Are you kidding?

March 18, 2011 1:20 pm

The members of the Dane County School Board Consortium and WAES (Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools) have gotten together to sponsor a public meeting to discuss walkers $900 million dollar cut to public schools.

In Monona Grove(probably like other school districts) we get an automated mass email with school events(infinite campus). My son was sent home with the following letter yesterday:

mgpm

Then the next morning we received this email from the school:

The intention of the sponsors of the March 27 community meeting is to discuss funding for public education in a non-partisan event. Given that one sponsor of the event, WAES (Wisconsin Alliance for Excellent Schools) is an active political advocate for a specific agenda, that of school funding reform, use of school resources to promote the meeting was inappropriate. WAES membership includes 24 teacher organizations, including WEAC, 47 school districts, parent organizations, other professional organizations and individuals. We apologize for the error in oversight.

Are you kidding? in the 12 hours since we the notice of the PUBLIC MEETING came home they had enough complaints that they had to apologize for it. What part of “All are welcome to come” do the republicans have a problem with? Looks like an “open records” request to see who made such a silly complaint. Stay tuned and see you at the meeting!

Sorry for the delay, but more clarification is needed here also. Last year at election time, a anonymous, somewhat cowardly group came up with a new “email list” that they were promoting called MGSD community (mgsd.community@gmail.com).

There was some concern (not confirmed) that they took the PTO email list and used that. They also, due to innocent oversight by the building principals, were allowed to send out a generic voting information sheet with all of the kids. This flyer was a very generic flyer stating who was running, when and where to vote, etc… Also on the flyer was a line stating to stay informed sign up @mgsd.community@gmail.com.

All very innocent until we got closer to the election and the messages received from mgsd were very partisan. These one way email messages, started advocating strongly FOR the head of the PTO and strongly AGAINST a sitting board member in their race for school board. Since it was a one way email list, no one could complain or object to any issues. Those that did(myself included) were simply removed from the list.

This led to some fallout, as it seemed like an “official” mailing, after all it came from the “MGSD community”. yet no one would ever actually claim to being the person/people behind it. They were also selfish in, that they hung the principles of the buildings who ok’d the note, out to dry. The principles took most of the heat and had nothing to do with it(except being overworked and too trusting).

I am quite certain that the person/people who complained were just as upset last year during this whole Mgsd flap. I will be placing an open records request to get all complaint letters and see if we have good government watchdogs or just hypocrites.

2 COMMENTS

Jeff March 18, 2011 11:34 pm At 11:34 PM

I need to clarify, the monona grove school board is great. What I am saying here is there is a very small faction of regressive hyper partisans who would have complained enough to force the apology. An open records request will hopefully flush them out so they can be appropriatly shamed.
Jeff March 21, 2011 8:10 am At 8:10 AM

Sorry for the delay, but more clarification is needed here also. Last year at election time, a anonymous, somewhat cowardly group came up with a new “email list” that they were promoting called MGSD community (mgsd.community@gmail.com).

There was some concern (not confirmed) that they took the PTO email list and used that. They also, due to innocent oversight by the building principals, were allowed to send out a generic voting information sheet with all of the kids. This flyer was a very generic flyer stating who was running, when and where to vote, etc… Also on the flyer was a line stating to stay informed sign up @mgsd.community@gmail.com.

All very innocent until we got closer to the election and the messages received from mgsd were very partisan. These one way email messages, started advocating strongly FOR the head of the PTO and strongly AGAINST a sitting board member in their race for school board. Since it was a one way email list, no one could complain or object to any issues. Those that did(myself included) were simply removed from the list.

This led to some fallout, as it seemed like an “official” mailing, after all it came from the “MGSD community”. yet no one would ever actually claim to being the person/people behind it. They were also selfish in, that they hung the principles of the buildings who ok’d the note, out to dry. The principles took most of the heat and had nothing to do with it(except being overworked and too trusting).

I am quite certain that the person/people who complained were just as upset last year during this whole Mgsd flap. I will be placing an open records request to get all complaint letters and see if we have good government watchdogs or just hypocrites.