Candidates square off in 3 races for busy School Board

Candidates will face off next week in three races for seats on a Port Washington-Saukville School Board dealing with sliding state report card scores, the transition to a new superintendent that comes on the heels of a period of remarkable turnover in the ranks of administrators and the financial challenges facing school districts throughout the state.

Sara McCutcheon, who with more than 25 years in office is the longest serving current member of the board, faces a challenge from Dawn Brooks for a seat on the board representing the Village of Saukville in the Tuesday, April 4, election.

Melissa Alexander, who was appointed to the board last year by the luck of the draw, faces Justin Myers, the other finalist for the appointment, for a seat representing the Town of Port Washington on the board.

After selecting Alexander and Myers as finalists for appointment in August, the board deadlocked and drew Alexander’s name out of a box to put her on the board.

Squaring off for a City of Port Washington seat on the School Board are Kierstin Cira, who garnered 47.6% of the vote in the Feb. 1 primary election for the seat, and Richard Sternhagen, who was the runner-up with 36.2% of the vote. Douglas Rogahn was eliminated from the race.

Cira and Sternhagen are vying to succeed Brian McCutcheon, who with more than 24 years in office is the second longest serving member of the current board and is not running for re-election.

Although board members represent specific areas of the School District, with the exception of the person who holds the at-large seat, they are elected by all voters in the district.

McCutcheon vs. Brooks

McCutcheon, 57, describes herself as a champion of public education and said she is seeking a return to the board to help protect it from the politicization of education that has divided other school districts.

“I’m concerned about the current climate in public education,” she said. “I believe there is an attack on public education. I think some of our neighboring districts are seeking a shift in that direction, and I don’t want to see that happen here.”

That attack has contributed to a shortage of qualified teachers, and if the Port Washington-Saukville School District is to continue to attract and retain the best educators, it needs to foster an atmosphere of respect for the profession, McCutcheon said.

“This needs to be a place where educators feel respected and enjoy teaching and are excited about their jobs because that trickles directly down to our students,” she said.

Brooks, 57, who is making her first bid for elected office, said she is running for the board to keep what she called racist policies out of the district.

“Policies that teach racism and exclude people have no place in our schools,” she said.

When asked to specify the type of policies she referred to as racist, Brooks said, “The ones that are flat-out racist, like teaching white students they are evil because they are white.

“All people are equal, and that’s what we should teach.”

Referring to the district’s latest state report card, Brooks said the district’s top priority should be improving academic achievement and ensuring students learn the skills they will need after high school.

The Port Washington-Saukville School District earned an accountability score of 75 on its 2021-22 Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction report card released in November, which falls into the state category of “exceeds expectations” but was the lowest score among school districts in Ozaukee County.

“We have never been at the top of schools in Ozaukee County, but why can’t we be?” Brooks asked. “The state report card is important. You have to have a quantitative measure for students and schools. It can’t be just that we feel good that our students are graduating.”

Brooks said there is a lack of urgency in the district and on the school board to address such problems.

“There’s a lack of initiative to get things done in this district,” she said. “Our kids have already lost one-and-a-half to two years to Covid. They can’t afford to lose any more time.”

McCutcheon said the district is addressing academic achievement with a focus on Tier 1 instruction ­— the teaching of core subjects aligned with state standards — a shift from principals serving as building managers to instructional leaders and evaluations that hold educators accountable for student achievement.

She said it’s important to keep the state report card and the high-stakes standardized tests that factor into them in perspective.

“There are people who will look at the state report card score and say, ‘I’m not sending my kid to that district,’ but people should look at the school district and our communities as a whole,” McCutcheon said, adding that her granddaughter was in tears before taking a standardized test because she was worried about letting her teacher down.

“I’m not going to put all that pressure on kids just so we can pat ourselves on the backs when we have fourth-grade kids in tears,” she said.

Brooks also criticized the board for the process it used to select the district’s next superintendent.

Stunned by the announcement in October by Dave Watkins that he will retire on June 30, just two years after coming to the district, the board worked quickly and almost exclusively in closed session to name Mel Nettesheim, the district’s current director of business services, his successor. It did not conduct an external search for candidates and interviewed only Nettesheim, who will become interim superintendent on July 1, in contrast to the four-month, region-wide search, which included several opportunities for public input, that resulted in the hiring of Watkins, who was a top administrator in the St. Paul, Minn., school system.

“They should have gone out and sought applications from outside the district,” Brooks said. “Nothing against Mel. In fact, it may be good to have someone with a business background as superintendent.”

McCutcheon called the process used to hire Watkins flawed and said that four of the six semi-finalists for the job should not have been recommended to the board. 

“We had someone in our ranks this time around who was better equipped to be superintendent than the pool of candidates we saw just a year ago,” she said. “We knew what’s out there and we knew we had a known entity in Mel, who is unrivaled in terms of understanding school finance.”

McCutcheon said the district must also continue to lobby state legislators to fix a broken school funding system that has frozen money for public schools that must deal with increasing costs and state taxing limits.

“Eighty percent of our budget is salaries and benefits, so if you have to make a substantial cut, you have to cut staff,” she said. “Then you will have 30 to 40 students per classroom, and we’re just not going to do that.”

Brooks said improving school safety is one of her priorities, noting that an active shooter hoax at Port Washington High School in October revealed that maps of the schools used by authorities are inaccurate.

“That’s pretty concerning,” she said.

Brooks, who has lived in the School District for 25 years, is a sales manager for a company that manufactures testing equipment for the petroleum industry and has a degree in business and economics from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

She has two adult children, both of whom graduated from Port Washington High School.

McCutcheon, who has lived in the district for 33 years, owns Silk Screen Specialists in Grafton and has an associate’s degree in tailoring from Milwaukee Area Technical College.

She has three adult children who graduated from Port High.

Alexander vs. Myers

At the top of the list of school district priorities for Alexander, 33, who teaches in the physical education and dance departments at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee, is fiscal responsibility.

“We need to definitely keep an eye on our budget,” she said. “I will fight against every referendum. Our taxpayers are not bottomless pits of money.”

Alexander said the district should have been doing a better job of saving money and must now look for ways to trim spending, although she did not cite specific spending cuts.

“We need to look at the budget and eliminate those things that aren’t essential to education,” she said. “With 80% of our budget going to salaries and benefits, I’d look at some of the positions that don’t pertain directly to education.”

Myers, 48, who is a vice president at U.S. Bank, said he is running for the board to help bridge what he sees as a divide between the School District and community.

“I feel like there is a disconnect between the district and the community,” he said. “It seems like there’s a lot of parents and others in the community who are asking questions and not getting answers from the district.”

Myers called the district’s state report card a concern but one that is being addressed by the district.

“We went through Covid and some turnover with the senior leadership at the high school and then we saw test scores drop,” he said. “I think there’s a correlation there.

“Now I think we’re on the rebound and I’m confident we’ll see our scores improve.”

One of the keys to ensuring academic achievement is making sure educators have the academic freedom and time to teach effectively, Myers said.

“I don’t want them to feel stifled and think they can’t talk about certain things,” he said.

Counselors and mental health professionals are key to education in this day and age, Myers said, because in addition to providing services students need, they allow teachers to focus on classroom instruction.

“If we give teachers the time to teach because we have counselors to jump in and help with problems, then our students benefit,” he said.

Alexander said the district must ensure not only that educators are properly trained to teach effectively but that students are learning.

“They’re two different things,” she said. “We can teach all we want, but if students are not learning, its not working.”

Alexander joined the board shortly before the board decided how to replace Watkins and said time will tell if it made the right decision.

“She (Nettesheim) has the opportunity to prove over the next two years if she’s the best person for the job, and the board has two years to see if it thinks she’s a good fit for the district,” she said.

The board, Myers said, should have followed the process used to hire other administrators and conducted a search for candidates.

“I wish the process was more open, more transparent,” he said. “But I like Mel a lot. She brings tremendous value to the job and has some great ideas that I support.”

Myers said the response he has received when he tells people he does not have a political agenda to bring the board is telling.

“They say, ‘Oh, thank God you said that,’” he said. “I didn’t think that needed to be said, but I guess in this day and age it does.”

Alexander, a 2008 graduate of Port Washington High School who grew up in the district, has a bachelor’s degree in dance from City University of New York-Hunter College and a master’s degree in international business from the University of Birmingham in England.

She has a daughter who is not yet school age.

Myers, who has lived in the district for nine years, has a bachelor’s degree in finance from Portland State University and a master of business administration degree from Marylhurst University.

He has three children, two of whom attend Port Washington High School and a third who graduated from Port High.

Cira vs. Sternhagen

Cira, 54, a veteran teacher, said she is deeply concerned by a state public school funding system that has not kept pace with increasing costs, leaving school districts in the difficult position of trying to provide high quality education with increasingly limited resources.

“School districts are being forced to take very hard looks at their budget, then turn to their communities for money when needed,” she said.

“The reality is, education has not been a priority for our state Legislature for a long time and we need to fight for our students.”

Sternhagen, 66, who was the director of sales and strategic planning for Sargento Foods before retiring, said one of his priorities is to address the district’s subpar academic performance.

Of the district’s state report card, he said, “It’s absolutely not acceptable. We should be leading school districts in southeastern Wisconsin, but if you compare us to our peers even outside Ozaukee County we’re in the bottom quarter.

“You need to establish goals and hold people accountable. Any organization that doesn’t do that is willing to accept mediocrity.”

Cira said the state report card is a single measure of academic achievement and, like grades, is not the most telling.

“The report card is just one measure of the success of our kids,” she said. “I’m constantly reminding people that students aren’t numbers. Grades are subjective.

“There should be more emphasis on what happens when our students leave the district. Do they become productive members of the community? Ultimately the goal is to create learned people who have all the options they want available to them when they graduate and who contribute to our community.”

Cira said the district should explore programs, for instance one that would allow students to train to become certified nursing assistants, so they have skills they can use after they graduate from high school.

“What are the training programs we can implement in our School District that are attractive to students so they can leave our district with life skills?” she  asked. “I’d like to look at what other districts are doing.”

Sternhagen said the district needs to be aware of and plan for significant development in the City of Port Washington and Village of Saukville.

“We have to have eyes on this and determine what this means to the district,” he said. “We need to be better prepared and not be blind to what is headed our way in order to keep our citizens whole.”

Sternhagen has lived in the district for more than 10 years and holds a degree in economics from UW-Milwaukee.

He has three adult children.

Cira, a 1986 Port High graduate who teaches third grade in the West Bend School District, has a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from UW-Milwaukee. She holds both a state principal and director of instruction license.

She has a daughter who is a freshman at Port High and two older children who graduated from the school.

School Board members serve three-year terms.