Issues

Bottom-up funding, not top-down.  Fully fund the classrooms and students first, including getting them to and from school (bussing, crossing guards, etc). This includes adequate starting and continuing pay rates.  Our pay rates (esp starting pay) are among the lowest in the area and this is embarrassing and needs to be corrected. Read More

Recruit, hire, train, and retain the best quality teachers and administrators, including adequate and appropriate compensation.  This includes substitutes as well! Read More

Chippewa Valley Schools has an enormous amount of debt.  This needs to be reduced.  As interest rates rise, it will cost more and more to service this debt and make refinancing it impossible.  It will result in cuts to the general budget in order to pay this interest.  Read More

I will work hard to ensure that we are spending the school funds in a prudent manner as if we were spending our own money.  

Chippewa Valley Schools lost 6.2% of enrollment from 2019-2020 to 2021-2022 school years.  This resulted in a loss of state funding of over $16m!  That's enough funding to cover over 100 teachers! 

Overall, have lost almost 10% enrollment and $33.2m in state funding since 2017-2018. 

The district's own consultants expect this enrollment decline to continue! Some of this is demographic, but a not-insignificant portion is due to parents taking their kids out of the district and moving them to private or home schools.  We need to reverse this trend.

I will work to remove divisive rhetoric from the schools - encourage and promote universal respect/acceptance/kindness/equal treatment without labels, segregation, or special attention. Read More

The Board of Education is the community's voice for the district.  The BoE represents the community.  The current BoE seems to think they represent the administration.  This needs to be corrected.

The BoE should listen and react to the parents and the community to improve the district.  Working together with the community, the administration, and the unions to promote the district will create a stronger, more viable school district.  The BoE should not be adversarial to the community it represents.

Parental involvement is imperative in education!  No one knows the children better than their parents! Ultimately, it is up to parents to decide the best educational, healthcare, emotional, and financial support that their children should receive.  We need to encourage parents to take an active role in their children's education.  Either through extra curricular activities, in-classroom volunteering, lunch room monitoring, or just helping with their homework, children will be most successful when their parents are involved.

The current board has only 2 members who currently have students in the schools. Read More

Schools need to be a safe place for the kids.  Free from both internal and external threats.  I will work diligently to ensure this is the case. Read More

Library books and textbooks have had lots of press lately.  I am for balanced textbooks (yes, I want textbooks in the schools, not just laptop computers) and age appropriate books in the libraries. Read More