Upcoming Primary

Due to there being more than four candidates running, Fall Creek will be having a Spring Primary for the spots on the School Board on February 21, 2023.

I hope that I can count on the support of anyone reading this to show up on that day and vote for me to continue into the general election.

I’ll go ahead and publicly state here for the record my most important priorities if I got onto the School Board:

  • Transparency – People have busy lives, yet are still interested in the happenings of their local government. And I believe that they have a right to have such knowledge at their fingertips. As such, I’ve personally attempted to attend all of the school board meetings that I could and recorded and released the video of these meetings online for anyone to view at their leisure. I would like to make it policy that the school board choose to voluntarily do this, and to release it to their website within a week of the meeting occurring.
  • Accountability – the Fall Creek School District mission is stated as being “Committed to Academic and Personal Excellence”. Yet, from what I have seen from the outside looking in, barely any time at all in the school board meetings are actually devoted to discussing academic progress. Our teachers are doing the best that they can, and I’d like to help them to do even better. I will push to have academic excellence as the Board’s top priority again, and to include at the very least a short discussion on academic progress of the District and the School at every meeting. Ideally, I’d like us to use a “big data” approach so that we can view objective progress towards these goals. I’d like everyone to be able to see where we are, and where we are going, in clear and unambiguous terms. And us taxpayers should be able to see, at all times, just how well our schools are doing.
  • Dynamism – It is important that governments have both a constant churn and influx of new ideas, as well as to still maintain the experiences of those that came before. We need both youth, enthusiasm, and wise experience to be successful. As such, and to reduce stagnation, I propose what I call the “Take a Break” Act. Rather than setting absolute term limits, this act would allow sitting board members to serve for a maximum of two consecutive terms, after which time they are forbidden from running for another term until at least one full term has passed. After which time they may choose to again run for up to two more consecutive terms, repeating this pattern indefinitely. This gives others a chance to get in and get their ideas heard, while at the same time giving those with the drive and experience the ability to keep supporting our schools.

I hope that you can agree to these goals. I dearly wish the best for our students, and want to see them given the best possible education.

The Pond – Eau Claire River Watershed Coalition Information

I’ve joined the Eau Claire River Watershed Coalition mailing list in order to better understand the challenges facing the Fall Creek Pond. You can join too if you wish by sending a request to either the person running that list, DANIEL P ZERR, or his associate Chris Straight, which is how I got on the list. I see that Village Trustee Karen Herbison is on the list, but don’t recognize any other names as local notables.

I’m going to provide you here with all of the documentation I’ve received thus far from the list. The next Zoom meeting will be held on Dec 8, 2022 03:00 PM. Apparently they only meet via Zoom. Here is the link to join the meeting at the appropriate time, if you’re interested. If I can, I will attempt to record the meeting and provide it to the public. The process for improvement appears to be a fairly slow years-long process, and I’m not quite sure why that is. Perhaps the meeting itself will reveal more.

All of the files that I’ve received so far are shown at the bottom of this post, but I have extracted from them all the parts that specifically mention Fall Creek in the next section, if you don’t want to read through it all. However, I would recommend reading through it all, as Fall Creek is not isolated – what affects the greater Chippewa Valley affects us, and vice-versa.

Note above from the “2018 Plan Accomplishments” report
Notes above from the “late 2018-2019 Plan Accomplishments” report
Notes above from the 2020 “Plan Accomplishments” report

221110-Eau-Claire-River-Watershed-Coalition-Meeting-OutcomesDownload
ECRW_Action-Plan-Accomplishments_thru-Oct-2018Download
221208-Eau-Claire-River-Watershed-Coalition-Meeting-AgendaDownload
ECR-Watershed-Action-Plan-Accomplishments__late-2018-2019Download
ECR-Watershed-Action-Plan-Accomplishments_2020Download

The Pond

One of my interests in the Village is the state of the Fall Creek Pond. One day, I’d like my kids to be able to play in the pond like they can at Coon Forks or Big Falls, perhaps even with a small beach. Call me a big dreamer.

I’ve done some investigating, and learned that the “scummy” pond water and substantial algae blooms are mostly caused by leakage of nitrates and other runoff compounds from local farmer’s fields into the watershed. These act as nutrients for the “scummy” algae and other plants that have taken over the pond.

I’d like us to do whatever we can to reduce this issue. I see many possible steps forward, including but not limited to:

Note, that I wish all of these ideas/suggestions/proposed changes should be based on the mutual consent un-coerced of the nearby landowners. The Village should partner with these farmers to create a local goodwill coalition to improve our local watershed. Perhaps a “Fall Creek Watershed Coalition”?

Documentation Round-Up – School Board

Documentation Round-Up – School Board

With the permission of Dr. Sanfelippo, Teresa Reetz has been graciously providing me with a copy of the “packets” that the School Board members receive at the beginning of each meeting. I’ve scanned all of the ones for the meetings that I’ve attended for the past six months (I unfortunately could not make it to the October meeting due to a previous obligation.). Below I have provided these for your information and to download at your leisure:

FC-School-Board-Packet-June-20-2022Download
FC-School-Board-Packet-July-18-2022Download
FC-School-Board-Packet-August-22-2022Download
FC-School-Board-Packet-September-19-2022Download
FC-School-Board-Packet-November-21-2022Download

Priorities

This is a short post to release a pent up frustration that I have. This post may make me some enemies, but I will stand by my statements. Because I am PASSIONATE about our children and their education.

Our priorities as a community are messed up, frankly. Our 190 Middle School students currently have to essentially BEG the public for money to support fields trips that will help in their primary education. PLEASE support them by following the link below:

https://app.99pledges.com/fund/fallcreekcrickets?fbclid=IwAR3DaxvNVkjBcOniFZEzMZ2ANFDRoYDS6fdWSuh2nNi-CjZhoraV3fwl3qs

Apparently, there wasn’t room in the school’s budget to pay for class field trips. However, you know what the sitting School Board did find money for? A pole vault platform:

No need to start a fundraiser for this, no sir! They consider a pole vault platform that will service perhaps a couple dozen students twice as important as the entirety of the Middle School being able to go on their academic field trips for the year.

On a related note, I, an individual parent whose annual salary is roughly equivalent to that of one of our teachers, was able to match and exceed the entirety of the PTO’s “Directed Funds” for the 2020-2021 school year with individual donations over time directly to our teachers, largely funding over a dozen projects that the teachers felt were directly necessary for the education of our children:

While I’m sure that most of the PTO’s projects are worthwhile, only a couple of them appear to directly assist with the education of our children.

And that’s what a School District, and a PTO, should be primarily concerned with. Education. First and foremost. While the other stuff is “nice to have”, it should always come secondary to the direct education of our children’s minds.

While a pole vault is certainly a good thing to have to help train our student’s bodies and coordination, the likelihood of it directly helping them be successful in the workforce is slim.

While it’s important to give to families in need, and to support children during Christmas time, I would think we’d want to make sure that our hard working teachers have EVERYTHING they need to educate our children FIRST and foremost.

This, makes me sad. We can do better. For our children’s education. For their future. I know that we can do better than this. And we should.