Mayor Dave Cieslewicz is proposing a regional approach to affordable housing to help ease high concentrations of poor students in Madison schools.
Cieslewicz is proposing to merge the city and Dane County public housing authorities into a single entity that would take a more regional view.
The authorities handle federal vouchers that offset rent payments, public housing and support first-time buyers.
Cieslewicz also wants to make communities outside Madison eligible for money from the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which now stands at $4 million.
Over time, the proposals might spread low-income housing more evenly through the region, which would help all schools, Cieslewicz said.
Madison Demographics: 82.2% white (Dane County = 87.5%) with 15% of the population living below poverty (2000 census; Dane County = 9.4%). 43% of the Madison School District’s students were classified as “low income” for the 2007-2008 school year.
Thanks for posting Jim.
Email sent to Dave this morning.
Congrats on becoming aware there are SCHOOLS in the city!!
Horray we need your help.
I have been complaining for years as to why the city and the schools are so distant. It has been clear to many in the city that you have been unaware of the BOE meetings or happenings. I realize you do not have any wards in the school system but MANY citizens in the city do and MOST of us have seen this crisis and been emailing and blogging for years.
SO welcome aboard. We need the city planning (a little late, we could have used you many years ago), housing, police, traffic, human resources, health centers, and verbal comments from leaders on the issues that are affecting so many in the district. Do you realize the last 15 years the low income student population in MMSD has doubled (from 21% to 42%), did you know the minority student population has doubled, and did you know the city population has NOT grown at the same rate. At the same time private schools have grown and expanded….we do not want to be a MPS urban mini-me. We want good PUBLIC school. This is an issue that has been ignored by the city for the last 10 years and I am so excited you noticed I just hope you stand strong and firm because this district needs the city support.
Thanks and I would be happy to help in any way.
Mary Kay Battaglia
This is a fascinating proposal. I wonder where the political reality lies?
It would seem that there are at least three scenarios:
a) Mayor Dave believes that this proposal will happen, or
b) he believes that it won’t happen but the concept will pave the way for something else (Arguments for additional state/federal redistributed tax dollars based on the local climate? What are the odds of such new funds for Madison, given it’s significantly higher spending per student than most Wisconsin Districts?), or
c) http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rhetoric
The recent teacher compensation discussion is a useful, related read:
http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2008/03/teachers_face_l.php
A good teacher friend mentioned a while ago that “I’m tired of baby-sitting, I just want to teach”.
Finally another related article: “Pride in public schools fuels positive involvement” notes that the advocate’s children attended the Boston Latin School, a well known high school that requires an exam for admissions.
http://www.schoolinfosystem.org/archives/2008/04/pride_in_public.php
Beyond emailing Mayor Dave, I think people should email the school board with their support for more collaboration between MMSD and the city. I have heard that there was some negative reaction from Rainwater and the School Board about the mayor proposing a committee on this.
The reaction is public and visible. There is a great deal of interest in working more closely with the city among board members.
The issue with the mayor is about process. Notably, his failure to engage and communicate with MMSD administration or the board of education BEFORE making his pronouncements on how he/the city are going to help the schools. This is the e-mail that I sent to the editors of the Cap Times after they endorsed the mayor’s engagement in the schools; at the CT request, it was printed as a column.
I read with interest the Thursday editorial on “The mayor and the schools.” As a member of the School Board, I agree that a closer working relationship and collaboration between the city and the Madison Metropolitan School District would be a positive thing. Certainly there are critical issues in planning, housing development patterns, transportation, zoning, and other matters that have a critical impact on our district in both the short and the long term.
For example, the “best planning practices” of infill have had a great deal to do with enrollment declines in isthmus schools by replacing family housing with condos. Decisions by the traffic engineering officials — such as roundabouts at $1.2 million each — have an impact on our budget. When the city annexes land on the periphery, it affects how and where we must provide schools; we do not have a right to refuse to also annex the students that go with the land.
Without a voice in decisions and processes, we are effectively at the mercy of the city on key issues that affect how we use the scarce resources that we have under state finance.
No matter how much cooperation is needed, there are some cautionary signs in how Mayor Dave Cieslewicz chose to proceed. I am particularly concerned by the absence of coordination and engagement with either elected or administrative representatives of the school district before the mayor made his announcements. The superintendent and president learned about the impending discussion of our schools when reporters called to ask for comment. Board members heard about the speech through an e-mail from the district after the district requested more information from the mayor’s office.
To be fair, Ald. Satya Rhodes-Conway had raised the possibility of an umbrella group at the first meeting of the City Council-Board of Education Liaison Committee in September. The committee did not reach a conclusion on the idea, and that was the last that we heard of it during the past six months, although we meet regularly.
There also was a discussion with the superintendent last May, and some inconclusive discussions with mayoral staff in summer. For some nine months, nothing was heard, and the district believed that the idea had been mothballed until the mayor’s speech.
I may be old school, but in my experience collaborations are built through dialogue and respect. They are not pronounced. At a minimum, the key partners should have the courtesy of a “heads up” before any announcements. Ideally, there would have been extended conversations and key areas of agreement before anything was rolled out. That did not happen here.
I cannot speak to why the mayor would choose to insert himself in school district policy and politics in this way without working with the district first. This is a very disappointing and counterproductive way to initiate a serious and much-needed policy discussion. It does not build the good relations and trust necessary to move forward, nor does it provide a sense that the mayor is concerned with the issues that our school district faces, how we are addressing them, and ideas for how the city and MMSD can work together more effectively.
This is no way to proceed. If the mayor wants to take the welcome step of working with the district, let that work start with a phone call to the superintendent; a meeting of staff or elected officials; or a visit to the liaison committee, which has had scant attention and uneven representation from the mayor’s office during my two years of service. Any of these overtures would work. None of these, with statements made to play to the press, is just grandstanding at the expense of serious questions that we, as the elected governance body for the schools, and district staff are trying to answer.
Lucy Mathiak is a member of the Madison School Board. She chairs the Finance and Operations Committee and is in her second year on the City Council-Board of Education Liaison Committee, which she chaired last year.