All it took was one question to know that watching last night’s Oshkosh School Board candidates’ forum was going to be a complete and utter waste of my time: “Do you pledge to uphold the 9 pillars of the Oshkosh Civility Project?” That question, asked right out the gate by the moderator and member of the group hosting the forum let me know that there was NOT going to be a serious discussion of the issues facing the district this year.
I won’t bore you with what the “9 pillars” are–suffice it to say they are about silencing dissent and protecting local elected officials from public criticism–but the moderator made sure to list them all and tell the candidates why each of them is so important. And with each of the six participants getting 90-seconds to provide their answer, the first 10-minutes of a 90-minute forum was spent discussing something that has no legal standing and in no way improves the quality of Oshkosh schools.
Let’s be honest here, this year’s school board elections in most of the large, urban districts will be referenda on mask mandates, quarantine policies, vaccine requirements and whether schools should have gone fully-virtual as long as they did. That is why all four of the challengers got into the race for the two seats open in Oshkosh–and it’s why we have some of the largest fields for school board races I have seen in my 22-years covering local politics in the Fox Valley. And they are the issues that should be vigorously debated.
The third question of last night’s forum did get into the subject, but the question was carefully worded in such a way to all but disqualify the position of the challengers: “The school district has done everything it can to keep kids and staff safe during the pandemic. What will you do to continue to guarantee that level of safety?” Higher level candidates with “messaging specialists” would easily handle this distorted question and smoothly move into their talking points. But the folks with regular 9-5 jobs that don’t have time for mock debate practice wasted most of their response times fumbling around with the definition of “safe” and had little time left to question the benefits of masking up pre-kindergartners for six hours a day.
I should note that I used to be invited to take part as a questioner at these forums, but I fell out of favor with the organizing group because my questions focused on topics that they did not feel were that important to voters–topics like property taxes, continual referendum initiatives, changing school mascots, declining aptitude test results, conduct unbecoming elected officials, racial disparity in outcomes, demands that the Board “always speak as one”, and how much per-pupil spending would actually be “enough” per-pupil spending.
Just one of those questions was asked last night–but it was again couched in such a way that rendered any of the answers pointless: “We know that standardized test scores are not an accurate measure of a student’s learning–but what would you do to address the district’s declining test scores?” And the incumbents both took advantage of that lead (and the extreme deficiencies of virtual-learning) to discredit any test scores that will be coming out for probably the next decade, thereby absolving themselves and administrators of any blame (unless they are surprisingly good–then they will show that everything the district is doing is great!).
Completely missing from last night’s forum were discussions on any spending measures–including the millions in pandemic relief funds that still have not been spent, a change in school policy governing the use of preferred pronouns for students by staff without parental permission–which was never brought to the school board for consideration or review (something that likely would never have seen the light of day without WHBY reporting on it), the district conducting multiple surveys asking for recommendations on naming the new north side middle school and the board choosing the least-popular of the three names anyway, redrawing of school boundaries to increase class efficiencies, and complaints from administrators about their treatment by the previous superintendent–who was selected by the incumbents currently running for re-election.
Instead, Oshkosh voters that tuned in last night will know just a few things about their school board candidates: they all think civility is important, they all think Oshkosh kids are awesome, and they all think Oshkosh teacher are awesome.
Oh, and the four challengers all want to kill kids and staff.
