How will PW-S School District respond to stinging report card?

A student who brings home a report card with the worst grades in his or her classroom has a lot of explaining to do.

So, Port Washington-Saukville School Board, the people of your school district are listening. How to do you explain the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction report card that gives the Port Washington-Saukville school system the lowest grades among the six school districts in Ozaukee County?

The 2021-22 DPI report, required by statute to be issued annually to ensure accountability for educational performance by all of the state’s public school systems, ranks Port-Saukville behind not the only the larger suburban districts of Cedarburg, Mequon-Thiensville and Grafton, but also the county’s small rural districts.

Cedarburg received the highest score in Ozaukee County, but the Cedar Grove-Belgium school system, the smallest school district in the county, was also a standout in the state report—third highest of the Ozaukee systems and eighth highest of the 368 K-12 districts in Wisconsin.

There was some good news for district residents in the Port-Saukville report card. Dunwiddie and Lincoln Elementary Schools excelled, getting high marks that put them in the significantly exceeds expectations category. But Port Washington High School’s low accountability number dragged down the district’s overall rating.

The district’s top administrators have to answer for this, of course, but the ultimate responsibility falls on a school board whose members are elected for the sole purpose of providing the guidance needed to make the education of Port-Saukville the best it can be.

Meeting that imperative is not helped by the fact that the district is functioning with an administrative leader who resigned only 14 months after being hired. David Watkins’ resignation, announced as a retirement, will take effect on June 30. 

The hiring of Watkins in 2021 as the successor to long-serving School Supt. Mike Weber followed a four-month $16,000 search by a consultant, but was marked by disagreement among school board members. Watkins was hired by a divided board vote. The finalist not chosen by the board was recently hired to lead a Milwaukee area school district with an enrollment more than twice the size of Port-Saukville’s.

It is not known outside of school board circles whether there was disagreement over Watkins’ replacement because almost every aspect of it was handled in closed meetings, but the board’s unconventional choice surely raises questions.

Though there was a cushion of months before the position would be vacated, the board decided to act quickly without a comprehensive search for candidates, and hired the current Port-Saukville district business manager as the new superintendent. No other candidates were interviewed.

Mel Nettesheim, the district’s director of business services since January 2021, was hired in November to be Watkins’ replacement but will have the title of interim superintendent because she is not yet licensed to be a school superintendent in Wisconsin.

Six semesters of classroom teaching experience is a requisite for a superintendent’s license. Nettesheim has no classroom teaching experience, but DPI rules allow superintendent appointments for school district business managers under some circumstances. Nettesheim said she will complete coursework required for the license by next fall.

Giving the superintendent job to Nettesheim, who obviously has impressed the board with her work in the district’s business office during her brief tenure here, was a convenient choice for a board that was frustrated by Watkins’ short stay after the long and tedious search leading up to his hiring. Whether it was the right choice remains to be seen, perhaps in future state report cards. This school board has had to deal with an unusually large number of staff vacancies besides that of its top administrator—a problem not of its making—and this has complicated its work. There are reasons school board service is often called a thankless job, and among them is that the stakes are high and the stakeholders, particularly the parents of school children, are demanding.

Those stakeholders expect more than a high school that falls short in educational performance and successful student outcomes. They did their part in 2015 as voters when they approved a whopping $50 million referendum—and the tax burden that came with it—to give Port-Saukville some the some of the most impressive high school facilities in the state.

The disappointing DPI report card is a reminder that the excellence of a school district’s brick and mortar is not a guarantee of educational excellence.

School Supt. Watkins’ comment about the state critique of the district’s performance was that it “means there’s room for improvement.”

That’s a kind way of admitting the leaders of the Port Washington-Saukville School District brought home a lousy report card.