School board race comes to Operation Fresh Start

Four of the five school board candidates up for election on April 2 answered questions posed by students at Operation Fresh Start Thursday, March 21.

Operation Fresh Start (OFS) helps students who have not succeeded in the traditional classroom setting. Fresh Start students and other adults packed in as the candidates prepared to address them from a small table in the front of the room. The candidates began with opening statements, which soon gave way to the students’ questions.

“The reason this forum matters, the reason it is important, is the Madison school district is facing something called an ‘achievement gap,’ where students of color are not graduating at the same rate as white students. Our population, our participants, whether people of color or not, are the gap,” OFS Executive Director Gregory Markle told the audience.

The candidates in attendance included current school board President James Howard, TJ Mertz, who is running unopposed for seat 5, and competitors for seat 3, Dean Loumos and Wayne Strong. Greg Packnett, who is running against Howard for seat 4, did not attend.

Strong was the first to speak in the few minutes each candidate had to make their pitches and discuss the issues they view as most important.

Strong opened by saying he believes the achievement gap is the number one issue facing the district. He added that ensuring school safety and making sure kids are in school are also among his top priorities.

“The district is only as good as its worst students,” he said.

Loumos highlighted his experience growing up in a dual-language family and his longtime work in the community, including his current position developing housing for people with mental illnesses. These experiences, he said, gave him the skills to work on the school board.

Mertz began by saying education is his passion. He continued that he has learned through his work on the Equity Task Force that it is necessary to invest in schools and students in order to implement the “great ideas.” He also emphasized his work on school budgets and his attendance at more than 200 school board meetings.

Howard, the final candidate to speak, said community partnerships, like the one between OFS and the Madison Metropolitan School District, are important in helping students succeed. He also focused on globalization and the need to compete worldwide, saying that today students must have something – a GED or high school diploma – with which to compete. 

From there, students asked about a range of issues, from the nutritional value of school lunches to access to quality public education for all students. The OFS students had chosen the few questions they deemed most important from roughly 80 they came up with as a group.

A student named Sam asked what the district is doing today to ensure that those under the age of 21 without a high school diploma have access to free education.

All four candidates focused on continuing and expanding partnerships like OFS, especially as state funding for public education decreases.

Loumos also asked that the young people in attendance promote the changes they would like to see.

“Moving an institution also involves involvement and nothing moves institutions any faster than 15 or 20 or all of you [students] coming to the school board and [school board members] seeing young people saying, ‘Hey, we want this and we want it now,’” he said. “And people who look like me are going to say, ‘yeah, let the young kids get in on this.’”

Answers varied in response to another student’s question about how the candidates would improve the quality of food served in the district’s schools.

Although Mertz said he tended to focus on others problems like equity-based budgeting, he added that if students brought him ideas he would work to get them on the agenda. Loumos focused on the complicated logistics of servicing the district’s many schools but said he like the idea of having students learn to grow and prepare their own fresh food.

Strong said he would start with the budget when it comes to issues like food and said the district does the best job possible given the amount of funding it has. Finally, Howard focused on the affect on students of eating unhealthy food.

“There are a lot of people in our community that are concerned about how well we feed our kids, because we know if kids aren’t eating well, if they don't’ have the right nutrients, they’re not going to study. And they’re not going to learn,” Howard said.

The school board election will take place Tuesday, April 2.