If you want to know why our public schools are struggling so badly to educate our children, I encourage you to watch the video of last Monday’s Appleton School Board meeting. Within that three hours you will come to realize external forces are putting educators in impossible positions to run efficient and effective programs.
The meeting would likely have been just two-and-a-half hours had there not been what appeared to be an organized protest against the Appleton district’s potential use of police citations for students that don’t go to class, but stay on campus. The issue was not on the agenda for the Board meeting, but ten people still wanted to speak on the topic. Those speakers included a number of folks that live outside the Appleton Area School District, a child counselor, a substitute teacher, and a couple of former students. Many used their 3 minutes of allotted time to compare the issuance of a ticket for truancy to the “criminalization of kids”. The “school to prison pipeline” was also cited, inferring that a child getting a ticket for not showing up for class repeatedly is on the path to career criminality–and that the kid that doesn’t show up for school but doesn’t get a fine is far less likely to run afoul of the law in the future. And the requisite “Police shouldn’t be in our schools anyway” argument was raised as well.
Myriad excuses for children not coming to class were also offered: Kids are bullied, LGBTQ+ kids don’t feel like they belong in school, low-income kids have to work to help support their families so they are too tired for school, the children are in abusive home situations, queer kids have been kicked out of their house by their transphobic parents, and on and on and on. One speaker even argued that “using punishment to change behavior never works”.
What no one mentioned was the 25.8% chronic absentee rate among Appleton high school students–a number that went up this past school year, despite the hiring of an Attendance Specialist to work specifically with kids that are missing too much class. Dismissed were the multiple warnings, counseling sessions, follow up meetings with parents, and other accommodations made for habitually truant kids before any citations would ever be issued. Never referred to were the parents of those truant kids, or the role they need to play in ensuring those students show up and stay in class. All it was was a constant litany of excuses for why the students and the parents should NOT be held responsible for school attendance.
The lone voice in support of issuing truancy citations was a long-time teacher at Appleton North High School who expressed eloquently the frustration he feels with kids not showing up for class–not learning what they need to–and the lack of accountability directed toward those most-responsible for that failure. It was the voice of an instructor that likely has spoken directly to kids and their parents, and likely heard nothing back but indifference, insolence, and blame-shifting.
School Board President Kay Eggert did her best to defend the truancy policy, noting that every effort is made to get kids in school before any threat of citation is made, and pointing out that not a single middle or high school student was cited last school year–despite the dismal attendance numbers. Having had their say, the protesters left, not at all concerned about anything the School Board actually had on the agenda for the night.
And it was quite an agenda. With the room nearly cleared, board member Ed Ruffalo offered a recap of the Linkages Committee work for the past year. Linkages is a program the board uses to increase public outreach–hosting cafe conversations with the general public and meeting with student representatives. Wouldn’t you know that one of the main concerns that committee heard from kids was that so many of their peers DON’T COME TO SCHOOL REGULARLY.
Another major concern for students is the number of kids allowed to regularly disrupt classroom instruction. This is not “class clown” activity that I grew up with, but serious incidents of violence, threats, and malicious intent. And why are kids that interrupt classes, threaten teachers, and assault their classmates kept in those classrooms? The reasons are two-fold: 1–Students with serious behavioral issues are required by federal law to be mainstreamed with their peers, and 2–the Appleton Area School District has a stated goal of reducing its suspension numbers, both in-school and out-of-school. Efforts to deal with students that come to class each day without the social skills to maintain proper behavior for the length of a school day are seen as a “blemish” on a district’s performance rating–especially if that discipline affects more minority students that majority whites. In order to maintain “equity”, students with proper social skills are forced to deal with continuous disruptions to their own learning.
The School Board then moved on to a measure that will increase hot lunch and school breakfast prices by a dime each next year. The increase is required not because food prices continue to rise but rather because the federal government and the state Department of Public Instruction say the district isn’t charging enough. The Government says hot lunch should be $3.85 per meal, whether it costs the district that much or not.
So why doesn’t Appleton just jump a dollar a meal to meet that requirement? Because there is another rule in the school lunch program that allows districts to raise their meal prices by a maximum of ten-cents a year. So that means AASD will have to raise their prices a dime a year for the next decade to “catch up”.
Once that bit of business was taken care of, the Board was able to move on to an information item on revisions that will have to be made to the district’s discrimination policy. Those changes are meant to comply with the new provisions added to Title IX by the Biden-Harris administration. (As an aside, it appears that “the media” are going to use the term “Biden-Harris administration” to described things that now-nominee Vice President Kamala Harris wants to take credit for–while things that she would not like to be blamed for will be labeled “Biden administration” acts. See: Immigration policy and support for Israel in its war against Hamas).
For those not familiar, Title IX is part of the federal code governing fair access to education programs for females. Since 1972, it was used to force schools at all levels to provide equal opportunities to women and girls in terms of scholarships, sports, and programming on campus. It’s why high schools and colleges have added so many female sports offerings in the past 50-years, and why some men’s sports were eliminated (See: Wisconsin Baseball). But the Biden-Harris administration has added new language that not only does away with female-only protections but shifts the onus of enforcement to the schools themselves.
In a painful-to-watch presentation, Assistant Superintendent Mike Hernandez walked School Board members through the requirements school districts now face, and the procedures that will be used to meet them. Hernandez detailed that until now, a Title IX investigation was only required if a student or a parent filed a written complaint with the district. Under the new rules, if anyone working for the district so much as hears a student complain about their treatment by other students or staff–or a student talks about how they “heard” another student was treated–the district must launch an investigation. Hernandez pointed out that gone are the days of having a teacher tell a student not to use a certain name or word and apologize to the offended party.
Hernandez will now serve as one of the two “investigators” for the district (neither of whom have police investigative experience)–talking to the “victim” and the “perpetrator”–who will not be afforded legal representation. The “facts” uncovered in the investigation will then be turned over to Superintendent Greg Hartjes (who has no legal background)–who will act as judge and jury, deciding if a Title IX violation has occurred and meting out punishment. If either the “offender” or the “offended” take issue to the superintendent’s decisions, they can appeal to the School Board itself (which also does not feature any legal experience among its ranks). And if the accusers aren’t satisfied with the decision by the district, they can always file a federal lawsuit claiming the schools are not in compliance.
If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because Title IX was also used as a cudgel to address “rampant sexual abuse and harassment” on college campuses. Special tribunals were convened where (usually) men who were accused of sexual assault or inappropriate interactions with women were forced to defend themselves (again, without legal representation, without the ability to question their accuser, and with limited information about the accusations provided only by the school itself) against claims that would lead to their expulsion, even if no police reports were ever filed or no criminal charges were brought against them.
Add to that, the new Title IX language provides no definition for “sex” in “discrimination based on sex”. Until a few years ago, this was pretty easy to determine in a legal sense–but as the Oshkosh School Board also learned this week from the attorney brought in to help them address the new requirements–that will be for a federal court to determine, not them. So until that happens, anyone except a heterosexual male is afforded some sort of legal avenue to complain about the way they are being treated, and the school must investigate.
How many days will it be before a group of high school girls, looking to boost their TikTok and Instagram following, decide that they now want to be addressed by pronouns other than “she” and “her”–and a group of high school boys, looking to be teenage boys, decides not to use those pronouns, and someone other than the girls themselves mentions it to a classmate in front of the lunch lady, who is now legally required to report what she heard? It sounds like Mr. Hernandez and his other “investigative” counterpart have plenty of work ahead of them.
Oh, and speaking of TikTok and Instagram, interaction on social media sites between classmates (which does not have to take place on school grounds) is also considered worthy of a school investigation and possible punitive action. That is why Assistant Superintendent Hernandez looked like he had accidentally scheduled a root canal and a colonoscopy on the same day while talking to the School Board.
While I have taken school districts to task often in the past for using literacy curriculum that doesn’t actually teach kids how to read–crippling their future learning capacity–for hiring multiple additional layers of administration over the past couple of decades–taking money away from actual classroom instructors–and for telling everyone that will listen that standardized test scores don’t actually measure what a child knows, I actually feel sympathy for those that are also burdened by outsiders opposed to accountability, federal regulations that drive up costs, and arbitrary requirements that turn teachers into paid informants and administrators into quasi-judicial enforcers of regulations dictated by un-elected bureaucrats in Washington.
And that was just one meeting.
