Neenah News | New Board Member Questionnaire

    Below are my responses to the Neenah News as I submitted them in an email.  They may ask me to cut them down for brevity, or they may make editorial decisions to do that themselves.  In any case, I want to share here for anyone interested in my answers.  

    I also want to acknowledge that I do use AI chatbots to help refine my ideas.  Before a reader assumes that I'm having AI think for me, I invite you to look at the chat log yourself that I used to construct these answers.  Once you've read through it, consider my framing at the LWV Candidate Forum that I believe we should rein in AI, and that we should teach our children to think well, and not allow AI to do the thinking for them.  How well do I demonstrate that?  Where does my chat with Claude betray an outsourcing of my thinking?  How can I better leverage AI's potential while remaining true to my thoughts and ideals?

Here are the answers:

1. What’s the first thing you hope to accomplish as your term with the board begins?

    Honestly, the first thing I need to do is learn — how the district actually operates, where the real leverage points are, and where a board member can be most useful thinking long-term rather than just reacting. I don't want to arrive with a fixed agenda before I understand the landscape.  

    That said, I have a clear direction. Educational outcomes and financial stability tend to move together when you get the conditions right. A district with a strong reputation draws families who choose to open enroll here, and that enrollment has direct budget implications. A district on solid financial footing can sustain the programs and staffing that built the reputation in the first place. The two objectives feed each other.  My first goal is to understand the district well enough to find where those two things pull in the same direction — and push there. 

2. What would you like to see more of from the board overall?

    I'd like to see us reach further into the community — particularly to residents and employers who don't have direct ties to the district. Understanding how they see us, and what they think we could be doing for them, matters. Everyone has a stake in our public schools, whether or not they have kids in them.  

    That means a few concrete things. I want to know whether local employers see our graduates as their first choice — and if not, why not. I want people to have a genuine understanding of how school funding works — not just access to a budget document, but enough context to understand what the tradeoffs actually mean for students, for staff, and for the community. And I want the district to be the kind of institution people feel connected to before something goes wrong — available and legible to anyone who wants to tune in. The capacity to engage is there; we just need to build the channel.

3. What do you hope to accomplish over the next year or two?

    In the near term, I'd like to see real movement on ELA achievement. The state report card gives us a standardized scoreboard — the same one every district plays on — and I think we should be using it more deliberately. Our strategic plan already names closing gaps between student groups as a goal, and I think there's room to go further in how we set those targets.  One thing I'm hoping to bring to that conversation is a closer look at how we benchmark ourselves — not just against our own prior years, but against nearby districts and socioeconomically similar districts across demographic dimensions. That tells us where we stand relative to the districts families are actually choosing between, and it gives our goal-setting a more competitive foundation. I'm looking forward to exploring what that could look like with the rest of the board.  That kind of strategic clarity is what makes differentiation real rather than just claimed.

4. How do you plan to approach your duties and achieving your goals as a board member?

    Carefully. I'm one voice on a board that governs a complex institution, and I think the worst thing a new board member can do is confuse having opinions with having answers. So I'm going to spend a lot of time listening and asking questions before I push hard for anything.  But listening isn't passive. The things I've described in the other questions — deeper community outreach, competitive benchmarking, finding where educational outcomes and financial stability pull in the same direction — those require understanding how the district actually works before I can make useful recommendations toward any of them. That's the work of the first months.  Beyond that, I want to stay solution-oriented and collaborative.  The first ideas are rarely the best ones, and I'd rather iterate with the people in the room toward something that actually works for the students, staff, and the community than move fast on something that sounds good.  The thread running through all of it is longsightedness. The decisions a board makes compound over time — for students, for staffing, for the district's financial health, for its reputation in the community. I want to be the kind of board member who keeps that horizon in view, even when the immediate pressures push toward short-term thinking.