trying to hold me accountable for my actions as the “real bad guys”, and the ability to conjure up tears on-demand as proof of how much you “care about this injustice”.
I’ve come to realize that I need an advocate following 27-years of covering local government meetings where officials are trying to address social ills. Anytime those efforts include holding anyone accountable or responsible for their actions (or inactions) “advocates” suddenly appear to quash those proposals and accuse the officials of being the “real problem”.
Take for instance, the Appleton Area School District’s continuing effort to have a truancy ordinance put back on the books. While many surrounding districts have lowered their truancy rates since families got too comfortable with their kids not going to school every day during the pandemic, Appleton’s habitual truancy numbers have stayed at alarming levels above 20%–increasing again last school year. Superintendent Greg Hartjes has repeated numerous times that they do not want to issue citations for truancy, that they see issuing a police citations as an absolute last resort, and that that step would be reserved solely for kids and families that make no effort to interact with the multitude of services and programs offered by the district.
Despite all of those explanations and assurances, advocates continue to show up at Appleton School Board and Appleton Common Council meetings to adamantly oppose the truancy ordinance proposal. Few, if any, of them are parents in the Appleton Area School District–nor are they the parents of actual truant students. And yet, they have a laundry list of excuses for why kids should be allowed to miss more than one day of class every single week of the year: Bullying, anxiety, racism, sexism, LGBTQ identity issues, any and all other psychological issues, transportation needs, language barriers, learning challenges, boredom, not enough family income, housing status, cultural norms, physical health issues, and several others conditions or situations that would affect perhaps one out of a million kids.
Those advocates have also raised the “specter” of the city’s previous Truancy Court program. Their criticism of that is not based on a failure to improve attendance, but rather on the belief that the judge that administered it was “too mean” to kids and their parents. The term “classroom to prison pipeline” is also brought up often–claiming that a kid getting a ticket for not coming to class is far more likely to end up committing serious crimes later in life. Superintendent Hartjes has repeatedly pointed out that a greater indicator of potential legal issues later in life is not having one negative interaction with a police officer, it’s actually not getting an education that is more likely to see you end up behind bars–something that happens when you never go to class.
And it doesn’t matter how many programs and services several school officials have detailed that are used to combat chronic truancy, the advocates always say the district “doesn’t do enough”. Never, do they they point fingers at parents who make no effort to ensure their kids are going to class nor do they think that teenagers have any agency in making the decision to not go to school. At one presentation, Hartjes noted that the district had sent notice to 20+ families of habitually truant students to attend a meeting with officials to discuss the situation and to work on ways to get those kids back in class. ONE family showed up. So who isn’t doing enough?
This past week, the Oshkosh Area School District and its School Board took part in extensive self-flagellation in reporting its out-of-school suspension numbers from the last year. The fact that suspensions went down could not be celebrated–as the rate of suspensions for students of color continued to climb. This after an advocacy group came to the School Board a couple of years ago demanding that it “do something” to reduce those numbers.
And the district did, in fact, “do something”. It adopted a multiple-step “equity plan” that would teach teachers and administrators not be “biased” in the way they administer discipline in the classroom, that would ensure “cultural sensitivity” regarding behaviors, that would employ “restorative techniques”, that would recognize “trauma-induced behavior”, that would establish “calming centers”, and that would “foster inclusiveness”. Earlier this year, district officials “celebrated” achieving all but one of those steps in the plan. And the result? Even worse disparities.
What followed this week’s report was a further recitation from administrators that “obviously, we need to do better” and “we need to find more ways to ensure equity”. Some school board members insisted that there are still “biases” affecting the administration of discipline. Others, to their credit, questioned the effectiveness of the equity plan–but then laid the blame for its perceived failure at the feet of administrators–not those perpetrating the acts that lead to the suspensions.
In fact, nowhere in the report are listed the offenses for which kids are getting kicked out of school. We know of one high-profile incident in Oshkosh where a student engaged in a physical fight with the Dean of Students and threatened to kill him because the boy was told to give up his cellphone per school policy. How did the district respond? It suspended the Dean of Students and did not renew his contract. Last year, a group of para-professionals used the public comment section of a School Board meeting to describe the physical abuse that they suffer regularly at the hands of students–sometime requiring hospitalization and workman’s compensation claims. The response from administrators and board members? “We need to improve our para-professional training!”–like its the employees that are causing the physical assaults.
Also this week, the Winnebago County Board sat through a presentation from Assistant District Attorney Christian Gossett about the office’s new High Frequency/Low Severity diversion program–which offers habitual, repeat offenders of petty crimes addiction treatment, employment and housing support, and a number of other services. If the program is completed, the criminal charges they face are dropped. It sounds like a positive way to help people get back on the straight and narrow–and reduce the number of cases the DA’s office handles by 11%.
But in the eyes of some advocate groups, there is a problem with the program: too many of the people that commit dozens of petty crimes are homeless. And these advocates believe the homeless are being “unfairly targeted”. That cause was taken up by some of the County Board supervisors themselves. Gossett was scolded for the offense of putting the term “unhoused” in “flying quotes” in his PowerPoint presentation. Other supervisors claimed the homeless wouldn’t be committing all of these petty crimes if further public concessions–like port-a-johns being put around the county courthouse–would be made to “accommodate” their needs. One supervisor argued twice that “forced treatment usually fails” in countering Gossett’s points that those in the program would receive the services and support that they need. For a moment, I was encouraged that one supervisor demanded that those offenders be “sentenced to Winnebago Mental Health”–backing my call for involuntary commitment of the mentally ill to fight violent crime–but then he complained about the cost and dropped that argument.
Gossett scored a real “mic drop, walk-off” moment when he pointed out that the program has been in place since January. Nobody had any problem with it until WHBY News did stories on it last month–which then were picked up by other media outlets. It was then that, you guessed it, advocacy groups caught wind of it and decided that it was “unfair”.
So that is why I am now looking for an advocate to absolve me of all of my responsibilities. I forget to take out the garbage on-time? My advocate can go to the Sherwood Village Board meeting and demand that pickup be done on the schedule I want. I blow off a day of work? My advocate can tell my boss that expecting me to be in regularly is “just too much for me to handle”. I get caught taking a dump outside the Winnebago County Courthouse? My advocate can blame the county for not having a port-a-John on every street corner for me to use.
The dumbest part of all of this is that everyone involved in the processes I detailed today want to achieve the same goals. Everyone wants kids to be in class regularly. Everyone wants fewer kids suspended from class. And everyone wants people off the streets and not committing crimes. It’s just that some people think those we are trying to help don’t have any responsibility to help themselves. Although, if we successfully addressed all of those issues, for whom would the be able to advocate?
