Listening and Sharing

Oak Creek, South Milwaukee explore visions
By Lyn Jerde

Guy Costello saw the handwriting on the wall, and he was delighted. Costello, a 5th-grade teacher at Lakeview Elementary School in South Milwaukee, had organized a School-Community Visions session – in which people from all segments of the community were invited to talk about what they want their public schools to be.

Fifty-four people attended the Feb. 24 meeting at South Milwaukee’s Community Center.

At the end, Costello made a request: All participants who would like to continue the dialogue, or are willing to help implement some of the suggestions that came from the session, please stick your name tags on the wall.

The wall was papered with 45 name tags — 83% of the people who attended the visions meeting.

“It was a wonderful process that allowed everybody to be heard,” Costello said.

The School-Community Visions session at South Milwaukee – and similar sessions in public school districts throughout Wisconsin – play a key role in WEAC’s Great Schools initiative.

The sessions also exemplify the sixth standard of community involvement in schools, as set forth in a Johns Hopkins University study: “Community resources are used to strengthen schools, families, and student learning.”

At South Milwaukee, Costello made a special effort to ensure that the visions session included a broad cross-section of the community. He enlisted the aid of South Milwaukee Mayor David Kieck, who had recently put together a community discussion related to city and business issues.

Kieck had a ready-made list of potential participants, including elected officials, business people, religious leaders, and the most vocal supporters and opponents of recent school bond referendums.

To that list, Costello added the names of parents, teachers, and high school students.

All the people on the list received a notice of the visioning session, signed by both Costello and South Milwaukee School Superintendent David Ewald.

The meeting was held in the South Milwaukee Community Center, which used to belong to the Bucyrus-Erie Company, a reflection of the blue-collar roots in this community of 20,000.

“From the get-go,” Costello said, “we had a spirit of cooperation.

“It’s pretty cool that we can get such a wide range of people, from the chair of the State Senate Education Committee to a group of high school students, to sit down and share ideas about the future of our schools,” he said. “That just doesn’t happen in too many places.”

Indeed, one of the participants was State Sen. Richard Grobschmidt of South Milwaukee, who is a former political science teacher, a 1966 South Milwaukee High School graduate, and now chair of the Senate’s Committee on Education.

Grobschmidt said what he heard at the visioning meeting will influence his work as a lawmaker.

Of particular concern, he said, was the impact of revenue controls on the district, which has four elementary schools, a middle school and a high school.

Revenue caps, combined with a relatively flat enrollment, would make it almost impossible for the South Milwaukee School District to get all the technological improvements that many at the visioning session said they wanted, Grobschmidt said.

Guy Costello

Richard Grobschmidt

“Yes, the people want their money wisely spent,” he said. “But they also want the local control to make those decisions.”

The key reason for the visioning session, Costello said, was so all people in the community could have a say about their schools.

Costello had been concerned that some participants would come to the meeting with strongly held opinions or agendas, and might dominate, or intimidate those who might disagree.

The session’s structure, he said, alleviated that concern.

Participants were instructed not to sit next to someone they knew well.

Based on where they were sitting, they were organized randomly into groups of three. For the initial discussions, each member took turns being a speaker, a listener and an observer.

Then, each group would join with another, to form a circle of six people. Discussion focused on three major topics:

• What aspects of the schools can we, as citizens, realistically hope to control?
• What aspects can we influence, even if we can’t fully control them?
• What aspects can we neither control nor influence, but concern us anyway?

“It helped the groups,” Costello said, “to think in terms of what we can, realistically, get done.”

Similar process in Oak Creek
Suzanne Wefler, who teaches 6th-grade science at East Middle School in the Oak Creek-Franklin School District, used a similar format at the School-Community Visions session she organized for her school district on April 4. Forty-two people attended that session.

Many people felt that Oak Creek would benefit from more community involvement in the schools, Wefler said.

“Those present were happy to have the opportunity to express their ideas and concern for the future of public schools – so much that 90% of those in attendance said they would be willing to come back and continue the discussion,” she said.

Some of them, she said, came to the meeting with strongly held opinions that many teachers may not share. That’s OK because the important thing is that the issues are openly discussed and debated.

For example, some said teachers’ pay should be based on how well their students perform in school. Others said students and teachers in public schools should wear uniforms.

And some were adamant in their beliefs that the schools already have enough money, and taxpayers simply can’t afford to give them more.

But, it was highly encouraging to Wefler when, after the meeting was over, one of the people who had spoken negatively about the schools offered to continue with the process of visioning.

In Oak Creek, that process is continuing. Many of the participants in the April meeting came back for a May 16 follow-up on some of the topics most often discussed at the first session.

Recurring topics
Many topics were similar at South Milwaukee and Oak Creek-Franklin.

In both communities, participants supported making the school the center of the community.

“There was a strong sense of purpose,” Costello said, “that the schools should be more of a hub core area in the community – having schools open more hours, having schools available as places where people want to come.”

To achieve this, Grobschmidt said, it’s vital that schools don’t forget the importance of activities such as school plays, music concerts and sporting events.

“Many people in the community look to the schools not only as a place to educate their children and grandchildren, but also as a place to showcase what’s going on in the schools,” he said. “Whenever I go to a school play, I see many people from the community who don’t have children in the schools. It’s good to involve the whole community in the schools, and it will help the schools in the long run.”

Another issue that was raised in both communities was the adequacy of facilities.

Grobschmidt said South Milwaukee voters recently passed a referendum for repairs to the middle school – realizing, he said, that the repairs are only stopgap, and that the buildings need much more work.

Involving retirees
In Oak Creek-Franklin, Wefler said, one of the groups she made a point of inviting to the visioning sessions was the retired homeowners – some of whom live on fixed incomes and are reluctant to vote for school improvements that will result in increased property taxes.

“It’s important for them to see,” she said, “that whatever happens to the schools impacts them. When the time comes to sell their houses, the houses will sell faster if the community has good schools.”

Both Wefler and Costello said they also heard concerns about school safety – likely because of highly publicized incidents of school violence nationally, including the shootings last year at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

Grobschmidt said he heard from the participants a strong concern about “the kids in the middle,” who are perceived as being short-changed in schools.

“We do pretty well with the gifted and talented, and the college-bound,” Grobschmidt said. “And, we offer services for special education and children at risk. But, the community felt we needed to do more for the ordinary students who don’t fall into these categories.”

Some of the ways of “doing more” that Grobschmidt heard participants mention included equalizing student access to technology, keeping the school’s technology up to date, and adding or strengthening programs that aid students’ transitions from school to the workplace.

More follow-up planned
In South Milwaukee, these issues and others will be discussed in more depth by sub-committees that were formed from the original participants at the visioning session – those who stuck their name tags on the wall.

Two things about the session particularly gratified Costello.

One was the way it helped people with strong opinions to see the big picture about schools.

“As the discussion went on,” he said, “all the people began to think more globally.”

The other source of satisfaction, he said, was the articulate viewpoints contributed by students.

“If there was one group that stood out,” he said, “it was the students. They were a great example of the good things that are already going on in the schools.”

For more information about the Great Schools initiative, visit: www.weac.org/greatschools

The importance of involvement

Since last December, News & Views has been running a series of articles about the importance of parental and community involvement in schools.

These articles, written by Lyn Jerde, provide real-life examples of how schools throughout Wisconsin are enhancing involvement to improve education. The series reflects a primary goal of the WEAC Great Schools initiative.

OnWEAC at www.weac.org provides extensive information about Great Schools and research regarding its goals. One research paper, titled “Parent and Family Involvement,” summarizes research, including these points from author Anne T. Hendrickson:

1. The family provides the primary educational environment.
2. Involving parents in their children’s formal education improves student achievement.
3. Parent involvement is most effective when it is comprehensive, long-lasting, and well-planned.
4. The benefits are not confined to early childhood or the elementary level; there are strong effects from involving parents continuously throughout high school.
5. Involving parents in their own children’s education at home is not enough. To ensure the quality of schools as institutions serving the community, parents must be involved at all levels in the school.
6. Children from low-income and minority families have the most to gain when schools involve parents. Parents do not have to be well-educated to help.
7. We cannot look at the school and the home in isolation from one another; we must see how they interconnect with each other and with the world at large.

Posted May 31, 2000