As stated previously, our family has recently lost both grandmothers within a span of the last three months, so it has become a time of healing for us. As such, it has made me reconsider a few of my priorities.
After spending most of a year (2022) sitting in on meetings for both the School Board and the Village Board and observing, my personal reflections are as follows:
The Village Board is operating as I feel a proper legislative governing unit should – as a group filled with strong personalities that represent a fairly diverse cross-section of the community. That board has very passionate discussions and debates about topics, because they have a passion for their community, and you can tell that those that are in opposition towards each other are good counter-balances towards each other in temperament and mentality. This gives the board a good balance, and I think the right drive to push the village forward in the right direction. It reflects the US Congress in that way. And while we all may have a complaint or two about Congress and how it works (or doesn’t!), the fact is that the push and pull between such groups is a healthy thing for a democracy. It shows passion, it shows interest, and it shows a desire to make things better (from their own diverse perspectives, of course). As a result, I’ve decided not to run this year for the Village Board.
As for the School Board, I’ve said it before on my site and elsewhere – I just don’t see that same passion, that same drive for continuous improvement amongst the board members. I see people smiling and nodding (when they aren’t yawning – not going to name any names) but mostly just going through the motions of the role. There is no debate, and any discussion is limited to social graces and perfunctory pleasantries. It definitely seems as though decisions were made previously before the meeting, and the meeting exists as just a formality to make decisions legally binding. Any passion that I have seen has been shown by our school staff – the principals, teachers, and even students that have presented to the board.
But, is that a bad thing? I’m not as certain as I once was. Just last month, the DPI released its score cards for the 2022-2023 school year. I will provide my standard line graphs below for you. In the past, I’ve provided graphs showing our district and its physically closest neighbors. However, I’ve come to understand that, for better or worse, the populace at large appears to care less for physical proximity to group nearby communities than it does about extracurricular activities. As such, it appears that those schools within the same “conference” as ours are of most interest to the electorate. So, even though Eau Claire’s Memorial High School is 10.6 miles away (a 15 minute drive), and the Columbus School District in Marshfield is 66.9 miles away (a 76 minute drive), the graphs below will show only those schools listed within the Cloverbelt conference, so they will show Columbus, but not the much closer Eau Claire schools. Schools were included where there was adequate data to make reasonable-looking graphs, removing only those schools that didn’t have sufficient data to show any lines properly (such as a couple of the “charter schools” that exist within a couple of districts).
These graphs all show the main “Overall Accountability Score” metrics, which have been run through my DPI Summary Consolidation Application, which aggregates all of the scores against “like” entities (such as all elementary schools, etc.), compares them, and ranks them to get a percentile. As stated previously, I created this application because of the DPI’s habit of “moving goalposts” making their thresholds arbitrary. By using this ranking method, we can get a solid baseline that’s based on how schools compare to each OTHER, creating a much better and more stable metric for comparison’s sake.
As with any percentile, it’s similar to golf scores – the lower the better! A percentile score of 5% means that that school/district is within the TOP 5% of ALL schools/districts of that type. Compare that to a score of 90%, which would mean that 90% of all schools/districts of the same type did BETTER than the school in question on this metric, which is why these charts will appear “flipped” from the kind you usually see, with the “larger” number at the bottom.
As I’ve already provided superfluous commentary above, I will refrain from doing so for the rest of this page, and just let the data mostly speak for itself. The charts will show, in order, the overall accountability scores for the Cloverbelt conference for all Districts as a whole, and then Elementary, Middle/Jr High Schools, and High Schools, each on a separate graph.
I have tried to make Fall Creek stand out slightly more from all of the rest of the lines by making the line “cricket green” with red marking points. You can click each of the images to enlarge them.
As you can see, with the exception of the elementary school, the “trajectories” of the other schools, as well as the district as a whole, are in a positive direction. So, even though I do still have concerns about the passion and transparency of the school board, the operation of the district as a whole seems to be largely functional and mostly improving year-over-year, and especially as our children rise in the grades/years.
As such, I have made the final decision to skip this upcoming election for the school board. I will watch the district for another year with the slight change-up in the sitting board member roster and the change of superintendent, and see how they do this school year, before deciding whether to run again the same time next year.