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After a long and frustrating search, Beth Wisniewski felt like she found a haven for her son in Penfield Montessori Academy — a Near West Side Milwaukee charter school that serves children with and without disabilities.

Wisniewski’s son, Henry, was born with Down syndrome. As he approached school age, Wisniewski and her husband toured private schools, traditional public schools and charter schools — those that are publicly funded but independently operated. But no matter the school model, the Milwaukee couple walked away with the same message: Henry was not wanted. 

“Every place we went we had to explain that our son was worthy, as if we had to sell the school on our son,” Wisniewski said. “You feel less than, like there was no place that welcomed him the way he is.” 

The family finally found Penfield, which centered its vision for the school on students with disabilities. Penfield Children’s Center — a taxpayer-funded nonprofit that serves young children and infants with developmental delays and other disabilities — opened the school in 2016 for children who aged out of the center. 

“(At Penfield) we’ve never had to apologize for where my child is at, developmentally. He’s truly welcomed by everyone,” Wisniewski said, pointing to the school’s teachers, therapists and specialists to support students with special needs.

But that support may vanish. Penfield’s board in April abruptly announced the school would shutter at the end of the year, citing long-term financial pressures and surprise building repair bills. 

Absent a long-shot plan to save Penfield, the closure means families must find a new school next year — whether returning to their home district public school or trying to navigate a state school choice system that offers few options for students with disabilities. 

Public schools must serve all students living within their boundaries, including those needing special accommodations. But not all neighborhood schools are equally staffed or resourced to meet the needs of students with disabilities.   

In theory, Wisconsin families have a variety of options. But those options often exclude students with disabilities. 

Student art hangs on the wall of Penfield Montessori Academy, a Milwaukee-based charter school that serves children with and without disabilities. School officials announced plans to close at the end of the 2022-2023 school year, but parents are hoping to save the school. Photo taken on April 19, 2023. (Jonmaesha Beltran/ Wisconsin Watch)

Such students could apply to attend a private school with the help of a taxpayer-subsidized voucher, a program that enrolls 52,000 students across Wisconsin. But such private schools also are allowed to expel a student with disabilities if officials determine they cannot meet that child’s needs.

Charter schools elsewhere have been accused of denying entrance to students with disabilities — either because they cost too much to accommodate or because their test scores could lower the school’s average. The practice is commonly known as “cherry picking” students. 

Less talked about, however, is how the state’s biggest choice program, open enrollment, excludes students with disabilities. Roughly 70,000 Wisconsin students attend public schools outside their home districts through the 25-year-old open enrollment program. It allows students to apply to better-resourced public schools outside of district boundaries. But those schools can limit or deny slots for out-of-district students with disabilities.

Wisconsin districts in 2021-22 received 41,554 open enrollment applications, about 14% of which represented students with disabilities, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction data show. Schools rejected about 40% of applications in that category, with lack of special education space as the most common reason for the denials. By comparison, school districts rejected only 14% of applications from students without disabilities. 

Last year, for example, one suburban Madison district announced 115 slots for incoming open enrollment students — but none for children with disabilities.

The denials tie students to their home district school, underscoring how a child’s ZIP code shapes opportunities. The effect is compounded for students with disabilities.

Problem’s root: Special education funding gap

Joanne Juhnke, an advocacy specialist for Disability Rights Wisconsin, said the fundamental problem is the gap between the cost of special education services and how much the state reimburses school districts. Despite years of lobbying from disability rights advocates, Wisconsin reimburses school districts only 30% of special education costs — one of the lowest rates in the nation. 

The New Jersey-based Educational Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for equal educational opportunity and education justice, produced this map to accompany its October 2022 report titled: “Wisconsin’s special education funding crunch: How state underfunding disproportionately harms students in high-poverty districts.” 

Over the past five decades, state funding support for special education has declined precipitously. That forces districts — which must abide by revenue caps set by the state — to take money from the regular education budget to pay for services for students with disabilities.

“Wisconsin is currently at something of a crisis point,” Juhnke said. “The funding problem is something we have not managed to move the needle on very far.”

Abigail Swetz, communications director for the state’s Department of Public Instruction, said Wisconsin’s “abysmal” funding for special education could indeed impact open enrollment decisions. 

“It is my fervent hope that open enrollment decisions would not hinge on the status of a student’s (plan for additional accommodations), and yet I would be shocked if budgetary concerns did not impact open enrollment decisions. Districts need to pay their bills,” said Swetz. 

Some experts say the state could make the system more inclusive by following Minnesota, which prohibits school districts from rejecting students with disabilities due to resource constraints. 

“This policy in Wisconsin may not be illegal, but it’s absolutely inequitable,” said Jennifer Coco, senior director of strategy and impact at the Center for Learner Equity, a national nonprofit headquartered in New York.. 

“If we pride ourselves on advancing equity for kids in the state of Wisconsin, this isn’t it — for a multitude of reasons. It’s discrimination with a lowercase d.”

Schools limit admissions for students with disabilities

Milwaukee Public Schools saw about 3,400 more students transfer out than in last year, more than any other district, as many families headed to nearby suburban schools. The movement flows in both directions, and open enrollment helps some districts make up for shrinking in-district enrollment by attracting outside students and their attendance dollars.

The open enrollment process begins each January, when school boards determine how many outside students they’ll accommodate the following year. Seats are specifically reserved for students who have disabilities and those who don’t. 

Families can apply to attend out-of-district schools between early February and April. Parents learn of the decision by early June.  

While the process allows districts to avoid overcrowding classrooms by capping the number of incoming students, it can also shut doors to students who have disabilities, with districts citing a lack of space to serve them.

Verona schools made no space for students with disabilities

In 2022, Verona Area School District, southwest of Madison, announced it would welcome 115 open enrollment students, the most in a decade. But the district reserved zero spots for students with disabilities, citing a gap between the cost of special education services and state reimbursements. 

“This is nothing but discrimination against students with special needs and students with disabilities,” longtime disability rights attorney Jeff Spitzer-Resnick told Isthmus at the time. 

Spitzer-Resnick’s chief concern, he later told Wisconsin Watch: that the district claimed to lack space for students with disabilities before analyzing applicants’ individual learning needs.

While some children have medically-sensitive disabilities that are expensive or complicated to accommodate, most students with disabilities are taught in regular classrooms alongside their peers, said Spitzer-Resnick. And many of their needed accommodations cost little to implement. 

“If a student needs extra time on a test because they have ADHD, that’s literally a zero cost item,” he said. 

School districts aren’t required to offer evidence of a lack of space for students with disabilities unless a parent appeals a denial. In most cases, parents never see the analysis behind a school district’s decision. 

State data do not capture the untold number of parents who abandon the application process, assuming their child will be rejected due to a disability. 

“We saw they weren’t offering seats for students with disabilities, so we didn’t even bother submitting an application,” Wisniewski said of one school district the family considered before finding Penfield. 

Habitually truant, disciplined students face rejection

Disabilities aren’t the only reason students are rejected from open enrollment. A smaller number of students were rejected because they were considered habitually truant or faced previous expulsions — categories that can disproportionately exclude students from low-income families, who are more likely to struggle with transportation; or students of color who are overrepresented in discipline data. 

Black students with disabilities in Wisconsin, for instance, are roughly 6.7 times more likely than white students to be removed from the classroom for disciplinary reasons, according to a state analysis.

Author Tim DeRoche details in his book A Fine Line how school attendance boundaries often correlate to families’ income and race, a pattern he calls educational redlining. He says Wisconsin’s open enrollment law has a “loophole” that allows a public school to categorically deny open enrollment to a child who has a disability, no matter how minimal the services that child requires.

“This means that kids with disabilities are really at the mercy of one district, and that district may or may not have the ability — or desire— to meet the child’s needs,” DeRoche said. 

“It’s not right for a child to be denied enrollment at a public school because of where his or her family lives,” he added. “Our system of district boundaries and attendance zones means that the best or most coveted public schools are often only available to families that can afford a home in the most expensive part of town.”  

Courts uphold open enrollment rejections 

Wisconsin’s open enrollment system has already survived scrutiny in federal courts. 

The Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty (WILL), a conservative law group, in 2014 launched a lawsuit against the state and five southeast Wisconsin school districts on behalf of several students with disabilities who faced open enrollment rejections, citing lack of space. One Racine family was rejected by school districts 12 times over five years based on their child’s disability, according to court documents. 

WILL took the case after hearing from numerous families that the state’s open enrollment system left children stranded in schools that didn’t work for them, Libby Sobic, an attorney for the families, told Wisconsin Watch.  

The state, WILL argued, essentially created a two-tiered system allowing school districts to reject students based on their disabilities. 

But siding with the state, U.S. District Judge William Conley ruled the system did not illegally discriminate, because districts may allocate space based on a “nuanced analysis” of available resources. While school districts must serve all students living within their boundaries, federal law does not require districts to expand or “fundamentally alter” its program to accommodate students who live outside their boundaries, Conley ruled in 2017.

Sobic rejects the judge’s rationale, pointing out that school boards allocate space before knowing how many students are applying or their particular needs. 

“How can you do a nuanced analysis after you’ve already determined in January that you have no seats when students have disabilities?” Sobic said. “I don’t think in practice that ‘nuanced determination’ happens. I’ve sat through school board meetings where they’ve set these numbers, and it’s very rarely a discussion.”

But the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed Conley’s ruling in 2019, writing that “differential treatment of special-needs students doesn’t make the program unlawful.” 

Minnesota transfer system seen as more inclusive

Still, the Legislature could change the open enrollment process, Sobic said, pointing to Minnesota as a model for a more inclusive open enrollment system. Unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota prohibits school districts from considering a student’s disability when weighing a transfer.

A 2021 WILL report calls for a year-round open enrollment application window and increased transparency in decision making. While it’s difficult to measure the specific impact on Wisconsin school districts due to data limitations, research shows that open enrollment tends to increase racial and economic integration, the report said. 

Juhnke, the disability rights advocate, said Wisconsin must revamp the way it funds special education more broadly. Gov. Tony Evers wants to increase state special education reimbursement from about 30% to 60% of a district’s costs. But Republican leaders in the Legislature have questioned the size of that increase and called to expand the state’s private school voucher program.

Voucher-subsidized private schools that accept students with disabilities can currently receive up to 90% of special education costs through a special reimbursement program. 

“Any solution or improvement to the open enrollment program has to reckon with the overall state funding challenges for education for students with disabilities,” Juhnke said. “For real equity, we ought to be reimbursing school districts statewide up to 90%.”

Swetz, the DPI spokesperson, said the agency hopes the proposed funding increase will land in the final budget, considering the proposal’s historic bipartisan support. In 2019, the bipartisan Blue Ribbon Commission on School Funding established under then-Gov. Scott Walker recommended increasing special education reimbursement to 60%. 

“This is an incredible opportunity for our Legislature to make a huge difference in the lives of every kid in Wisconsin,” said Swetz. 

Sen. Howard Marklein, R-Spring Green, co-chair of the Republican-led budget-writing Joint Finance Committee, declined to comment. 

Penfield Montessori Academy parents fight for their school  

Back at Penfield, parent Amy Scales said news of the school’s closing  unleashed chaos at her home, where her overwhelmed children cried and threw toys. Penfield students volunteered to sell prized possessions to keep the school afloat, Scales said. 

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Amy’s husband, Martice. “As a parent it makes you feel like you’ve failed them,” he said. 

Losing the school would drastically alter the daily routine of Nicole Kirk, whose daughter attends Penfield and lives close enough to walk. Penfield was also a sanctuary for Kirk’s niece, who 10 years ago suffered burns to 75% of her body in a house fire. 

“She had to relearn everything after the fire, but she’s doing fantastic now,” Kirk said, crediting the speech, occupational and physical therapists who worked with her at Penfield. 

Parents are still fighting to save their school.

As the April meeting unfolded at the school, leaders from Adeline Montessori, a similar charter school in Oconomowoc, announced they were exploring a plan to fold Penfield into their school, operating it as a satellite campus. 

Parents have since launched a plan to raise money for the effort. They hope to quickly gather $1 million to move forward this summer, Scales said. But the outcome is far from certain. They also need to find a building and retain enough students and staff for the plan to be viable. Penfield principal Michelle Ravin declined to comment on the progress.

Meantime, parents know they must confront the possibility of losing Penfield.

Milwaukee Public Schools officials are offering to help families search for a new school within the district. But some families don’t see that as a viable option. 

“My experience with neighborhood schools is that if you’re struggling, too bad, it’s your fault,” said Penfield parent Cassie Johnson. “Penfield is amazing, it’s a collaborative environment, instead of shaming kids.” 

Johnson, like her children, is autistic and has attention deficit disorder. A traditional “public school is not an option for us,” she said.

“If the new school doesn’t happen for us, we’ll likely homeschool, at least for the next year,” Johnson said. She worries less for her own family, and more for the students who need  higher levels of support, many of them Black and brown, who would have to find new schools. 

“People should be able to make choices that are best for their kids — not made to leave schools or to homeschool instead or be forced into situations that don’t work,” she said.“That only traumatizes kids.”

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school choices is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Rebuking far-right officials who last year gained control of their school board, concerned residents of Kiel, Wisconsin, this month clawed back political power by blocking the ouster of a popular superintendent.

Two members subsequently resigned from the Kiel Area School District board, returning the usually seven-member body to a moderate majority — at least temporarily. 

It’s the latest chapter in a saga that last spring erupted into bomb threats and left some feeling their northeastern Wisconsin community, population 4,000, had been “hijacked by something bigger.” 

With his contract set to expire, Superintendent Brad Ebert faced scrutiny from a small but vocal group called Tri-County Citizens for Education. In 2022, the group pushed restrictions on certain library books, sought to block anti-racism training and helped flip the school board to a majority that criticized efforts for racial equity and LGBTQ rights.

Concerns that the board would oust Ebert spurred residents to pack the Kiel Performing Arts center for a Jan. 4 meeting. So many attended that district officials moved the meeting from the high school library. Nearly all 26 residents who shared comments called for Ebert to stay, with many blaming the board for Kiel’s recent political turmoil. 

Ebert’s supporters pointed to balanced budgets, the high-fives he gives students walking into school, his attendance at basketball games and other school functions.

“He just never turns off. He’s 100 percent for kids, all of the time,” middle school band teacher Becky Marcus told Wisconsin Watch. “I couldn’t be apathetic and assume someone else would stand up for him.” 

After facing the public outcry, the board unanimously voted to renew Ebert’s contract. Board member Jamie Henschel, a Tri-County Citizens ally elected in April, concluded the meeting by resigning, citing unspecified bullying and harassment from board members. 

“We need to lose the hate. If you think we are setting a good example for our children in this community, we are not. We are showing them how to divide a community,” Henschel told his board colleagues. 

Board members also agreed to discuss removing board president Randy Olm, who was aligned with Tri-County Citizens, at the following school board meeting. Olm resigned days later, pointing to health concerns. He did not respond to questions from Wisconsin Watch. 

The remaining school board members must now appoint two new members.

“Let me be clear, I love working here,” Ebert said in a written statement after his contract was renewed. “I promise to continue to do whatever is needed and whatever is best for ALL students, families and staff to ensure the Kiel Schools are welcoming, supportive and safe for all.”

Ebert remains in his job as partisan culture wars spur an exodus of the superintendents at public school districts in Wisconsin and elsewhere. 

In Hartland, 20 miles west of Milwaukee, Arrowhead Union High School District Superintendent Laura Myrah announced in December her plans to retire in August, citing the increasing politicization of schools. Less than 30 miles from Kiel, Manitowoc Public School District Superintendent Mark Holzman left his position last year after backlash to COVID-19 protocols and misperceptions that the school was teaching critical race theory led to efforts to remove him. 

Title IX probe spurs bomb threats

Tri-County Citizens ratcheted up most of the pressure on Ebert. Seeking to block “woke ideology” and lessons on racial justice, the group helped elect like-minded school board challengers last April by canvassing, producing campaign videos and creating a political action committee to raise funds.

Matt Piper, a Tri-County Citizens leader who plans to run for a school board seat in April’s election, declined to be interviewed for this story.

“As exemplified by your writings regarding Kiel, you sir have shown yourself to be an intentional promoter of partisan lies and deception,” he told a Wisconsin Watch reporter. “I pray daily for the conversion of all hearts in your ilk.”

In a previous interview, Piper described Tri-County Citizens as “just concerned citizens reaching out to our neighbors.”

David Voss, a resident whose two children attended Kiel schools, believes the group saw Ebert as a barrier to its goals.

“What nobody said publicly is the real reason Tri-County Citizens don’t want Dr. Ebert as superintendent: He was in the way of their agenda,” he said. “Ebert is anything but a sock puppet. He is a leader.”   

The campaign resembled far-right efforts to reshape schools nationwide — fueled by a cocktail of political tribalism, COVID-19 anxiety, false claims of election fraud and racial tensions following the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

Tri-County Citizens criticized Ebert for launching a 2022 investigation into the alleged sexual harassment of a transgender student by three middle school boys. 

Under a federal law called Title IX, schools must investigate allegations of sexual harassment. After a teacher documented a complaint, the boys’ parents, along with the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, pushed what they later acknowledged was an incomplete narrative to the media: that the boys mistakenly used the wrong pronouns to address the transgender student. 

While the story ricocheted across news media nationwide, an anonymous emailer threatened to blow up Kiel and warned the threats would continue until the district dropped the investigation. The threats spanning nine days prompted Kiel officials to pivot to online classes for the remainder of the school year, cancel the Memorial Day parade and halt in-person government meetings.   

As fear enveloped Kiel, the school board abruptly closed the harassment investigation. Civil rights advocates said the move sent a chilling message to school districts that protecting transgender students could put them in danger. 

Racial bullying leads to lawsuit  

Tri-County Citizens members also pressured Ebert to account for the handling of a separate probe into the bullying of a Black high school student, Armond Wempner, who faced ongoing racial harassment before transferring to a neighboring school district in 2020.

As Wisconsin Watch detailed in October, the Wempner family filed a federal lawsuit against the district, alleging it violated Armond’s civil rights by failing to appropriately address racial hostility. 

Despite deep concerns about the way the school district handled the case — including Ebert’s early role —  Amy Wempner, Armond’s mother, supported the superintendent at the Jan. 4 meeting and largely faulted the school board.

“The federal complaint was not filed because of Brad Ebert. If you are looking to place blame for that complaint, look elsewhere,” she told the board. 

Wempner told Wisconsin Watch she believes the board hampered Ebert’s response to racial bullying by slow-walking compliance with a legal settlement that required educating staff and students about responding to racism and harassment.   

Wempner said she felt compelled to support Ebert after his critics sought to use her family’s lawsuit to justify his outster. In December, the Wempners and the school district settled the lawsuit, with each party agreeing to undisclosed terms. 

Targeted: Gender identity, critical race theory

In campaigning to reshape the school board, Tri-County Citizens seized on wedge issues surrounding gender identity and cast children as victims of a reverse-racist plot to reshape Kiel using critical race theory. Sometimes called CRT, the academic concept asserts white supremacy from America’s past lives on in its laws and institutions, shaping today’s racial disparities. 

Tri-County Citizens sought to prevent schools from implementing the anti-racism training required by the Wempner settlement, alleging the exercise would promote CRT.

The group falsely alleged schools were providing students with access to pornography. That claim later enveloped the public library, with one member calling public library staff  “perverted.”

Tri-County Citizens unsuccessfully sought to restrict access to two public library books. One, “Making a Baby,” deals with pregnancy; the other, “It’s Perfectly Normal,” contains illustrations of human anatomy, gender and sexuality. 

Such arguments found traction among Kiel voters last spring. But some residents say the outrage politics have worn thin.

“There are a lot of people in the area who are truly more conservative. They’ve lived in this community for a long time and like to see things stay the same,” said Eli Shaver, chair of the Calumet County Democratic Party.

“But I think the extremism of the rhetoric and the subsequent bomb threats really caused a lot of those people to reconsider the positions of the people they had initially voted for, to the point where I don’t think those people will ever be snowed again.”

Jude Allen, a parent of two children in the district, said hostile rhetoric and misinformation prompted her to publicly support Ebert. 

“I can say without hesitation I am one of many who would have remained quiet if these extremists hadn’t started spewing defamatory filth against our teachers and librarians,” Allen said. 

The possibility that these dynamics would oust Ebert represented a local tipping point, said Shane Konen, who with his wife helped organize a group called Best For Kids to encourage more tolerance in Kiel.  

“Until now, a lot of the political stuff in the community has been dealing in abstractions,” Konen said. “But this was about a real person that everybody knew and liked, with the exception of a select few, and that made the issue real for people.”

On Jan. 18, the remaining school board members elected Dan Meyer as their new president. He said he looks forward to refocusing on education issues. But he considers the last two years of rancor lost time.  

“What if all this time talking about CRT and false allegations of pornography in schools, about indoctrinating students, what if all that time was used for something positive — like having parents and grandparents reading to young students?” he said. 

“We’ve wasted staff members’ time, we’ve wasted board members’ time. Now the hard work begins.”  

The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Tired of turmoil, Kiel residents rebuke far-right school officials is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

The Wempner family felt like prisoners as they sat in their house in early June — surrounded by woods on their 6-acre lot outside of Kiel.

Their usually sleepy northeastern Wisconsin town had transformed into a culture war battlefront, stoking fears of violence. Parents of three middle school boys, along with a conservative law firm, pushed a one-sided story that went viral across conservative media: That the Kiel school district was investigating the boys for allegedly using the wrong pronouns to address a transgender student.

Backlash to the story drew national headlines. It culminated in a series of bomb threats over nine days that paralyzed the city’s government, ended the school year early and left many longtime residents feeling that their town had been hijacked by larger forces.

Unexamined until now is how documented acts of racism provided the kindling for Kiel’s political eruption. That story started in 2020 when Amy Wempner discovered racist Snapchat messages sent about her son Armond — one of five Black students at Kiel High School that year. 

The family’s push for the school district to respond triggered a domino effect: As part of a legal settlement, the school district ultimately brought on a consulting firm to conduct training about racism and harassment. But well-organized Kiel parents accused the firm of advancing critical race theory, which residents — echoing conservative pundits on TV — described as an infiltration of Marxist and anti-white ideology. That movement propelled the ousters of three school board members.

It also prompted Armond to transfer to another school district. In a federal lawsuit filed in October, the family accused the Kiel school district of violating Armond’s civil rights by failing to appropriately address racial hostility. 

In June, as police hunted for whomever was threatening to blow up Kiel, the Wempners feared violence could strike at any moment.

“I’m honestly trying to decide whether I should put bullets in my pistols and have them handy,” Dan Wempner said, as he leafed through a scrapbook of photos and newspaper clippings of Armond’s athletic accomplishments. 

“But I also don’t want them handy because the kids might find it.”

Armond’s experience mirrors that of students of color in some other Wisconsin schools. And it illustrates how a Republican strategy to mischaracterize discussions of race and biases as political indoctrination can prevent schools from protecting students from documented acts of racism.

Rhetoric around critical race theory — an advanced academic concept that Republicans have branded a catch-all for inclusivity efforts — is only escalating ahead of the high-stakes November election in Wisconsin and across the country. 

Football star finds family

As his family tells it, Armond Wempner carried high hopes when he moved to Kiel in the fall of 2017, the start of eighth grade. 

Armond looked to reinvent himself after spending most of his life in the foster care system. He shuffled between families until Amy and Dan — both of whom are white — adopted him. He gained three younger siblings and soon called Amy “mom.”

Despite being among few Black students in a 94% white city, he didn’t feel like an outsider. His athletic talent cast him as a rising football star in a community that swelled with pride for its Kiel High Raiders.

“I just wanted to put Kiel in the spotlight,” Armond said. “To show people that just because we’re a small town, that doesn’t mean we can’t produce athletes.”  

He grew into a 6-foot-tall, 180-pound linebacker who excelled on defense and ran a 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds, top-tier speed for a high school athlete. He would sack a quarterback five times in a game, the second most in state history. 

Armond’s personality made him equally magnetic off the field, his mom said. When Amy led Sunday school classes, Armond helped. When a young fan took a shine to him, Armond showed him around the football field after games. 

“He’s that kid who brings you in,” Amy said. “He was just a huge hit.” 

Facing racism in Kiel

But sometimes-overt, sometimes-casual acts of racism would mar Armond’s high school experience. 

Shortly after Armond moved to town, he and Dan said they listened in bewilderment as the teenager’s basketball teammates told racist jokes about Black people during a tournament trip. The coach did nothing to stop it, they recall.

Dan said he remained silent, not wanting to complicate Armond’s life by jumping to his defense. 

“I still carry shame for not stopping it back then,” Dan said. “But I just thought, when you’re with the lions, you have to act like a lion.” 

In 2019, a white football player said the N-word during class, according to the Wempners’ legal complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. 

A teacher heard the slur and reported it to administration, prompting the school to suspend the student from games. A group of students campaigned to “free” the football player from suspension, the lawsuit said. 

A teacher separately documented an incident in which several middle school boys cornered Armond’s younger brother, who has autism, and forced him to utter the N-word.

Armond initially shrugged off the racism he experienced.

“You just kind of go along with it and laugh it off, otherwise you’re the bad guy,” Armond, now 18, said in an interview at his home. “It’s not right, but people here aren’t used to being around African Americans, or even different ethnicities.”

But an incident in July 2020, the summer before Armond’s junior year, upended that status quo. Amy picked up Armond’s phone to discover that his football teammates had shared messages in a Snapchat group he was part of that advanced demeaning racist stereotypes and described Armond as a criminal because of his skin color. 

Amy asked her son how long this had been happening. 

“Since I moved here, mom,” he told her. 

This time, Amy wouldn’t let it slide. 

District acknowledges racial harassment 

As the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd set off nationwide protests against racial injustice, Amy sought to make Kiel schools more welcoming to students of color. 

She took the Snapchat messages to the football coach, its athletic director and Brad Ebert, the district’s superintendent. 

Ebert downplayed the messages and asked Armond what he did to prompt the vulgarities, Amy said. In a separate meeting, the athletic director Steve Walsh said he “wasn’t surprised” to hear of the bullying and said “a transfer (out of the district) would probably be best” for Armond, according to the lawsuit. 

Asked for comment, Ebert told Wisconsin Watch in an email that the school district could not respond to the Wempners’ statements or otherwise comment for this story, citing the lawsuit. 

By August 2020, Ebert acknowledged in a letter that unlawful racial harassment occurred. Amy expected little action, so Elisabeth Lambert, an ACLU attorney, helped her escalate the complaint to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. 

Months of negotiation yielded an out-of-court settlement in which the district agreed to hire an outside consultant to educate staff and students about responding to racism and harassment. 

Teachers would then incorporate the training into classroom lessons. The district also agreed to clearly outline to parents how it planned to respond to the harassment complaints. The state DPI was to ensure the district followed through. 

Similar complaints statewide

Kiel’s response to the Wempners’ initial complaint fits a pattern playing out across Wisconsin, said Lambert, who has represented families describing similar treatment in Chippewa Falls, Cedarburg, Greendale, Oshkosh and Burlington.

“Many districts have taken an approach to the investigation that’s more focused on dismissing or controverting the allegations as opposed to actually developing necessary facts and fully exploring the case,” Lambert said.

For instance, the Cedarburg School District challenged the Department of Public Instruction after it ordered the district to fully investigate allegations that a biracial student faced persistent racist slurs, jokes and comments. 

Even after acknowledging racial harassment, some school districts — including Kiel’s — have failed to act, leaving oversight to already-traumatized subjects of harassment, Lambert said. 

Partisan attacks citing critical race theory only complicate attempts to address documented racism in schools, she said.  

“People who are in that kind of anti-CRT camp will try to tar my clients or me as Marxist agitators who have got some sort of ulterior motive to corrupt kids and bring in curriculum or ways of teaching that that they think are inappropriate.” Lambert said.

“We’re trying to help kids, and this culture war pushback is happening.”

Feeling increasingly uncomfortable in Kiel High School, Armond transferred to a more diverse school in Fond du Lac.  

In August 2020, Armond asked the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association to waive the requirement that he miss a year of varsity sports due to the transfer. 

“I don’t want to continue to go to school in Kiel because I feel like I don’t belong,” Armond wrote in his request. 

“I just want to be a normal kid. I play football, I wrestle and I am a sprinter. I have worked so hard in Kiel to earn my positions on the varsity squads,” he added. “Please don’t make me sacrifice even more in order to go to a school that doesn’t single me out based on my race.”

The association granted the waiver. For the next two years, Armond would make the 90-minute round trip to Fond du Lac High School.

CRT opponents mobilize

Armond’s transfer came after some parents protested efforts to respond to racism in Kiel schools. 

Distrust in the school board initially simmered during protests of the school’s COVID-19 masking policies. But as parents mobilized, their grievances broadened to gender and racial issues, protesting steps required of the Wempner settlement and reacting with outrage to public discussions about diversity after multiple families of color complained about harassment. 

Opponents cast their children as victims of a reverse-racist plot to reshape Kiel using critical race theory. 

Often shortened to CRT, critical race theory is a decades-old academic concept asserting that white supremacy from America’s past lives on in its laws and institutions — shaping today’s racial disparities. Wisconsin is home to some of the nation’s starkest disparities between white and Black residents in education, public health, housing, criminal justice and income.

Opposition to CRT soon dominated Kiel’s school board meetings. Anti-CRT parents flooded social media with misleading information. They pressured the school district to stop working with the firm it brought on for anti-racism training under the settlement: Great Lakes Equity Center, which provides training upon request to public school districts and other governmental agencies. 

Brandon Gibbs, a parent of two district students, initiated the campaign against the consulting firm. In a 21-page letter to the school board, Gibbs accused the firm of advancing CRT, citing statements about anti-racism on its website. Neither he nor the firm responded to requests for comment.

Gibbs also expressed outrage that his daughter’s class watched a video about diversity that mentioned systemic racism and white privilege. That exercise signaled CRT’s arrival in Kiel, he wrote. 

Gibbs wrote that CRT counters Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of equality because “it assigns collective guilt and ascribes character traits to people based only on the color of their skin.” 

Stuart Long, a Kiel school board member, said Gibbs’ email was “the first indication that the local pushback to CRT was morphing into something much bigger.”

Weaponizing critical race theory  

The criticism echoed anti-CRT rhetoric heard across partisan media. It emerged as conservative activist Christoper Rufo publicly outlined a strategy to usher CRT backlash into mainstream politics — weaponizing the academic concept to encompass all “woke” racial and identity ideologies that progressives back and conservatives scorn. 

“We have successfully frozen their brand — “critical race theory” — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions,” Rufo, who declined to be interviewed for this story, tweeted in March 2021. “We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

Rufo’s strategy proved wildly successful as he expanded his platform through appearances with conservative stars like FOX News’ Tucker Carlson, who routinely advances the conspiracy theories of white nationalists. Conservative groups now hold anti-CRT talks nationwide, including an October event in Waunakee, Wisconsin called “Poisoned: The insidious ideologies in your schools.” 

The UCLA School of Law is tracking more than 500 anti-CRT efforts introduced at the local, state, and federal levels since 2021. In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled Legislature in early 2022 passed a bill to prohibit educators from referencing a host of concepts, including “critical race theory,” “multiculturalism,” “equity” and “social justice,” before Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the bill.

At least five Wisconsin school districts have adopted anti-CRT measures — from the tiny northern city of Mellen to the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha. 

In the race for Wisconsin governor, Republican Tim Michels has frequently called for schools to teach more “ABCs and less CRT,” adopting a popular party talking point. 

While schools may educate students about racial bias, K-12 teachers do not teach CRT, which is generally limited to graduate-level coursework in universities, said Jamel Donnor, a professor of education at William & Mary and an expert on CRT and school desegregation.  

But misleading claims about CRT in classrooms persist, he said, through a “calculating and concerted” political strategy to “speak it into existence.” 

Those raising alarms about CRT claim the framework fuels divisions by categorizing white people as oppressors and students of color as victims. Donnor rebuts that characterization. 

CRT emerged out of attempts to understand how law has been used to perpetuate inequality along the lines of race — as well as class, gender and sexual orientation, Donner said.

“One of the misperceptions of critical race theory is that it is anti-white, when nothing can be further from the truth,” he added. “It’s been created as this boogeyman — a phantom menace that doesn’t exist.” 

Speaking to The New Yorker in June, Rufo outlined a similar strategy to exploit tensions around gender, saying there’s “no ceiling” to the emotional reaction it triggers from some parents. 

“It’s like the tentacles of an octopus. It’s not just one thing, but it’s one strand of this larger animal, so to speak,” Donner said of the evolving Republican strategy. “It’s the same kind of rhetoric, the same fire and brimstone and the same actors pushing it. It’s all part of this unyielding beast.” 

Echoing playbooks for opposing CRT

Kiel’s anti-CRT campaign followed playbooks crafted by Rufo and other conservative parent groups. The literature instructs parents in how to “hold a school district accountable” by opposing CRT through organizing, litigation and running for school board. 

Gibbs helped organize a grassroots group called Tri-County Citizens who followed many of the steps outlined in such playbooks. The group’s mission: to keep critical race theory out of Kiel.

“(CRT) is a race-based political philosophy developed and promoted by Marxists. Its disciples claim the United States is fundamentally racist and that ALL white people are privileged and racist,” said on an early version of its website, which featured one of Rufo’s videos. 

In social media posts, Tri-County Citizens and a similar group, Common Sense Kiel, touted nationalistic, Judeo-Christian values while criticizing movements for racial equity and LGBTQ rights. 

Facing that pushback, the board halted work with Great Lakes Equity Center and delayed implementing the Wempner settlement agreement.  

Meanwhile, the parent groups launched campaigns for three candidates who ran on anti-CRT platforms — filming campaign videos, creating a political action committee and flooding social media and the local newspaper’s opinion page with polemics.

School board member embraces opposition

One longtime school board member was already sympathetic to the energized citizens’ views: Randy Olm, who opposed the anti-racism curriculum required by the settlement, arguing that it sounded Marxist. 

“I don’t like the ‘programming’ word or the ‘restorative practices.’ It sounds like re-education to me,” Olm said during a 2021 board meeting, invoking the concept of forced indoctrination. “As the CRT stuff is being discussed, I would argue that putting a group of kids in the corner and telling them you’re the oppressed group — that’s programming.”

Olm’s rhetoric echoed what Rufo instructed in his “Parent Guidebook” for fighting CRT. Use the phrase “race reeducation programs,” it suggests, because the term is “trenchant and persuasive and resonates with the public.”

In a letter to the community, Olm acknowledged an “increased amount of racial and ethnic intimidation in our schools” but warned about the dangers of CRT — lamenting that the school board did not approve the curriculum changes required of the settlement that Ebert signed.

“We have effectively lost local control to determine how and what we’ll be teaching our students,” he wrote before endorsing the three insurgent school board candidates. 

Olm, who did not respond to requests for comment, repeatedly downplayed the relevance of discussing racial identities with students, saying he has family members of color who have  “grown up pretty white.” 

“Don’t worry. I know how you feel. I have mixed race in my family, too,” Olm told Amy and Dan Wempner during a break at one board meeting — an exchange that another school board member confirmed. 

The three school board challengers narrowly won election in April 2022. 

They oversaw the transgender bullying investigation that drew ire from grassroots parents groups and prompted an anonymous emailer to give an ultimatum: Drop the investigation by June 3 or Kiel might blow up. The night before the deadline — with the Wempners and others in town huddled in their homes in fear, the board announced the investigation “closed” in an unsigned letter.

Anti-racism curriculum seen as too controversial

In August, after the threats ceased and life in Kiel resumed its typical rhythms, the school board prepared to vote on an anti-racism training plan, as required by the Wempner settlement. Rather than rely on the Great Lakes Equity Center, a district staff member compiled various resources for consideration. 

A public group edit of those resources preceded the regular board meeting. Residents, including Tri-County Citizens members, joined the board in changing language considered too controversial. Attendees scrutinized references to “microaggressions” and “power structures.” Some questioned the use of  “talking circles” for an in-class ice-breaking activity. That detour lasted nearly 90 minutes.

Olm sought to remove discussions of race and ethnicity from the anti-racism training. New board member Diana Schaefer criticized use of the words “perpetrator” and “victim” in training on recognizing microaggressions. 

“I take offense at saying that it’s the system’s fault for maybe poor choices or just life occurrences,” she said.

Mike Joas, another new board member, acknowledged a growing bullying and harassment problem in the district, but he doubted that racism was driving the trend.

“Yes, probably some students, because they’re colored or whatever, they are getting picked out,” he said, urging the district to emphasize treating each other better “instead of trying to divide people.”

In a 6-1 vote, the board approved what members called a compromise, eliminating portions that offended some residents. 

Amy Wempner said the process produced a “watered down” curriculum that failed to satisfy the settlement provisions. 

Discrimination complaint ‘closed’

Dan Meyer, a longtime Kiel school board member who has clashed with the newcomers, described the curriculum changes as “very cosmetic.” But it’s difficult to identify specific changes. Wisconsin Watch filed a public records request for the original draft, but Ebert said the district no longer has access to it.  

Regardless, in an Oct. 4 letter to Wempner, the state education department said the final curriculum met the settlement requirements, and “the DPI considers this matter closed.”

The school board’s vote came seven months after the initial deadline to approve the anti-racist curriculum.  

Meyer attributed the delays to public pressure. Claims that the Great Lakes Equity Center would bring CRT into Kiel schools proved untrue, he said, and he regrets halting work with the firm. 

“In hindsight, we never should have done that,” Meyer said. “The claims were based on a political agenda that had nothing to do with our school district.”

School board member Long said the anti-CRT campaign made the community ignore the victims of harassment. 

“The thing that saddens me most is that because this organized effort has been so successful, the whole reason for the new curriculum — bullying and harassment — has been completely lost on the community,” Long said. 

“Nobody seems to be upset anymore that the N-word has been used in schools. They’re more upset and worried about the solution than the actual problem.”

Armond finds ‘family’ in Fond du Lac

Although bomb threats have ceased in Kiel since June, fallout from the transgender bullying  probe continues. As a new school year began, Tri-County Citizens members demanded an investigation of how the district handled the crisis, warning that the results could jeopardize Ebert’s job.

Board officials want to move on from the chaotic spring. “As far as the School Board is concerned, this matter is closed,” an October letter to parents said. 

Amy feels that her campaign against racism in Kiel schools remains incomplete. In her view, the district failed to uphold its end of the settlement. 

“Our intent was to make the school a safer place for our children and other children of color and to make them feel like they belonged. And I do not feel like we’re any closer to that. In fact, I feel like we’re further away,” she said.

Armond said he’s glad to have transferred to Fond du Lac High School, where he felt more at home in class and on the football team.  

“It was way better being around other races. It just opens your eyes to more of the world,” Armond said. “It finally felt more like a family.” 

His high school graduation ceremony in June was a proud day for the Wempners. 

“After all Armond’s been through, to see him graduate was a special moment. He’s the most resilient human you’ll ever meet,” Amy said. 

Armond is now putting high school in the rearview mirror. He’s working a job in Kiel and visits his parents for Wednesday-night suppers. He doesn’t want people to see him as a victim. He just wants to ensure that his younger siblings, who are all children of color, don’t face what he did. 

As he looks back on Kiel’s two years of turmoil that started with something that happened to him, Armond said it never felt like the conversation was about him. 

“It didn’t even have anything to do with kids,” he said. “It was just about the adults.”

Lianne Milton contributed photography for Wisconsin Watch. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

In Kiel, Wisconsin, attack on ‘critical race theory’ ignores bullying of Black student is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

Six years ago, David Spector bought an 80-year old house perched on a 120-foot bluff that provided a panoramic view of Lake Michigan’s endless horizon. 

But that priceless view may cost Spector more than he could have imagined as ongoing shoreline erosion edges his house ever closer to the bluff’s precipice and crashing waves below. 

Spector, who works in real estate, knows it’s only a matter of time until the bluff gives way and his home will be gone. 

“It’s such a beautiful view. It makes up for some of the heartache,” he said.

The Great Lakes collectively hold 20% of the world’s surface fresh water, and Lake Michigan is the second-largest of those lakes by volume.

The Spector property, about 20 miles north of Milwaukee in Mequon, occupies a hotspot for bluff erosion. Wind and waves whittle away at the base of the bluff, knocking soil loose and shaving off portions of Spector’s backyard. Ten years ago, the house stood 50 feet away from the bluff’s edge. Today it’s less than 10 feet away. 

While the elements leave the area particularly prone to erosion, Spector and many of his neighbors say the real problems started after 2007, when Concordia University Wisconsin, a nearby private institution, built a 2,700-foot-long rock wall to protect its own beach and bluff. Experts say the $12 million project is one of the largest seawall structures on Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan shoreline. 

But while the wall protected the university, its neighbors almost immediately saw their own beaches begin to wash away. Much of the bluff, once a gentler slope, became a sheer vertical face as yards of their properties tumbled into the lake. Neighbors complained to the university, and two couples sued. Spector’s home was one of the properties at the center of that lawsuit, although the case involved the prior owners, not Spector. 

A jury later agreed that Concordia’s construction caused “significant harm” to properties, but the university was not negligent. The jury awarded no damages, leaving bitterness over the seawall to linger in the neighborhood. Concordia did not respond to a request for comment. 

Erosion concerns and battles over seawalls span the Great Lakes and the globe, notably in Hawaii, where the islands of Oahu, Maui and Kauai have lost an estimated 25% of their sandy beaches with seawall construction fueling the losses. In Australia, the construction of a nearly 25-foot-tall wall to protect properties along the beach sparked intense pushback from community members who argued it would do more harm than good by washing away sand in front of the concrete structure. 

Experts worry about the long-term effects of shoreline armoring while describing the practice as a short-term maneuver that benefits those who are fastest to build.  

Revetments, a kind of seawall, are typically sloped, stacked rocks meant to buffer the beach against the impact of waves. But they can also affect downstream properties — making adjacent beaches deeper while blocking the natural movement that would otherwise replenish them.   

The construction of one wall can kick off a domino effect with consequences for beaches down the shoreline. Damage from one revetment can cause neighbors to armor their shoreline, which can damage the next beach, said Guy Meadows, a professor at Michigan Technological University and director of its Marine Engineering Laboratory.

“That’s what we see happening here near Concordia,” Meadows said. “There’s a cumulative effect.”   

Chin Wu, a professor in University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has studied the issue for years. In 2014, Wu wrote an article published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research that found Concordia’s revetment worsened bluff erosion on the south side of the project, the same direction the current travels. 

But new evidence has shown the damage from the revetment is even more widespread than originally known. Not only has the massive wall led to erosion to its south, as first detected, but erosion is also occurring to its north, Wu told the Guardian and Wisconsin Watch.

The rush to armor property is natural, Meadows said. But residents are losing a battle against nature. As waves hit revetments, water reflects backwards, pulling sand farther from the shoreline. Over time, the force scours away at the base of the seawall causing it to fall forward or fail. 

Experts like Wu advocate for the use of nature-based solutions — using materials like sand, vegetation or logs to create natural barriers while promoting resiliency of the shoreline. 

But many property owners still opt for the quick-fix of seawall construction, a tactic Meadows and others describe as a band-aid solution with unintended consequences. 

“Once we start building structures on the shoreline, armoring the shoreline, (creating) harbor structures, we change the shoreline dynamic,” Meadows said. “There’s many, many places where there is no beach anymore. So going to the extreme, if these trends continue, there will be no beach or access for the general public.”

Dramatic shifts in water levels 

Looking out from its shoreline, with no land in sight, Lake Michigan’s waters resemble more of an ocean than a lake. 

Unlike the oceans, however, which are rising gradually with global temperatures, water levels on Lake Michigan’s water levels largely depend on weather and swing up and down in three- to 10-year cycles. 

But climate change appears to be altering patterns in the region, bringing warmer temperatures that speed evaporation and more frequent, intense storms that dump more water into the lake. As a result, lake levels over the past 10 years have swung from low to high at a startling pace.  

Between record lows in 2013 and a record high in 2020, lake Michigan rose by 6 feet, according to data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Water levels have since dropped, but still remain above their monthly, long-term average.

Contractors, ferry boat captains, climate scientists and home owners are living through the most dramatic shifts in their lifetimes.

The Great Lakes are new features geologically speaking, said Meadows, carved out several thousand years ago by retreating glaciers. Especially in the case of Lake Michigan, that retreat left a deep basin with steep sides, which is broadening through natural erosion by about a foot per year. But during years of high water, waves pack more energy, dramatically accelerating erosion, Meadows said. 

“When we go through episodes of extremely high water levels, like we just went through in 2020 for Lake Michigan, that erosion rate goes up catastrophically, from one foot per year to 10, 20 or 30 feet per year, depending on where you are on the shoreline,” Meadows told Wisconsin Watch last year. 

As Lake Michigan’s waters climbed between 2018 and 2020, the number of property owners in Wisconsin applying to build revetments along their properties more than doubled. Those requesting emergency certifications — a temporary permit that allows walls to stand until the state can inspect them — soared from fewer than 30 applications to 280, an 830% increase.

And those figures offer only a partial glimpse of Lake Michigan shoreline. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources issued most permits in Door County — a sensitive habitat in northeastern Wisconsin where permits are required. Property owners farther south are not required to seek permits for new barriers, so long as they meet DNR’s standards.

Some residents along Door County’s shoreline watched neighbors, one by one, hustle to build revetments during 2020’s high waters. Similar trends played out elsewhere on the lake, as panicked property owners in communities north of Chicago rushed to do the same.

In Wisconsin, many of those who installed new revetments under emergency certification may have to revisit the work. The DNR recently sent letters to 115 Door County property owners whose seawalls failed to meet agency standards upon inspection, according to James Pardee, DNR environmental analysis and review specialist.

DNR spokesperson Sarah Hoye said Concordia obtained a permit for its project in 2005. The DNR hasn’t identified any enforcement issues with the project, she said, but hasn’t done any follow up monitoring on the revetment since its construction. 

Stabilizing a bluff

For the next few years, Spector does not expect his house to topple over the bluff’s edge. The same can’t be said for all his neighbors. 

Spector’s property is several doors south of Concordia’s seawall. But properties north of the revetment are now seeing pronounced erosion. Wu said it’s hard to attribute all the damage done to properties north of Concordia to its seawall alone; recent years’ high water and heavy rains have also accelerated erosion.  

But in 2020, a three-bedroom house overlooking the lake in Grafton was left on the brink of collapse after heavy rains pummeled the area. At one point, the house’s worth was estimated at nearly $1 million. The house has since been demolished. Now, a bare patch of concrete sits where it once stood. 

At another nearby property, a children’s swing set teetered on the edge of the bluff, its front legs clinging to soil that hasn’t yet tumbled into the lake. 

Spector said he believes there’s a misperception that everyone in the area is extremely wealthy.  But there are many modest homes and retired residents along the lakeshore — people who can’t afford to make major repairs. 

He said he bought his house for around the cost of the land, knowing work needed to be done. 

The previous owners installed a $60,000 revetment to protect that bluff. To extend the house’s lifespan, Spector reinforced its basement and built a $25,000 retaining wall to keep the home in place. He and neighbors hired a contractor to cut a slope into his remaining yard, which can help stabilize the bluff. And they planted deep-rooted vegetation, which can help hold soil. 

“For me, it made sense to buy the house and put some work into it knowing I might only have it for 10 to 15 years,” he said. “But I think some people who are moving into these million-dollar homes without any kind of protection might be living in denial.”

Spector is optimistic the work he has done to protect his property will keep the house upright for years to come. 

“I’d like to say it’s a success story, but it may be only a temporary success story,” he said.  

tanka dhakal contributed reporting. A version of this story was first published by the Guardian, which commissioned it. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

15 years later, Wisconsin university’s massive Lake Michigan seawall frustrates downstream neighbors is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.

On the day of the third bomb threat, a bell echoed through Kiel, Wisconsin’s empty middle school. 

Students had gone home days ago after the first bomb threat, and they would finish the school year virtually. Graduation ceremonies were postponed. Sports games canceled. The Memorial Day parade? Nixed.  

Smoky clouds hung like the pall that had enveloped the town in recent weeks. Neighbors grew suspicious of neighbors. Residents peeked out of windows; few ventured into the streets of this northeastern Wisconsin town of 4,000.

Many who spoke to a reporter requested anonymity and out-of-view meeting spots.

“It feels like we’ve been hijacked by something bigger than Kiel,” one school parent said, sitting by the banks of the Sheboygan River. “A year ago, two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have expected any of this. It’s an unbelievable scenario.” 

Even before the bomb threats, the possibility of violence chilled conversations. Those who spoke publicly risked stepping into a vicious vortex of Facebook brawls. By May, Kiel’s political factions clashed over the direction of schools, public libraries and even the local farmer’s market. 

Kiel’s paralysis in late May and early June followed a descent into incivility that shares elements of school board fights across the country — fueled by a cocktail of political tribalism, COVID-19 anxiety, false claims of election fraud and racial tensions following the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. The town’s turmoil offers deeply divided Wisconsin an extreme example of what can happen when partisan misinformation aggravates the resentment and distrust already festering in a community.  

A news event shook Kiel in mid-May. That’s when the parents of three Kiel Middle School boys told news outlets that their children were under investigation for violating Title IX — a federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools —  for allegedly bullying a transgender student.  

The parents were outraged at the school for what the families described as the mistaken use of the wrong pronouns — using “she” to address the transgender student, who went by “they/them” pronouns. Luke Berg, an attorney from the powerful conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), represented the accused boys. The investigation violated the boys’ right to free speech, he argued. 

The public has yet to hear the transgender student’s side of the story, and federal privacy laws shield those details. Berg acknowledged to Wisconsin Watch that WILL withheld some details from the narrative it pushed to the media, including hyper-partisan juggernauts Newsmax and Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. 

A Kiel music teacher’s report flagged four or five incidents between the boys and the transgender student, Berg said. Rose Rabidoux, the mother of one of the accused boys, added that the teacher documented incidents across multiple days, not an isolated conversation in class. She acknowledged that one of the boys once “lashed out” and threw food at the transgender student — none of which was revealed in initial media interviews.  

But the one-sided story had already gone viral after a conservative Twitter account posted the name of the school principal involved in investigating the complaint to its 1.3 million followers. As the story ricocheted across the mediascape, “hateful” messages poured in to school staff, according to Kiel police. 

In the days that followed the first bomb threat on May 23, residents phoned police on most anything that appeared suspicious, including a Wisconsin Watch reporter photographing the library. “People are really amped up,” an officer said while confirming the reporter’s identification. “We’re getting calls about everything.”

In the backdrop, mass shootings — first in Buffalo, New York, then Uvalde, Texas — only heightened fears. 

Over nine days, six emailed bomb threats would land in school, police and news media inboxes, and the list of targets grew. First, the middle school, then multiple Kiel schools. Eventually all schools, the public library, city hall, wastewater treatment plant, stores and all roads into and out of the city.

Effectively holding Kiel’s core institutions hostage, an anonymous emailer warned the school district to drop the Title IX investigation by June 3 or face additional threats. 

On June 2, school board members emerged from a closed meeting to pronounce the Title IX investigation “closed” in an unsigned letter. 

WILL and some Kiel residents welcomed the result, while others suggested that school board members submitted to a terrorist’s demands. The person who sent the threats acknowledged the investigation’s closure in a follow up message, but promised threats to any Wisconsin school district attempting to investigate similar complaints in the future, according to WBAY, which received the email. 

Stuart Long, a school board member, said the board did not let the threats dictate the outcome, but he acknowledged that they expedited deliberations.

“Did we cave? Absolutely not, we did not cave. Were the threats keeping our feet to the fire to keep pushing us towards a resolution maybe sooner than later? I would have to say yes,” Long said. “It was expedited in the sense that everybody wanted this to end.”

Questions loom about how the outcome might affect future Wisconsin school investigations — and about what Kiel’s saga indicates about the trajectory of Wisconsin’s democracy. 

The district’s swift closure of the investigation will send a chilling message to schools and districts that protecting transgender students could put them in danger, said Elizabeth Tang, senior counsel for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center.

“The right wing extremists will see that this tactic has worked,” she said. “Any reasonable person would conclude that an anti-trans terrorist used threats to force the school to close its Title IX investigation.” 

‘The water was boiling’

Residents long saw Kiel as a place where families stroll along river banks after grabbing a bite at Dairy Queen. At the Kiel Picnic, the summer’s premier event, parents send their kids to the tilt-a-whirl, grab a beer, then make the celebration Wisconsin-official with fried cheese curds from the Future Farmers of America stand.

But sometime over the past two years, an insidious force began tearing at the community’s fabric, about two dozen residents told Wisconsin Watch. Exactly when that shift started depends on whom you ask, but Kiel Police Chief Dave Funkhouser said it started in the schools.

“The political atmosphere has definitely been amped up with the school board elections, and there was a critical race theory issue going around,” Funkhouser said. “The water was boiling, and when (the Title IX investigation) came to the light, it really kind of brought the pot to a full boil and overflowed at times.” 

The Title IX-related backlash poured gasoline on Kiel’s political bonfire, but an earlier bullying investigation provided the kindling.

In July 2020, two months after Floyd’s murder and amid nationwide protests against violence inflicted upon Black Americans, the mother of a Black Kiel High School student discovered racist messages in her son’s football teammate group chat. Wisconsin Watch will dive deeper into the episode in a follow up story.

She took the messages to school officials, and the superintendent eventually filed a complaint on her behalf with the school district. When the school district took little action, the ACLU helped her escalate the complaint to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. As part of a settlement, the school district hired a consultant to educate staff and students about racism and harassment.

Later, in 2021, a local resident accused the consultant of promoting critical race theory. Soon a faction of the mostly white community viewed the theory as one of the biggest threats to Kiel’s children. 

CRT is a decades-old academic concept asserting that white supremacy from America’s past lives on in its laws and institutions — shaping racial disparities across society today. But in the early days of the pandemic, writer Christopher Rufo sharpened the phrase into a kind of weaponized, catch-all for the “woke” racial ideologies that progressives back and conservatives scorn. “Critical race theory is the perfect villain,” he told the New Yorker in 2021. 

Republican lawmakers nationwide have since pushed often vague bans on CRT and broader efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in public schools, despite a lack of evidence that K-12 schools taught or endorsed the academic theory. 

Wisconsin has some of the country’s starkest disparities between white and Black residents in education, public health, housing, criminal justice and income. But in late 2021 and early 2022, Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed legislation to prohibit educators from referencing a host of concepts, including “critical race theory,” “multiculturalism,” “equity,” and “social justice.” Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the bill.

The anti-CRT messages spilled onto the pages of the Tri-County News, Kiel’s newspaper.

“My mother and her family fled Russia and came to America to escape Marxism. Now it’s here in the form of CRT!” wrote Dennis Steinhardt, the brother of Kiel Mayor Michael Steinhardt.

One local group, Tri-County Citizens, coalesced around an effort to keep CRT out of schools. Its website, which has since stopped functioning, prominently featured a video of Rufo asserting a connection between CRT and Marxism. Tri-County Citizens and another group, Common Sense Kiel, accused school board incumbents of advancing CRT and backed three challengers for their seats. The challengers did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s interview requests. 

The school district’s handling of race suddenly dominated the school board contest, alongside falling pandemic-era test scores and false claims of “pornography” in the local library. The weaponization of CRT had worked — making a faction in Kiel more concerned about a manufactured threat than the documented bullying of a Black student.  

The bullied student eventually transferred to a more diverse neighboring school district, where he graduated this spring. 

A spoon at a knife fight

Tony Johannes knew that his school board seat was in jeopardy in April when he read a letter in the newspaper titled “God remains in charge.” ​​

“Christianity and Critical Race Theory (CRT) cannot coexist; therefore, I cannot vote for any of the current board members who voted to support CRT,” it said.  

Johannes, who held his seat for only six months after his appointment to the board, describes himself as “just a math teacher from Sheboygan who likes to watch the Bucks.” The letter in the paper confused him; he and his family are church-going Christians — he previously served as his church’s president, he said, and he’d never endorsed CRT.  

“That was the moment I realized I was in trouble,” he said. “People either had their mind made up or they were no longer willing to listen.” 

Just days earlier, a group of 70 local teachers sought to correct CRT-related inaccuracies in their own letter to the editor. 

“First, Critical Race Theory is an academic legal theory taught in higher education. We discuss diversity,” the letter stated. “We discuss tolerance and respect to maintain a school that is a safe and welcoming place for all of our students.” 

But Johannes saw his challengers’ message as louder and more persuasive than his stance that the school board should focus on preparing kids for college or careers when they graduate. 

He also appeared to be financially outmatched. Glossy, expensive-looking banners touted his challengers, while the marker ink on Johannes’ hand-drawn signs bled in the rain. 

“It felt like I was bringing a spoon to a knife fight,” Johannes said. 

The school board challengers narrowly swept three incumbents, giving self-professed anti-CRT members a majority on the seven-member board. 

Pushing book bans 

School board incumbents faced a whack-a-mole battle against misinformation. Their challengers’ attack lines morphed faster than they could respond, roping in other Kiel institutions along the way. That included the public library. 

The library’s trouble started in November 2021, when a man called police to claim that he spotted pornography on the shelves. 

The call put two books under the microscope. One, “Making a Baby,” deals with pregnancy; the other, “It’s Perfectly Normal,” contains illustrations of human anatomy, gender and sexuality — “something that a parent and child could sit down together to read and open a conversation about the human body,” said Julia Davis, director of the Kiel Public Library.  

That book also has images of same-sex couples, which helps explain why the American Library Association has four times since 2003 listed it among the most challenged books of the year.

Upon visiting the library, Funkhouser, the police chief, saw the books’ cartoon-like drawings of embracing couples. 

“The content of the books was clearly intended, in my opinion, to be educational and informative, not erotic in nature,” Funkhouser wrote in a report. 

The complaint initially drew little attention, Davis said. But as the school board election approached, challengers began accusing the library of providing pornography to children. Candidates vowed to “keep pornographic materials out of schools.”

“It turned into a big talking point: ‘We need those candidates to save us from the pornography,’ even though no one seems to be able to show us that it exists,” Johannes said. 

Members of Tri-County Citizens and other local conservatives fueled the outrage. In a video, Ryan Harden, leader of Common Sense Kiel and the parent of a middle schooler, connected the issue to schools by pointing to a policy that allows people to return public library books to a school library.

On social media, Harden called public library staff “perverted” and urged others to file complaints, circulating a form letter. 

The library received 18 complaints by May, although seven or eight contained nothing beyond a signature, Davis said. Still, the complaints triggered a “reconsideration process” in which the library board would meet to consider their permanent removal.  

The book’s supporters packed the library basement for that meeting, by far outnumbering complainants. Lifetime users of Kiel’s library, victim’s rights advocates, grandparents and school board members condemned book-banning. 

“I’ve seen fascism, I’ve seen terror. And the problem is we start banning books, that leads to one thing and never ends very well,” said Jason Grube, a war veteran and father of three. “It always ends in terror. This is the United States of America. It is not the Middle East. It’s not the Taliban, and it’s certainly not 1939 Germany.” 

More than 20 people offered public comments; only two supported limiting access to books. One pro-censorship speaker conceded that the books were not pornography, but said the library should shield young kids from them.  

The library board overwhelmingly voted to keep the books on the shelves — a win for those resisting backlash politics in Kiel. But it was only one battle in a larger war. 

‘Go Gladiator with this one’ 

For Harden, everything changed on January 6, 2021 — the day rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, aiming to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory over Trump. Although four people died during the episode and about 150 law enforcement officers were injured, Biden’s confirmed victory most bothered Harden. 

“Everything flipped upside down for me, as it did with millions of others,” he said. “It made me lose faith in government and policy, in the judicial system, as well as the congressional system.”

“We’ve been lied to and lied to, to the point where a tyrant has taken over,” he added.

Harden began to mobilize folks who felt the same, becoming one of Kiel’s most prolific organizers. He pushed to end school mask mandates during the pandemic. Then he worked to flip the school board to advance his brand of conservatism. 

A host of factors caused Kiel to erupt during the Title IX investigation, Harden said. 

“It was the crossroads of COVID, isolation, bad grades, bad teaching policies, bad administration,” he said. “And the thing that blew the top off the volcano was the Title IX and cleverly marking a bullying charge as a sexual harassment charge.” 

Using the Facebook group he started, now branded “Common Sense Kiel,” Harden has excoriated the school district for falling test scores, warned of Marxist indoctrination of students and pushed back the use of self-selected pronouns, which he said creates more gender confusion. The rhetoric mobilized the group’s nearly 200 members. 

Along with Tri-County Citizens, Common Sense Kiel spurred like-minded residents to attend school board meetings, pass out fliers and knock on doors ahead of the election. The groups’ talking points, amplified on social media and in the newspaper, framed school board campaigns. 

“We were just concerned citizens reaching out to our neighbors,” said Piper, a self-described proud member of Tri-County Citizens. Rabidoux, the mother of one of the boys scrutinized in the Title IX proceeding, said she also contributed to the group’s efforts, and Mike Joas, elected to the school board in April, attended meetings. 

Harden said local conservatives previously lacked an asset like him — someone skilled at political messaging, confident enough to livestream for 20 minutes on the dangers of CRT and able to deliver those messages to ears and eyeballs. 

Harden said he filmed the campaign videos for all three challengers and built their websites. He rallied others to get involved over social media. 

“The choices we make now — I guess we’ll just go Gladiator with this one — will echo in eternity,” Harden said with conviction in one video address.

Pushback at the farmer’s market

But not all of Kiel appreciated his messages. Speaking to Wisconsin Watch, more than a dozen residents accused Harden of fueling local vitriol. None was willing to be identified publicly, citing fears of retaliation amid the violent threats in Kiel. 

But after word spread in May that Harden would help lead this year’s farmer’s market, 66 residents implored city leaders to closely monitor Harden’s leadership, citing “his outward display of anti-LGTBQ speech,” among other issues, according to a letter obtained by Wisconsin Watch.  

“Some of the communication coming from Mr. Harden around the farmer’s market seems to thinly veil his political views and motivations, which are extreme and discriminatory in nature,” the letter said. 

Harden said detractors singled him out for his anti-left views and because of his effective communication, and he denies accusations of homophobia, telling Wisconsin Watch he simply raises issues worthy of debate. 

“The fact that people associate questioning narratives with hate and bigotry is asinine to me,” he said. 

If anyone faces online harassment, Harden said, it’s him — as detractors mock his family, leave negative reviews for his business and accuse him of running his own militia. 

The perception is rooted in a group Harden formed, the United States Patriot Community, which says it “helps United States Citizens prepare for, and fix the decay of America.” The group meets in person and online, where members must first pay $40 and clear a background check. A clean criminal record is “essential to proving to the public you are worthy of public servitude,” according to the platform’s policies. 

New members pledge to obey commanding officers, are advised to wear a uniform and must swear an oath with their hand on a Bible. The group is not anti-government, it says, but it helps members “restore your communities to a constitutional republic,” and “hold court proceedings to bring tyrants and criminals to justice.”

Visitors to Harden’s business website can purchase a “Let’s Go Brandon” hoodie, a tactical folding knife or a foam throwing star for use in live action role play — Harden’s hobby. 

Some longtime residents remember the Posse Comitatus, a white supremecist paramilitary organization that operated in northeastern Wisconsin and beyond until criminal convictions broke up the group in the 1980s. Harden denies his group is a militia. Instead, he said, it promotes a lifestyle of growing crops, skinning rabbits, cleaning fish or “just getting back into small-town rural activities.” 

The group stays in touch with law enforcement and has offered to collaborate “not armed, just to be a valuable asset,” during any civil unrest, he said.

Funkhouser said his police department doesn’t generally accept such offers, nor is he aware of local militia activity. 

 “We’re appreciative of his offer, but to my knowledge, we’ve never taken them up on any of his offers,” Funkhouser said.  

WILL declares another victory 

The final bomb threat came with an ultimatum: Drop the Title IX investigation by June 3, or the city’s utility station, wastewater treatment plant, stores and all roads, would be targeted. 

The night before that deadline, the school board declared “the matter closed” in a letter that lacked details on how it reached the decision.  

School board trustee Long said the board followed the district’s policies for Title IX complaints, but declined to elaborate, citing confidentiality provisions. A blanket exemption in that policy appears to give the board broad power in “extraordinary circumstances.”

“It was a great win,” Berg, the WILL attorney, proclaimed three days after the board’s announcement. 

He was offering an update on the case at the FreedomProject Academy in Appleton, a private school that says it is “rooted firmly in the Judeo-Christian values as promoted in the Constitution by our Founding Fathers.” About 50 mostly gray-haired audience members gave him a hero’s welcome.

“Thank God we have your organization, because there’s been a lot of wins,” said one audience member. Said another: “We would be in a different country if every state in the union had a WILL law firm as busy and active as we have here.” 

Others mocked the concept of transgender identitities. “I could say to classmates of mine, you must address me as ‘handsome.’ Otherwise, you are harassing me. Right?” one man said.

Berg echoed the man’s perception. “This is a trend among young people. It’s to be unique, to be special,” he said.

Transgender policies targeted 

WILL has proved remarkably successful in fighting pandemic restrictions and racial justice efforts while advancing other conservative causes in court. That includes opposing COVID-19 mask mandates and stopping loan forgiveness for farmers of color across the United States. 

Several of its recent lawsuits target protections for transgender students, including challenging Madison Metropolitan School District’s allowance of students to choose their pronouns without informing parents. That case is pending as courts decide whether the plaintiffs that WILL is representing may remain anonymous. 

At the Appleton gathering, Berg affably walked the audience through the narrative of Kiel’s Title IX episode that his group offered media outlets: a simple disagreement about pronoun use spurred a sexual harrassment investigation. 

“It’s a one page document, and the whole description is ‘mispronouning,’ ” Berg said. “So the district’s theory appears to be that any misuse of pronouns is automatically sexual harassment under Title IX and is punishable speech.”

Even if the comments were inappropriate or rude, he said, they wouldn’t rise to the level of sexual harrassment under Title IX, which defines it as “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it denies a person equal educational access.”

Berg rejected the suggestion — from critics not in the Appleton audience — that WILL and the families of the accused boys fanned the outrage that culminated in bomb threats by going public with their defense.

“That’s just preposterous and frankly, offensive to suggest that families should be blamed for the actions of a third party when all they were doing was publicly defending themselves and calling out what was an egregious misapplication of the law,” he said.

Said Rabidoux about going public: “It was our only defense.” 

Berg said WILL helped law enforcement by publicly condemning the threats and emailing the person who sent them, after obtaining the person’s email from police. 

Funkhouser confirmed WILL’s cooperation during the police investigation. “They were helpful in trying to resolve things,” he told Wisconsin Watch. 

Details of complaint shielded

Berg’s narrative remains difficult to verify because records remain confidential and the transgender student at the heart of the story has not shared their perspective. A message Wisconsin Watch sent to their family went unreturned.

Berg confirmed that notes from the music teacher included a handful of incidents that had been left out of WILL’s narrative, all of which centered around misuse of the student’s pronouns. 

Berg said WILL aimed “to protect both sides” by withholding the notes from its narrative. Deliving into the transgender student’s complaints, he said, would have required hearing the boys’ version of the story, which would be unproductive. 

“The point of publicizing this was to point out that the district took what is a garden variety dispute among middle schoolers, and blew it out of proportion and turned it into a Title IX investigation,” Berg told Wisconsin Watch. 

Rabidoux said conflict between her son and the transgender student started in November 2021 and lasted through April, and the teacher’s notes reflected coversations spanning various days.  

The disputes became heated, leading to an instance in which one of the accused boys threw food at the transgender student, she said. But Rabidoux said the transgender student actually bullied her son and she repeatedly expressed concerns to school staff. 

“They never helped him,” Rabidoux said. “​​Because he’s white and straight? Is that why?” 

Did ‘mob mentality’ take hold in Kiel?

Long, the school board member, called the public narrative about the Title IX complaint partial and one-sided. And he described WILL’s involvement as callous and self-serving. 

“They’ve chosen not to reveal everything, and they’re not obligated to,” he said. “(WILL’s) motivations are very obvious: They want to be the preeminent culture warrior firm in the nation. They want the attention. They want to attract money, and they want prestige.”

Rabidoux wants assurance that the investigation will be removed from the boys’ student records and said her children will transfer to a private school next year. 

For his part, Harden expressed disappointment that the letter from the school board didn’t explicitly exonerate the boys. He has mixed feelings, however, about the violent threats used to pressure the board.

“Forcing an administration’s hand to drop a charge? I’m not sure how I feel about that. There’s a community response, and then there’s mob mentality, and I’m not sure which one fits where,” he said. “But this is a tactic that has to be very strategically used so it doesn’t get out of hand.”

Did the bomb threats mean that the backlash had gotten out of hand? 

“I don’t believe it got out of hand, but it got close,” Harden said. “Closer than this community has ever felt as it pertains to physical violence.” 

Police chief: ‘Be the light’

Funkhouser is catching his breath following the bomb scares.  

“I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. It was a three-week time period that was very stressful for our entire community, but especially for me and our police department,” he told Wisconsin Watch. 

Numerous local residents have called Funkhouser a steady, singular voice of leadership throughout the crisis while Mayor Mike Steinhardt and other city officials remained silent. 

“That’s right,” Steinhardt said when a reporter pointed out the lack of communication from his office. He said other officials hadn’t spoken either before abruptly ending the call. 

As tensions escalated during the bomb scares, Funkhouser called on Kiel residents to “be the light” and stay positive.

One resident made and sold “be the light” yard signs, donating the proceedings to the police and fire departments. Others left their porch lights on at night — a symbol for combatting the dark times. 

The FBI has offered assistance as law enforcement continues to search for whomever issued the bomb threats that paralyzed Kiel. In late May, the FBI arrested a 34 year-old-man in Oceanside, California for allegedly threatening to kill a Kiel schools staff member, but he was not believed to be the same person who emailed the bomb threats. 

The investigation may take weeks or years, but Funkhouser said he’s a patient man. 

“Technology can be used to catch people, but can also be used to hide or conceal identities and location,” Funkhouser said. “It could take time, but we’re not stopping.” 

‘This is Kiel against hate’

For the moment, daily life in Kiel has resumed its normal rhythm. Kids are back to their summer activities. Families have returned to their riverbank strolls.

While the bomb threats have ceased, some residents are looking to upcoming elections with urgency. Shane Konen said he’ll closely scrutinize down ballot races for positions like alderperson or city clerk — those that typically draw little attention but play a crucial role in democracy. 

During the school board election, he and his wife Kim became involved with a loosely organized group of parents and citizens named Best for Kids, which Kim describes as a nonpartisan effort to make Kiel more tolerant. She said she aims to challenge the misinformation threatening the community. 

“This is not us versus them. It’s not liberal versus conservative. This is Kiel against hate,” Kim Konen said. “This is about standing up for all the kids and educating them and making it inclusive.”

Some pointed to encouraging moments in recent months — like the day at the library when the community renounced book banning. 

Gabrielle Draxler, a Kiel native who works as a librarian in southeastern Wisconsin, drove two hours to attend the library meeting in May because she believed its subtext was clear: At a time when Republican-sponsored bills were targeting transgender students, the attempted book banning seemed to signal that LGBTQ community members were not welcome in Kiel. 

For Draxler, the vote to keep the books represented a larger victory for the city.

“We won that day at the library, and it felt so good,” she said.“We might have just won the battle, not the war, but even just knowing you have people on your side is a statement to young people ‘you are not alone.’ ”

Matt Mencarini contributed reporting. Lianne Milton contributed photography for Wisconsin Watch. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Bomb threats, canceled events, empty schools: How a bullying probe paralyzed a Wisconsin town’s democracy  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Jackpots, left and right. That’s what Brent White Eagle most vividly recalls of reopening the Ho-Chunk Gaming Casino in Madison, Wisconsin, after the pandemic forced a closure that lasted more than two months in 2020. 

Verifying each jackpot kept the former slots department supervisor on his toes as a skeleton crew of his colleagues adapted to pandemic life —  installing plexiglass dividers between slot machines and covering shifts for staff who felt unsafe returning to work, he said. 

Despite fewer gamblers on the floor, visitors made larger bets that triggered big prizes.

“There were quite a few nights where it was just off-the-wall jackpots. It was constant running for all of our employees,” White Eagle said. “The secondary maintenance that we had to attend to didn’t get done at all.”

Patrons didn’t complain as the payouts kept coming, but Ho-Chunk Nation officials hardly felt lucky as their government’s economic engine sputtered amid the public health crisis. 

Two years later, casino officials say revenue is eclipsing pre-pandemic levels. But the pain from the temporary shutdown still lingers for the tribe, manifested in layoffs and cuts to crucial services. That’s forcing tribal leaders to confront their economy’s outsized reliance on casinos. 

“We were hit pretty hard by the pandemic,” said Ho-Chunk President Marlon WhiteEagle, no relation to the casino official. “And that begs the question of what we can do to move beyond gaming.”  

Wisconsin’s 11 federally recognized tribes — along with tribal nations across North America — have long weighed how to diversify their economies, and the pandemic illustrated the risk of failing to do so. 

Some tribes have turned to industrial hemp or land-leasing ventures; others have launched economic development arms to invest in manufacturing plants, construction companies and other enterprises.  

The Ho-Chunk Nation has found little success with past efforts to diversify, facing turnover in government leadership, the failure of past business ventures and complacency with gambling earnings since that revenue began transforming tribal life in the 1980s, tribal officials said. 

But WhiteEagle and some economists see promise in future development on Ho-Chunk land held in a federal trust. Others point to opportunities in federal contracting and incentivizing entrepreneurship.   

“It takes courage to fail. And we’ve made a lot of courageous efforts,” WhiteEagle told Wisconsin Watch during a brief interview at his office in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. “But obviously we need to get back on the horse and keep trying.” 

Pandemic shocks gaming economy 

Casinos drive Wisconsin’s tribal economies, generating nearly $1.3 billion in net winnings a year before the pandemic’s disruption, according to the Wisconsin Department of Administration, which tracks gaming dollars. But by 2021 those winnings dropped by nearly a third to $893 million — an aggregate total that obscures the financial hit to individual tribes.  

The revenue chiefly funds vital infrastructure and government programs like education, social services and tribal courts. Tribes don’t generally tax income to fund services, nor do they collect property taxes, since most tribal citizens live on trust land. 

But the pandemic temporarily shocked that system in spring 2020.   

The portion of net winnings that Wisconsin receives under compacts with tribes plunged by more than 99% between the 2019 and 2021 fiscal years — from $29.1 million to $154,000, according to the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau.  

The largest three gaming tribes in Wisconsin — the Forest County Potawatomi, Oneida and Ho-Chunk — felt an immediate pinch as COVID-19 shuttered business. Potawatomi Hotel and Casino laid off 1,600 workers, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. And when the Oneida Nation reopened its Green Bay casino after a months-long shut down, it called back only about half of its workforce of around 900. 

WhiteEagle said gaming typically contributes 75% of the Ho-Chunk Nation’s revenue, and the pandemic forced layoffs of roughly 2,250 Ho-Chunk employees, including more than 80% of its gaming workforce. 

WhiteEagle announced the layoffs in a YouTube address to tribal citizens, fueling intense pushback and efforts to remove him from office. WhiteEagle did not specify how many positions would be restored in his next annual budget, but said management had previously been “top heavy,” with “more employees than we had work for them to do on a daily basis.”

Ryan Greendeer, a Ho-Chunk Legislature spokesperson and Army veteran, said he was pained to see the tribal veterans service officer laid off.

“Personally, I feel like that was a slight against veterans,” Greendeer said.

Among others who got pink slips: Nelson Smith, a wildlife biologist who tracked wild bees and worked on elk rehabilitation until the pandemic. He now spends his days tanning deer hides, running family errands and looking for work. Casino work isn’t ideal, he said. He prefers the outdoors. 

Nelson isn’t sure what the future holds. “Who knows, I might be living in my car this summer.”

White Eagle, the former casino worker, lost his job after taking medical leave and missing a deadline to file paperwork related to his leave, he said. 

He’s looking for work in sports betting – now underway at the Oneida Casino in Green Bay and on a mobile app at certain Oneida Nation locations as part of a broader industry shift. The Forest County Potawatomi and St. Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin also recently negotiated gaming compacts with the state to allow on-site sports betting, which remains illegal in Wisconsin outside of tribal operations. And tribal president WhiteEagle said sports betting is “on the horizon” for the Ho-Chunk Nation. 

That comes as the Ho-Chunk plan to break ground on a $405 million casino complex in Beloit, hoping it will boost gaming revenue. That project requires a final sign off from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, but initial designs include plans for a multi-use facility that could be used for an education or healthcare center should gambling move online and brick-and-mortar casinos become a “thing of the past,” Greendeer said.  

Humble beginnings for casinos

On a recent Wednesday night at Ho-Chunk Gaming Black River Falls, a crowd of patrons — most of them graying — sat beneath the blinking lights of slot machines, pulling levers in their pursuit of fortune. Rows of unoccupied machines left plenty of room for social distancing while a nearby blackjack dealer revealed each player’s fate one card at a time. 

The Ho-Chunk Nation owns six casinos. The three largest rise just off of Wisconsin’s major interstate highways. They are in Madison, Wisconsin Dells and in Black River Falls, where the cranberry marshes meet pines and granite crags.  

The easy access helped cement the tribe as an outsized player in Wisconsin’s gaming industry. That geography is no lucky accident. Long before the U.S. government forced the Ho-Chunk from their Wisconsin and Illinois lands — driving them west to Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota and later, Nebraska — tribal ancestors walked the paths connecting Ho-Chunk villages and cultural sites along what today is Interstate 94. 

Unlike other tribes, the Ho-Chunk have no reservation in Wisconsin, but parcels of land hold reservation status. Instead 5,550 Ho-Chunk citizens in Wisconsin are scattered across the state on ancestral lands that the tribe repurchased or on privately owned land. Larger groups settled in the counties of Monroe, Sauk and Jackson — home to Black River Falls, the tribe’s seat of government.

David Greendeer, a Ho-Chunk citizen and former member of the tribal legislature who now works with the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts, recalls the pre-casino years when the Ho-Chunk struggled to maintain basic necessities. Even through the 1980s, Greendeer said, some families lacked running water. His family had no oven until the mid-1990s. 

“My generation was the last to see people who lived in — according to today’s values — third-world conditions,” Greendeer said. “But people like my grandma didn’t see it as hard. It’s just what they knew.”

A transformation began in the 1980s after the tribe opened a tobacco shop out of a used trailer near Wisconsin Dells. Then came a bingo hall in the same place. 

“Money started coming so quickly they didn’t know what to do with it,” Greendeer said. “We were literally putting money into wheelbarrows and taking it to places where it could be stored safely because we didn’t know what else to do with it.” 

The next arrival: casinos, thanks to a series of court decisions and Wisconsin’s creation of a state lottery in 1987. By 1993, the Ho-Chunk opened their first casino — in the same spot as the original smoke shop. 

The casino operations started small. 

Samantha Skenandore is a Ho-Chunk citizen and an attorney who represents the Ho-Chunk Nation and works with more than 25 tribes and tribal companies. She remembers baking cookies with her grandmother to raise money to help the Oneida Nation make payroll — a common reality for tribes, including the Ho-Chunk, in the early days of casinos, she said. 

“We started in a tent just like most tribes did, and we built our gaming enterprises into what they are today,” she said. “It’s pretty phenomenal.” 

Aside from basic services, gaming revenue funds college scholarships and typically flows to tribal citizens through disbursements, more often referred to as “per cap.” Those quarterly payments reached about $12,000 a year per person before COVID-19. 

But the tribal government cut or reduced some education support programs during the pandemic. It also halted regular per cap payouts, although federal pandemic relief has helped. The Ho-Chunk government each month is sending each adult $700 in monthly federal aid, set to expire in June, according to the Ho-Chunk Nation Legislative Branch. That’s on top of the  $3,000 in federal funds WhiteEagle sent last year to each adult, along with $1,500 to minors, amid his conflict with the legislature. 

Outside of gaming, the tribe owns and operates five convenience stores, generating revenue that became crucial when casinos closed. It also has three hotels and the Ho-Chunk RV Resort and Campground, just outside of Wisconsin Dells. The tribe’s health department generated nearly $9 million in 2019. 

Still, gaming delivers three-quarters of tribal revenue, said WhiteEagle. He declined to provide a dollar figure, citing tribal confidentiality laws, but said the tribe brought in around $500 million from all revenue sources before the pandemic — including gaming and state and federal grants.  

‘A real serious problem’ 

Private industry typically drives non-Native economies, but administration and recreation dominate many tribal economies nationwide, making government and casinos the top employers, said Patrice Kunesh, the founder and former director of the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.  

Casino jobs often pay well and include health care and retirement benefits. But depending so heavily on one industry is a gamble that leaves the tribes vulnerable to economic shocks, said Kunesh, who is of Standing Rock Lakota descent. 

Governments of all types have faced similar challenges. Examples include West Virginia and other states that suffered widespread hardship after the coal industry declined, Kunesh said. States like Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming still largely depend on oil and gas taxes to fund services. In the 1800s, North American tribes faced a catastrophic shock when white settlers decimated the bison herds that tribes depended upon, Kunesh said. 

“Tribes are facing a real serious problem here with the concentration of their businesses,” Kunesh said. “We need a private economy that can continue and hum along and not throw your reservations into such chaos and turmoil.”

Projecting long-term gaming profits is difficult, Kunesh said. Questions loom about the long-term profitability of brick-and-mortar casinos. They face competition from certain online and mobile forms of gambling — including sports betting  — and other entertainment. A 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling lifted a federal ban on sports betting, allowing states to regulate the industry. While Wisconsin currently limits sports betting to tribal sites through negotiated compacts, a growing number of other states have more widely allowed forms of sports betting. Wisconsin continues to ban most online forms of gambling.  

Tribes may need to explore opportunities elsewhere, particularly as the brick-and-mortar clientele ages. 

“Right now our baby boomers are there. They’re the sustainable market,” said Jon Warner, a Ho-Chunk Gaming business development manager. 

He spoke to Wisconsin Watch on the Ciporoke podcast, which tackles issues facing the Ho-Chunk Nation. He was speaking as a citizen, not in his official capacity. 

“We’re fairly confident that we’ve got 20, 30 years of brick-and-mortar (casino profits) for us,” Warner said. “After that, it’s going to change.”

Diversification efforts fall short

Ho-Chunk citizens have long called for economic diversification, WhiteEagle told Wisconsin Watch, and he pointed to several past efforts that fizzled. 

In 2003, the tribe introduced a bottled water brand called Ni Sini —  “cold water” in Ho-Chunk — but it abandoned the project after struggling to break into new markets, WhiteEagle said. The same year, the tribe opened a $3 million Marcus Ho-Chunk Cinema in Tomah that closed during the pandemic and hasn’t reopened. Weeds now sprout from cracks in the empty theater’s parking lot. The tribe is exploring reopening, but that would require reinvestment in the property, WhiteEagle said. 

Similar episodes have played out in other tribes. 

After losing money on out-of-state casino projects, the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in northern Wisconsin ventured into payday lending, partnering with outside lenders who sought to avoid state and federal consumer protection regulations.

The operation charged interest rates as high as 400%, prompting critics to call it predatory and ensnaring the tribe in litigation targeting its role in the operation. 

The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin tried to break into the hemp market after Congress legalized it for research purposes. But in 2015, a swarm of federal drug agents destroyed 30,000 Menominee cannabis plants — despite shaky evidence that the plants contained illegal levels of THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana.

Still, industrial hemp holds promise for tribes — as does marijuana should it become legal in Wisconsin, said Skenandore, the Ho-Chunk attorney. Tribes have effectively regulated the market, she said.

“Tribal nations are just really good at regulating the sins of the world — gaming, tobacco, cannabis — all of these industries the government can’t handle the political pressure of regulating,” Skenandore said. 

Despite the setback for the Menominee, the nearby Oneida Nation is exploring hemp cultivation while navigating bureaucratic red tape. Meanwhile, the Menominee are building a new sawmill and adding maple syrup production.

The Menominee’s sawmill was its biggest money-maker before casinos, but has failed to generate profit in recent years — largely due to a shortage of skilled loggers. 

Nebraska tribe finds success

Looking to the west, Warner said he envies the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska — a separate tribe that shares ancestry with the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk. He sees economic success where his tribe has stumbled. 

The Winnebago Tribe began diversifying in the 1990s, when new Iowa casinos threatened profits of the tribe’s WinnaVegas Casino, located just on the Iowa side of the border because Nebraska had yet to authorize gaming at the time. 

The Winnebago Tribe created an economic development arm, Ho-Chunk Inc., which spurred an array of enterprises, including construction, real estate development, home manufacturing and tobacco growing. The corporation also secures IT and administrative contracts with the federal government — aided by a federal law that gives preference to tribes during bidding. 

In 1994, its first year of operation, Ho-Chunk Inc. raised $400,000 in revenue, which more than tripled the next year to $1.5 million. This year, it will clear $370 million in non-gaming revenue.

“And we’re doing it from one of the poorest places in Nebraska,” said Lance Morgan, president and CEO of Ho-Chunk Inc. 

Federal contracting played a large role in that success, Morgan added. 

Securing federal contracts can be difficult for tribes that lack capital needed to launch an enterprise, Morgan said. But even those with more modest budgets can succeed by wisely leveraging funds. 

‘Mom and pop’ mentality 

Tribal leaders and Ho-Chunk citizens attribute slow economic progress to frequent leadership turnover and a complacency tied to a lucrative gaming market. But among barriers to growth, those interviewed name one hurdle above all others: The struggle to separate government from business. 

In some ways, the two are naturally intertwined. That can lead to inefficiencies and inconsistent strategies as leadership rotates.

“Leaders are only in place for a short period of time, so they might come in, look at the enterprises started under the previous leaders, then decide to scrap them because they weren’t profitable enough,” said Nathaniel Longtail Jr., executive accounts manager for the Ho-Chunk Nation.

Gaming’s success also slows diversification efforts, WhiteEagle said: Other ventures pale in comparison to an industry that can generate 15%-20% profit margins.

“When we see anything less profitable, there’s a thought of, ‘Is it worth it?’ And then it stalls out,” WhiteEagle said. 

Dan Brown, executive manager of Ho-Chunk Gaming Madison, described a “mom-and-pop-checkbook sort of mentality” within the Ho-Chunk government. Government leaders don’t always seek ideas from more experienced business leaders, Brown said. Like Warner, Brown was speaking on the Ciporoke podcast and not in his official capacity. 

The tribe’s last strategic business plan expired in 2015, Warner said.

“I think we’ve become very spoiled,” he said. “We’re completely complacent with what we’ve been given. We are able to survive with what we have, and it has become the status quo.”

Warner added: “We’ve got to get gaming out of our blood.”

Warner and Brown said the Ho-Chunk should encourage citizens’ entrepreneurial spirit. 

 “Once you become an owner of a business, you understand what the tribe’s businesses need, therefore the tribe can expand itself and create a bit and make a better life for all of us,” Warner said.

Spirit-driven barbecue 

Darren Price has that entrepreneurial spirit. Over 22 years, Price and his Ho-Chunk family transformed a small catering business into a brick-and-mortar barbecue joint — BP Smokehouse in Tomah — by sticking to a business plan that mirrored Price’s cooking style: one step at a time.

Price was working as a State Highway Patrol trooper around 2000 when he spotted a newspaper advertisement. The Ho-Chunk Legislature was offering a $10,000 small business grant and looking for applicants. Price immediately charted a business plan that was among a handful picked as winners.

Price hit the competitive BBQ circuit, snagging prize after prize, at one point appearing on the Food Network. The business grew as patrons kept returning. 

Price, who doubles as a Pentecostal pastor, slips into parables and scripture while addressing the patience, faith and passion he has poured into his business. 

“It can be lonely at times,” he said, recalling the solitude of waking before dawn to start the grill and prepare the meat. “But you’ve got to have that dream and that vision, you have to nurture that. Because it’s yours.”

BP Smokehouse takes its name from the combined initials of Price and Blackdeer, the maiden name of his wife, Myra Jo. The couple just opened a second location, a kiosk in the Ho-Chunk Casino in Nekoosa. 

“My desire has always been to be in every one of the (Ho-Chunk) casinos as a marquee food vendor,” he said. “So that people can see that if you follow the basics and your passion, you too can establish your business and be an integral part of a larger community.”

On an early February afternoon, wood smoke wafted through a small dining area as the restaurant filled with local workers, young men Price once coached in high school and uniformed soldiers from nearby Fort McCoy.

Price employs 15 workers between his two locations, most of whom are Ho-Chunk. 

The Ho-Chunk government has since abandoned the small-business program that gave BP Smokehouse its start, but WhiteEagle said the tribe aims to restart a similar small business loan program. 

Tribes look to the future

Tribes would be wise to use the “tremendous” amount of federal pandemic relief for long-term investments in education, workforce development — or seed money for entrepreneurs like Price, Kunesh said. But some tribes — including the Ho Chunk — have instead sent those funds directly to citizens through per cap payments, which she said is often “more of a political calculation.”

Meanwhile, Kunesh said, tribes are underutilizing their greatest asset: land. A federal Bureau of Indian Affairs trust holds more than 60 million acres of land across Indian Country. 

The bureau has historically governed the land’s uses, requiring sign offs for activities like oil and gas drilling, agriculture, housing or commercial businesses. But a 2012 federal law allowed tribes to make those decisions in-house — once they developed federally approved leasing regulations. 

With 6,633 acres of trust land, Wisconsin’s Ho-Chunk Nation became an early case study for efficiently governing trust land — by creating an office to manage its own leasing agreements.

WhiteEagle said such creativity could pay off if the tribe opens those lands for commercial use.   

“We could attract large corporations that contribute to our tribal economy through taxes or fees,” he said, pointing to a store and repair shop Tesla recently opened on tribal land in New Mexico.

For the past several years, the Oneida Nation has generated revenue by leasing tribally owned land that overlaps with the city of Green Bay. Today, the area is home to Walmart, Festival Foods, Home Depot and other large box stores. 

Despite the past diversification stumbles, Warner and Brown remain hopeful that the Ho-Chunk Nation tribe will “get out of (its) own way” and come together for its future. 

“It’s just really about trying to have all of us build each other up,” Warner said. “We are a really powerful, strong tribe, and we’ve forgotten it.” 

Frank Vaisvilas, Native American Affairs reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette, contributed to this story. This story is part of a collaboration from INN’s Rural News Network in partnership with INN members Indian Country Today, Buffalo’s Fire, InvestigateWest, KOSU, New Mexico In Depth, Underscore and Wisconsin Watch, as well as partners Mvskoke Media, Osage News and Rawhide Press. The project was made possible with support from the Walton Family Foundation. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

‘We’ve got to get gaming out of our blood’: Pandemic shock pushes Wisconsin tribes to diversify economy is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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When Indian Country Today invited us last year to join a multi-newsroom effort to cover tribal economies across the nation, we jumped at the chance.  

Since 2009, our reporters have covered issues in all corners of Wisconsin — from the frac sand mines of Trempealeau County to the iron range of northern Wisconsin and the sandy shores of Door County. But we acknowledged needing to strengthen our reporting for citizens of the 11 federally recognized tribes living throughout the state — including sovereign nations that suffered financial shock as their casinos shuttered early in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As the pandemic illustrated the precariousness of tribal economies that rely heavily on casino revenue, we focused on the Ho-Chunk Nation, which plans to break ground on a $405 million casino complex in Beloit.

But having invested little time reporting in Indian Country, we began with few connections and sources to open doors, build trust and guide our reporting. 

And history didn’t help us build trust. While it was the U.S. government that drove tribes like the Ho-Chunk from their ancestral homelands and forced Indigenous children into often abusive boarding schools, white-run newspapers were complicit through the stories they told, the stories they omitted and the stereotypes they furthered through crude or racist headlines.  

So we looked for someone to help us make connections even before we started reporting. We turned to Anne Thundercloud, a Ho-Chunk citizen and public relations consultant who spent more than 10 years working in public relations for the Ho-Chunk Nation’s government. Thundercloud had written a thoughtful piece in Madison Magazine on the need to bridge the disconnect between tribes and the rest of the public.

We hired Thundercloud as a consultant. She sprung into action behind the scenes — helping us arrange interviews, gain photography access and understand cultural norms. In a few instances, she nudged reluctant sources to speak with us. In some ways, she played the role of a fixer — a  local professional who traditionally helps international journalists navigate unfamiliar territory. 

Without Thundercloud, our reporting may have lacked crucial voices in Ho-Chunk Nation, including its president, Marlon WhiteEagle, everyday people impacted by the economic downturn, and Ho-Chunk gaming officials, who spoke to us outside of their official capacity on the Ciporoke podcast, which tackles issues facing the Ho-Chunk Nation. 

Without those voices, we might have been left with a story about a community, rather than for it and shaped by citizens’ input. 

Of course Thundercloud — like anyone — has an individual perspective based on her own experiences, history and biases. While we invited her insights, we applied the same fact-checking process to the information she provided as we would for any other source. 

Ilana Bar-av, a Madison resident of Ho-Chunk descent, helped us tell the story visually and improved our reporting more broadly. When we visited Black River Falls, the seat of Ho-Chunk government, sources stopped Bar-av to talk — some knew her when she was small and others asked that she relay their hellos to her mom. Bar-av’s relationships and cultural connections materialized in her photographs in subtle but important ways that a non-Native photographer would be hard-pressed to replicate. 

Finally, as Wisconsin Watch often does, we embraced collaboration rather than treating other news outlets as competition. Aside from frequently checking in with Indian Country Today and the eight other newsrooms working on the project, we leveraged our relationship with the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. Frank Vaisvilas, who covers Native American affairs for the Green Bay Press-Gazette, contributed reporting on the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin and Oneida Nation to round out the story.  

Sharing resources and knowledge across similarly-missioned newsrooms only strengthens our service to communities.  

I recently chatted with Thundercloud about why she agreed to work with us, what she hopes her work will accomplish and what she learned during the project. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

When Wisconsin Watch first approached you about working with us on a story, what was your initial reaction? 

When I first saw the email from the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, I’m like: “Uh oh, now what? What do they want to know about us? What do they want to delve into?” 

But then it also legitimized it to me when they mentioned you were working with Indian Country Today on a larger project. So I thought, “Okay, well, if it’s coming from Indian Country Today, they didn’t just pull my name out of a hat. Let me hear what they have to say.” 

So you were put off at first when you heard ‘Center for Investigative Journalism,’ because you thought we were going to be investigating something nefarious? 

Yeah, pretty much. Like: “What did we do wrong? And why are you approaching me? What am I, some turncoat?” Just so you know, that was my first instinct based on having dealt with other mainstream media outlets. I’ve had to write letters to the editor for painting us in certain ways when they didn’t even ask us any questions for the story.  

When I first started doing public relations for my tribe, it was almost a joke how much turnover we had in the tribal office. But I started to develop relationships with reporters, be a reliable source, and really try to bridge the gap. There were times where I had to go to bat for us, because we were misquoted, and I would have to call up an editor and demand a correction. 

Then I started to get a little bit more respect. And so did the nation. And then we started to become a more visibly prominent nation within Wisconsin.

What made you say yes to the assignment working with us? 

Because my people are not in a great position right now between membership and two branches of government that are not communicating well with us, or with each other. It’s a mess.  

I thought if I can work with you guys to reach our people, then more people may feel as though they’re being heard and it can bring about a broader conversation. If I can’t be a leader within our government organization — which I don’t want to be — I can use my skill set and my connections to bring about change and make my people feel empowered. My real thing is, Mario, I want to help my people. But I also want to help you or other journalists have a better understanding and better relationships with us.

What are some things that stand out from working with non-tribal journalists? Are there things they got wrong or misunderstood?

I think that they didn’t do their homework. They weren’t culturally sensitive. There were times when they would call and it was evident that they had already written the story and they wanted a quote from me — from the nation as their spokesperson, to make it appear as though it were a balanced story. 

I kept a good, watchful eye on the news stories that were appearing about my nation, and also the other 10 tribes in Wisconsin, because I wanted to see what was being covered, the tone of coverage. And I could also see that some of the nations were not taking full advantage of the stories — by not commenting when they had the chance to. 

Were there any moments as we worked together on the story where your cultural values clashed with your professional values? Did the work present any ethical challenges?

Well, I always have to be true to myself. For instance, as we worked on this story I came across a confidential tribal document. I thought it was a really critical, necessary piece for your story. However, it said “confidential” on it. And if somebody says something in confidence, then I want to keep that confidence. 

Having worked with my tribe, I know that sometimes people don’t uphold confidentiality agreements, and word spreads throughout the building or the nation. But I have a strong duty and personal set of standards that I adhere to. Because if I don’t hold true to them, then I cease to be myself.

Did you ever worry your loyalty to the tribe would be called into question for working with us on the story? 

Yes. Because I never knew the exact content of what you’d found, I never knew how the story was going to turn out or what people would think when they read it. And I wondered if people were going to see me as a sellout who sold information on our people. 

That’s the other thing that played a big role in not giving you that confidential information. I also see this as a business transaction between me and Wisconsin Watch. I’m being paid to perform a certain service for you guys. Had I given that information to you, I’d have felt like I was selling information about my people. And that’s not something I want to do, or be known for. 

Do you feel like you developed a certain amount of trust with me, as a reporter and representative of Wisconsin Watch? Why or why not? 

That’s a good question. (Wisconsin Watch) told me I’d be working with a reporter named Mario — and you are Latino. So right away I was like, ‘Cool. You’ve got a person of color. That’s going to help this situation.’ I’m just being straight up about that. 

But then you as an individual, I felt comfortable with you right away, and we were able to establish a sense of trust immediately.

Do you think you learned anything new from this project about your own tribe or its government? 

That we’re even more closed off than I ever imagined. It was frustrating and disappointing to see all the people who didn’t get back to you, who didn’t follow through with meetings. I had to go behind closed doors and prod them to talk.  

Why do you think some tribes seem to be reluctant to speak with outside reporters? 

A lack of trust. People are afraid of having their words misconstrued or taken out of context. And they’re fearful that they won’t like how the story will turn out, what its tone will be, whether the story will be positive or negative. 

You earn trust by listening, observing and asking appropriate questions about cultural norms.

For example, in my culture, I’m not supposed to present myself as an expert. It shows a lack of humility. You’re supposed to profess you don’t actually know anything — you’re just learning. And so I think that’s another reason you don’t get a lot of people speaking up. There’s a big cultural difference between public relations in the modern sense and then also with the way that we’ve communicated traditionally.

But also, we basically haven’t had the skill set to work with the media. And this is why I do what I do — because there’s so many missed opportunities for our authentic voices to be heard and not just told by the man. And I want to make it better.  

Behind the story: How we reported on challenges and opportunities for Wisconsin’s tribal economies  is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Two slices of pizza for breakfast. Two slices of pizza for lunch. Two slices of pizza for dinner.

For more than a year, that’s how Aditya Sharma, a nursing student at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, planned his meals.

Sharma, a 27-year-old native of Chandigarh, India, came to Minnesota in 2019 to study nursing. The nearest grocery store to the apartment he shared with his sister was too expensive. He sometimes rode his bike to Aldi, where groceries were more affordable, but it took him an hour and a half to get there. In winter, biking to the store wasn’t an option. He looked for 75-cent specials at Burger King and carefully rationed his pizza.

He calculated that at two slices per meal, a $10 pizza could last four meals. But he couldn’t afford many fresh fruits or vegetables.

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Wisconsin Watch is a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news outlet. We increase the quality and quantity of investigative reporting in Wisconsin, while training current and future investigative journalists. Our work fosters an informed citizenry and strengthens democracy.

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Sharma wore light blue scrubs as he told his story on a recent Thursday afternoon, between classes at North Hennepin. As his diet deteriorated, he recalled, so did his health. He gained weight, his resting heart rate increased and his concentration dropped. His grades suffered.

Then a classmate told him about the campus food cupboard, available to all students. On his first visit, Sharma took rice, cereal and some ready-to-eat meals. This semester, he stops in for groceries once a week.

Forty-two percent of Minnesota community college students say they cannot afford to eat balanced meals, according to a 2019 survey by the Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University. And 49% said they struggled with housing insecurity in the past year. 

Related content: MATC broadens access for Milwaukee students amid historical inequities, dropping enrollment

College counselors and administrators worry that insecurity around basic needs is fueling a decline in community college enrollment, a decade-long trend in Minnesota and across the country that has accelerated during the pandemic. In just the past two years, community college enrollment nationwide has plummeted by 15%, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Community colleges in four Midwestern metro areas — Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit and Chicago — have rolled out a variety of strategies in recent years to boost enrollment by increasing access and affordability while providing unprecedented levels of support for students struggling with barriers including poverty, food insecurity, transportation — and now, a pandemic.

“We do see students having to make a choice between going to work, so they can make enough money for rent that month, or coming to class,” said Lindsay Fort, the dean of student development at North Hennepin Community College.

Milwaukee aims for affordability, access

In Milwaukee, higher education is increasingly vital, particularly for its residents of color. A 2020 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee report ranks it at or near the bottom of major cities when it comes to many key measures of Black community well-being, including rates of homeownership, poverty and employment. The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is only expected to deepen inequities. 

Milwaukee Area Technical College has in recent years launched a dizzying array of programs and initiatives to open the door to adult learners, including free tuition to qualifying students, debt forgiveness and dual-credit programs for high school students which it says have cut costs and accelerated a college education for more than 4,000 students. More than three-quarters of participants in the free tuition and debt forgiveness programs are students of color, MATC said.

There’s no shortage of success stories for MATC graduates. After dropping out of high school, Marisol Mendoza earned an associate’s paralegal degree from MATC. Based on her grades there, she was awarded scholarships to Marquette University, where she studied criminology and legal studies. Today, Mendoza’s work as a paralegal focuses on civil rights and labor law. 

Tanya Fenninger said MATC helped her become a certified nursing assistant, a credential that got her a job right out of school. “I think MATC does a great job at getting you prepared for a professional career,” she said.

Despite successes, former students and those who have worked with them say barriers persist for adult learners transitioning to college. Fewer MATC students complete their programs in a timely way than at peer institutions across the United States, according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. About 16% of MATC students finish their programs within 150% of normal completion time, compared to a median of 31% among peer institutions. 

Nevertheless, MATC remains a lifeline for students, boosting economic opportunity for Milwaukee and its residents. 

“I really am a true believer that education really lifts people out of poverty, improves their lives and improves the community that we all share,” MATC president Vicki Martin said. “And we’re determined to be part of that solution,” 

Martin said MATC’s experience with online learning during the pandemic, while uneven, may become a roadmap for success.

“I think it (pandemic) has given us an opportunity to really look at everything a lot differently than we did before,” Martin said. “And I think we’re a lot stronger because we have more tools in our toolkit.”

Detroit takes student-first approach

In Detroit, just 15% of the city’s residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and economists have reported that, while salaries in the city are expected to increase, Detroit residents will earn an average of $42,300 less than their more-educated suburban counterparts over the next five years.

When Chasidey Willis graduated from Detroit’s Mumford High School in 2017, she was determined to graduate from college — and to do it on time. 

Willis enrolled at Wayne County Community College District and completed 16 to 18 credits each semester as a student-athlete while working part-time in a work study program. Sleep was a rarity.

The then-teenager finished her associate’s degree within two years. She transferred to a four-year school, earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology, and is now completing her master’s degree in special education.

But Willis’ story is far from the norm: Less than 20% of Wayne County Community College District students complete an associate’s degree within two years. Boosting that rate is among many goals the district strives to achieve.

Willis said the support she received at WC3 was “totally different” than her four-year college of University of Massachusetts Lowell. Willis said she graduated on time from community college due to her own determination and with the support from teammates, coaches, advisers and WC3 staff. They challenged her to maintain a minimum 3.0 grade-point average and insisted that she attend study hall sessions.

The college offers an array of support services including a food pantry, vouchers for city transportation, a closet of donated clothing, emergency housing placement and mental health advisers for struggling students.

Curtis Ivery, chancellor of WC3, described the school’s approach as student-first. The chancellor said faculty and staff frequently speak to students about their educational journeys and social-emotional capacity. 

Said Willis: “I honestly believe Wayne County was by far one of the best schools that I’ve been to.” 

Realizing the American dream in Chicago 

For many immigrant students like Lien Tang, who studies at the City Colleges of Chicago’s Truman College, additional hurdles have made the experience of going to college during a pandemic even more challenging. Many students have had to take on additional work hours to support their families, all while struggling with technology problems and speaking limited English. 

“Immigrants often encounter new institutions they have to navigate, which generally presents challenges if they do not know where or how to access resources, especially if they are not English-dominant,” said Sophia Rodriguez, a former Chicago ESL teacher who currently teaches at the University of Maryland’s Teaching, Learning, Policy and Development Department. “Immigrants face multiple challenges, so their priority may be just trying to survive this pandemic.”

As the COVID-19 crisis and virtual classes have stretched on for 21 months now, community college students are finding ways to adjust and connect in the virtual environment.

At CCC, the proportion of credit-earning students who self-identify as born outside of the U.S. has declined from 17% to 13% over the last five years. But many continue to rely on the Adult Education Program, which includes non-credit English as a second language classes, high-school equivalency courses and citizenship preparation classes. According to CCC student trustee Imran Mohammad Fazal Hoque — a stateless refugee from Myanmar — about 90% of students in those programs are immigrants new to the country who lack English skills.

ESL classes at Truman are free and include a final transitional course to prepare students to begin taking credit classes. CCC also works with immigrant-serving institutions to provide resources and scholarships to immigrants like DACA recipients who may not have access to traditional financial aid.

CCC instructors and staff have stepped in to help ESL students, going so far as to call students to make sure that they were able to log into their classes, a CCC representative said. City Colleges also loan out laptops to students for 60 days at a time. And students can take advantage of the completely virtual, cross-campus tutoring system established during the pandemic.

Tang was among those struggling with online classes. She had trouble logging into her Zoom account, a problem her middle-school-aged son helped her solve. Tang also used a free loaner Chromebook from CCC. 

During the pandemic, to make ends meet, she started working as a caretaker for an elderly woman in Evanston. And like some students, Tang has found virtual learning can sometimes be more easily integrated with family and work obligations.

“(With online classes), you can do something at home or you can take care of your children,” she said. “You can work.”

Hoque, seeing the struggles of students like Tang, organized the Phi Theta Kappa honor society to help immigrant students access online classes and understand how to use their email to communicate with their professors. The society also provides virtual drop-in mentoring services and hosts networking events and scholarship workshops.

“Initially, it was really hard because we didn’t know how things would work,” Hoque said. “But … our past previous normal is not normal anymore. This virtual is normal now.”

This story was compiled by Wisconsin Watch Managing Editor Dee J. Hall. It is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless Magazine, BridgeDetroit, Sahan Journal and Wisconsin Watch. The project was made possible with support from INN’s Amplify News Project, whose funders include the Joyce Foundation in the Great Lakes region, and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation in Chicago.

Midwestern community colleges work to lure, and keep, students struggling with poverty and other barriers is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Jasmin Treske had planned to go to college after graduating from South Milwaukee High School. She picked out classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and attended orientation, but the looming financial commitment spooked her. So she decided to take a year off. And in that year, Treske got pregnant. 

“Going to school just became that much harder. Now somebody else was in the equation,” she said. 

Treske worked retail jobs and the first shift at a hotel, but a newborn made the hours difficult to manage. She hoped for something more — a career and financial stability, for the baby and for her.

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Wisconsin Watch is a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news outlet. We increase the quality and quantity of investigative reporting in Wisconsin, while training current and future investigative journalists. Our work fosters an informed citizenry and strengthens democracy.

We currently have reporters based in Madison, Milwaukee, and Oshkosh, and have other members of our robust editorial and business teams located across the state. We collaborate and share our content with mainstream and niche media across the Wisconsin and the nation.

We are a 501(c)(3) charitable organization operated by a professional staff under the guidance of a nationally noted board of directors. Our legal name is Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ Inc.).

Wisconsin Watch collaborates with, but is independent of, the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, where it is housed. Our organization receives free office space from the university in exchange for hiring paid student interns and for providing services and educational resources for students. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Wisconsin-Madison or any of its affiliates.

In addition, Wisconsin Watch receives free office space in the Marquette University Diederich College of Communication in Milwaukee in support of its partnership with Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Wisconsin Watch is a founding member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a group of nonprofit journalism organizations that conduct investigative reporting in the public interest.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Trust Project, a global network of news organizations that has developed transparency standards to help news readers assess the quality and credibility of journalism. Learn more about how we incorporate the Trust Indicators on our site.

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One day, without a plan, she stopped by the Oak Creek Campus of Milwaukee Area Technical College and started scouring the rack of informational brochures. That’s where a staff member spotted her and asked if she needed help. She did. Her parents hadn’t been to college; she had to navigate a new world of higher education without a template.

Soon Treske was meeting with an admissions counselor and student success coordinator. “They helped me answer questions I didn’t know to ask,” she said.

Not long after, Treske began taking classes in finance. A part-time job as a bank teller became full-time, and she started volunteering, teaching financial classes to young people. Treske met a mentor, and her professional network quickly expanded.

Today, Treske is the program and events manager for the MKE Tech Hub Coalition, a nonprofit that aims to grow and diversify Milwaukee’s tech community. She’s an active supporter of MATC. Treske, who is Latina, helps connect other young people of color to tech careers. 

‘Determined to be part of the solution’

Across the country, community colleges are looked at as a ladder to opportunities for people like Treske, educating students, launching careers and fueling local economies. 

In Milwaukee, that mission is increasingly vital, particularly for its residents of color. A 2020 UW-Milwaukee report ranks it at or near the bottom of major cities when it comes to many key measures of Black community well-being, including rates of homeownership and employment. The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is only expected to deepen inequities. 

MATC has in recent years launched a dizzying array of programs and initiatives to open the door to adult learners, including free tuition to qualifying students, debt forgiveness and dual-credit programs for high school students which it says have cut costs and accelerated a college education for more than 4,000 students. More than three-quarters of participants in the free tuition and debt forgiveness programs are students of color, MATC said.

Despite successes, former students and those who have worked with them say barriers persist for adult learners transitioning to college. Fewer MATC students complete their programs than at peer institutions across the United States, according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. About 16% of MATC students finish their programs within 150% of normal completion time, compared to a median of 31% among peer institutions. 

Others raised concern over what they see as opaque measures used to tout the accomplishments of one key program known as M3 or M-cubed, which seeks to seamlessly transition students between Milwaukee Public Schools, MATC and the UW-Milwaukee. 

Nevertheless, MATC remains a lifeline for students like Treske, boosting economic opportunity for Milwaukee and its residents. 

Related content: Midwestern community colleges work to lure, and keep, students struggling with poverty and other barriers

“I really am a true believer that education really lifts people out of poverty, improves their lives and improves the community that we all share. And we’re determined to be part of that solution,” MATC president Vicki Martin said. 

As the largest and most diverse campus within the Wisconsin Technical College System, MATC is well positioned for the effort. At four different campuses and two smaller education centers, the tech college enrolled more than 24,600 students last year — 90% of them part-time — for a full-time equivalent of roughly 8,000 students, according to the most recent data available. More than a quarter of its students are Black and 20% Latino. Statewide, Black students make up 6.5% and Latinos make up 9% of technical school enrollment. 

Milwaukee: ‘Archetype’ of inequality 

Fifty years ago, Milwaukee was a place of promise — a destination for Black and immigrant laborers who found work at any number of tanneries, manufacturing plants and breweries that made the city famous. 

By the late 1970s, however, the jobs that once provided a pipeline to the middle class had started moving to the suburbs, and later, overseas. Unemployment soared, particularly for Black residents living in the city’s core, where many had been forced to live due to restrictive housing covenants and federal red-lining practices that denied loans to prospective Black homeowners based on perceived financial risks. Milwaukee has one of the lowest Black homeownership rates among major U.S. cities at just 26% — one-third of the rate of white homeownership. 

By some measures, the outlook for Black Milwaukeeans has only worsened in recent decades. A 2020 report by UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development described the city as “the archetype of modern-day metropolitan racial apartheid and inequality.”

According to the report, Milwaukee remains one of the nation’s most segregated cities, where the median income of Black households is lower than any other of the nation’s largest 50 metro areas. The poverty rate of Black residents is highest in Milwaukee among those cities and nearly five times the rate of white Milwaukee residents. Only Minneapolis has a lower rate of Black homeownership. 

Martin said such statistics only underscore the importance of education as a tool for unlocking economic opportunity — both for students transitioning from high school, as well as the working adults who make up most of its student body. 

MATC offers 200 programs that can help prepare students for careers in one or two years and provides a more affordable avenue for students who transfer to other schools to pursue four-year degrees. 

“The kinds of jobs and careers that we offer will lead to family sustaining wages,” Martin said. “And I really believe that education is that difference maker.”

MATC points to evidence that the institution is helping lift up all students, including those of color. 

A 2018 report from Emsi, a labor market analytics firm, said students, alumni and the institution itself generate $1.5 billion each year by raising graduates’ earning potential, creating skilled workers for in-demand jobs and employing more than 2,000 full-time faculty and staff. 

Pandemic accelerates enrollment drop 

But as it has for colleges across the country, the past year and a half have tested MATC’s capacity to sustain revenues and meet students’ needs amid a pandemic — the fallout of which has yet to come into full view.  

COVID-19, and the declining revenue from lost enrollment, posed an existential threat to institutions across the county. MATC was not immune. 

Data from the current year are not yet available, but enrollment across the technical college system dropped by 19% between 2018 and 2020. For MATC, its full-time equivalent count of students dipped from 10,023 to 8,021 over the same period. 

When the technical college surveyed students who left school between the spring and fall of 2021, they learned from the 500 students who responded that changes in life circumstances, funding or concerns over physical and mental health were among the top reasons students did not return this past fall.  

Martin said MATC maintained a balanced budget by reducing expenditures, cutting the number of course sections offered — but not classes or programs. 

Students still need credentials, Martin said, and employers still need skilled workers. Those demands haven’t changed. And the lessons learned during the pandemic will only make the institution better, she said. 

“I think it’s given us an opportunity to really look at everything a lot differently than we did before,” Martin said. “And I think we’re a lot stronger because we have more tools in our toolkit.”

Success uneven for MATC students

There’s no shortage of success stories for MATC graduates. Wisconsin Watch reached out to current and former MATC students via Facebook and text messages through its News414 engagement collaboration, asking if the institution helped them move toward their goals. Most who responded shared positive stories. 

After dropping out of high school, Marisol Mendoza earned an associate’s paralegal degree from MATC. Based on her grades there, she was awarded scholarships to Marquette University, where she studied criminology and legal studies. Today, Mendoza’s work as a paralegal focuses on civil rights and labor law. 

Tanya Fenninger said MATC helped her become a certified nursing assistant, a credential that got her a job right out of school. 

“I think MATC does a great job at getting you prepared for a professional career,” she said.

Others shared experiences they said left them disappointed. 

Melissa Buscher had been a hairdresser for 30 years when she decided it was time for change. She wanted more traditional hours, and owing to an autoimmune disorder that put her at greater risk of complications from COVID-19, a safer work environment. So in August 2020, at the age of 47, she enrolled in MATC, planning to join its echocardiography program. 

But she soon found out she’d need additional classes before she could apply for the program. She took chemistry, struggling through online lectures with YouTube videos in place of hands-on activities. When she struggled, she emailed questions to the instructor, she said, but he often lagged in responding.

Buscher described the instructors as overwhelmed. “They had too many hats to wear,” she said.

The next semester, in microbiology, she said she fell just short of the grade she needed for her program, and the instructor made no allowances for the communication gaps that come with online learning. One year and $9,000 later, she left the school, transferring to Bryant & Stratton College. She said the credits she earned at MATC won’t count toward the credential she’s currently pursuing. 

Martin said both students and staff faced a learning curve when it came to the online instruction, with staff constantly responding to challenges as they arose. Over time, she said, instructors and students generally became more comfortable with virtual learning, and some students found they actually preferred the online approach due to its flexibility. 

As for Buscher, the experience wasn’t all bad. She particularly enjoyed her psychology and English classes, calling the episode a “learning experience.”

“I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason,” Buscher said. “I don’t hold any grudges. I wish that some of the debt that I incurred could fall off, but it is what it is.”

Adriana Vazquez is an educator who works for a community-based organization that supports adults working toward their high school equivalency degrees. Speaking for herself and not her organization, Vazquez called MATC a crucial partner, providing instructors plus resources at low or no cost.

But Vazquez noted that some instructors are less skilled than others. And in conversations with students who transition to MATC, she’s heard many say they didn’t understand financial terms before they enrolled. In other cases, daily circumstances like lack of transportation can pose barriers. 

MATC provides free bus passes to students taking six or more credits. But indirect bus routes are overwhelming to some students, while others worry about sitting on public transportation amidst a pandemic, she said. 

Vazquez is hopeful that MATC’s plan to offer more services at community-based organizations across the city will remove this barrier for more students.  

“With the way that our city is segregated and divided, it’s always going to be part of many students’ reality to commute or get transportation to a different part for opportunities,” she said. “But ​​if there was some form of transportation that felt direct and safe, that would make a difference for a lot of people in Milwaukee.”

New programs aim to broaden access

Several MATC initiatives aim to remove barriers to higher education.

In 2015, MATC launched the Promise Program for new high school graduates which offers up to 75 credits of free tuition for those who qualify. Three years later, it kicked off the Promise Program for adults 24 and older who have earned some college credits but don’t have degrees. And in October, MATC expanded the program to include students who had earned high school equivalency degrees.

More than 900 high school graduates and 1,100 adults have participated in the programs since their start, according to MATC — 78% of them students of color, which includes Black, Latino, Asian and biracial students. 

Last year, MATC launched its ReStart program for students who earned credits at MATC and still owe money. Students who return to MATC can earn up to $1,500 in scholarships over three semesters. More than 300 students have benefited from ReStart, 86% of them students of color, MATC said. 

Dual enrollment programs touted

And that’s in addition to the 2,000 students in dual enrollment programs that allow them to earn MATC credit while still in high school.

Earlier this year, after the release of the report on the economic state of Black Milwaukee, leaders from MATC, Milwaukee Public Schools and UW-Milwaukee spotlighted the M-cubed program as a way to cut the equity gap. 

“The issue of the achievement gap and inequities … this is simply holding too many people back because we know that education is the pathway to employment, income, social mobility and so many other things in our community,” UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone said at the time.

M-cubed, or M3 College Connections program, is a partnership between MATC, the public school system and UW-Milwaukee aimed at aligning curriculum and meeting the needs of students at the city’s three largest learning institutions. Students who qualify can earn college credits from both MATC and UWM at no cost — fast-tracking their college education, helping them apply for financial aid and saving money in the process. 

The program saves students about $5,000 they would have spent on tuition, Martin said. Collectively, the program has saved students $750,000 since its launch.

“It’s been a remarkably successful program. I think it’s the wave of the future,” Martin said of dual enrollment programs including M-cubed. 

John Hill, director of college and career readiness for MPS and an M-cubed program leader, said the program has grown from 32 students in 2018, its first year, to 149 students this year. Along the way, the program has offered additional areas of focus for students pursuing careers in nursing or education. 

The alignment with UW-Milwaukee and MATC is especially important because more than half of MPS graduates end up at one of the two institutions, Hill said. 

“The more we can do to make that transition easier for our students, the better. The more comfortable students are, the more successful they are likely to be,” Hill said.

M-cubed metrics questioned

But the program’s metrics are based on MPS’ overall student population, not just those enrolled in M3. Those statistics show fewer than half who attend MATC or UW-Milwaukee stay for a second year. And those numbers were declining even before the pandemic shut down in-person classes. 

Between 2018 and 2019, the numbers dropped from 49% to 34%. MATC said the college responded by adding supports like its summer bridge program to help prepare students for the transition to college.

M-cubed program leaders are encouraged that the overall graduation rate for all Milwaukee Public School students has risen since they launched the dual enrollment program, from 66.7% in 2018 to 69.1% the following year. 

Danny Goldberg, a former MPS school board member, said metrics such as overall graduation rate don’t provide a clear indication the program is improving outcomes for participating students.  

“We have no idea looking at this data whether collaborating this way improves outcomes or not,” Goldberg said. “There’s no metrics to show whether there was a causal relationship between M-cubed and the graduation rates.”

Those who successfully complete the program can come out with 21 college credits and a sense of confidence. Hill points to one student who will earn her licensed practical nurse credential even before she graduates high school. 

“They’re going to have the confidence and the knowledge that ‘Yes, I belong in the college game.’”

Phyllis King, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs for UW-Milwaukee and the institution’s lead for the M-cubed program, said the small program is working. 

“Could they (the numbers) be better?” King said. “Yes. But they’re better than what they were. We’re increasing the number of students that are ready for college. And the strategies that have guided the program have allowed the institutions to know our students much better.”

Partnering with nonprofits

MATC has tried a variety of other approaches to help Milwaukee students get college credit, including partnering with nonprofits like Teens Grow Greens, led by program director and Milwaukee native Sylvia Wilson.

The program offers paid internships and a certified pre-apprenticeship program with the state Department of Workforce Development, training and connecting students to jobs in agriculture — like greenhouse growing and urban gardening — or careers in other fields such as education. Throughout the program, students create a professional portfolio of their work experiences, which can earn them college credit from MATC. 

The goal is to move students toward registered apprenticeships, higher education and sustainable living wage jobs. Every student Teens Grow Greens has worked with has graduated high school, Wilson said. 

But just as important, she said, students leave the program with the skills, confidence and desire to help heal the water, education and health care systems that a community needs to sustain itself. 

“For me, it’s all about sovereignty and folks being able to have control in their own communities. And so ultimately Teens Grow Greens is like a microcosm of the big, big picture,” she said. “The transformation of our community is not going to happen until the individuals are transformed.” 

This piece is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless Magazine, BridgeDetroit, Sahan Journal and Wisconsin Watch. The project was made possible with support from INN’s Amplify News Project, whose funders include the Joyce Foundation in the Great Lakes region, and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation in Chicago. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

MATC broadens access for Milwaukee students amid historical inequities, dropping enrollment is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

This piece was produced for the NEW News Lab, a local news collaboration in Northeast Wisconsin.

Microsoft is providing financial support to the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation and Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region to fund the initiative.

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[vimeo 243723065 w=771 h=434]

Wisconsin Watch is a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news outlet. We increase the quality and quantity of investigative reporting in Wisconsin, while training current and future investigative journalists. Our work fosters an informed citizenry and strengthens democracy.

We currently have reporters based in Madison, Milwaukee, and Oshkosh, and have other members of our robust editorial and business teams located across the state. We collaborate and share our content with mainstream and niche media across the Wisconsin and the nation.

We are a 501(c)(3) charitable organization operated by a professional staff under the guidance of a nationally noted board of directors. Our legal name is Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ Inc.).

Wisconsin Watch collaborates with, but is independent of, the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, where it is housed. Our organization receives free office space from the university in exchange for hiring paid student interns and for providing services and educational resources for students. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Wisconsin-Madison or any of its affiliates.

In addition, Wisconsin Watch receives free office space in the Marquette University Diederich College of Communication in Milwaukee in support of its partnership with Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Wisconsin Watch is a founding member of the Institute for Nonprofit News, a group of nonprofit journalism organizations that conduct investigative reporting in the public interest.

Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Trust Project, a global network of news organizations that has developed transparency standards to help news readers assess the quality and credibility of journalism. Learn more about how we incorporate the Trust Indicators on our site.

Wisconsin Watch is also a member of The Global Investigative Journalism Network, an international network of nonprofit organizations founded to support, promote and produce investigative journalism.

Our mission:

To increase the quality, quantity and understanding of investigative journalism to foster an informed citizenry and strengthen democracy.

Our values:

Wisconsin Watch values truth and pursues it through accurate, fair, independent, rigorous and nonpartisan reporting. We also value transparency, collaboration, innovation and a spirit of public service. These values guide Wisconsin Watch’s training of journalists and its investigations, which seek to protect the interests of people in vulnerable circumstances, expose wrongdoing and deficiencies in systems, and explore solutions to problems.

Our guiding principles:

Protect the vulnerable. Expose wrongdoing. Explore solutions.

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Lake Michigan’s winds and waves have sculpted the landscape of Whitefish Dunes State Park, a must-see treasure along Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula. Water delivers fine sand to a shoreline that supports threatened plants like the dune thistle. Wind stacks that sand into the mighty dunes that inspired the park’s name. 

Summer visitors splash on its beach or hike to Old Baldy, the park’s tallest dune that rises nearly 100 feet above the lake. Come winter, gazers marvel at erupting ice volcanoes — cone-shaped mounds formed when waves shoot slush and water through cracks in ice. These shores have attracted humans for thousands of years; evidence lies in the Native American pottery, bone tools and thousands of other artifacts that Lake Michigan’s forces are increasingly unearthing from the dunes. 

But those same winds and waters are also whittling away the park’s landmarks — eroding dunes, toppling trees, damaging amenities and, at times, swallowing the beach whole. 

In 2018, those elements undermined a walkway leading to the park’s beach. The ramp remains closed three years later, preventing people with disabilities from accessing the beach. And record-high waters in 2020 left only a narrow stretch of beach at Whitefish Dunes for people to sunbathe. That threw a wrench into social distancing protocols during a coronavirus pandemic that drove people outdoors. 

Visitors have flocked to Whitefish Dunes and other Wisconsin state parks in record numbers during the pandemic, seeking fun and relaxation while public health measures limited indoor options. But Lake Michigan’s volatile waters have imposed their own limits along the shoreline. While beaches have somewhat recovered as water recedes from 2020 levels, the state Department of Natural Resources —which oversees a state system of 49 parks, 15 forests and 44 trails — has yet to repair many amenities destroyed in the surge. 

North of the Door Peninsula, water swamped the dock at Rock Island State Park, closing the island to campers for most of 2020 and reducing admission revenue that funds the park system. At Point Beach State Forest, about 60 miles south of Whitefish Dunes, a winter storm hammered the beach three years ago and mangled the ramp leading to the beach. Its metal carcass lies twisted on the beach. No one knows when it will be fixed. 

Just as local homeowners have watched waves flood and erode their lakefront, Wisconsin may see more damage to its shoreline parks. Scientists expect erosion to worsen as climate change brings more volatility to Great Lakes water levels. That would only lengthen a backlog of thousands of needed repairs that one DNR official pegs at nearly $1 billion. But the agency’s funding remains scarce, and even greenlighted repairs can take years to complete.

The DNR is looking for grants and external funding sources for repairs, but it can only prioritize the most serious damage unless lawmakers invest more in a park system that currently ranks among the country’s worst-funded. State parks have largely relied on revenue from admissions and campsite reservations since 2015, when then-Gov. Scott Walker eliminated general-purpose spending on park operations.

“We need to increase funding for state parks and we also need to look for additional ways to support homeowners and municipalities along the shoreline,” said state Rep. Deb. Andraca, D-Whitefish Bay, who has proposed legislation to finance shoreline protection projects. 

A dilemma for dune protection

The powerful waves that have gobbled up the beach at Whitefish Dunes have sent nearby homeowners scrambling to build walls to protect their beaches. 

Just south of the park, Bo Ellis in 2020 stacked rocks along his shorefront to deflect the waves amid worries that his home would topple into the lake. Nearly all of his neighbors now have riprap — slopes of rock or concrete that absorb force from waves — or some other kind of barrier, most of them constructed last year, he said. 

The trend extends along the Door Peninsula, where the DNR is seeing a surge in applications to construct such barriers along the shoreline. That includes a more than 830% increase from 2018 to 2020 in “emergency self-certifications” to protect structures facing imminent danger from accelerating erosion; residents filed 280 applications last year, up from fewer than 30 in 2018. 

Lake Michigan’s water levels have swung dramatically over the past decade. From record lows in 2013 to record highs in 2020, Lake Michigan swelled by more than 6 feet. Climate scientists attribute the volatility to a complex interplay of rising temperatures as humans emit more greenhouse gases and increased precipitation from more frequent and intense storms over the Great Lakes region. 

While artificial barriers can protect the property immediately behind them, they can disrupt the natural movement of sand that replenishes beaches downstream. A seawall meant to save a beachhouse can cost another homeowner their beach, said Guy Meadows, a professor at Michigan Technological University and director of its Marine Engineering Laboratory. 

DNR officials face additional complications when weighing how to protect state parks from flooding and erosion, including fundamental questions about land preservation.

At Whitefish Dunes, park manager Sarah Stepanik said her colleagues have discussed adding an offshore barrier to break up damaging water currents. But doing so would disrupt the forces that created the popular dunes. 

“The unfortunate thing is, those currents are part of the mechanism that formed the dunes. So if you put (barriers) in place, you’re protecting them, but you’re stopping their formation,” she said. 

Instead, the DNR is considering structures that can survive fluctuating lake levels, she said. That might include ditching a fixed dock for one that floats.

“We do want to figure out how to make it more usable even in years when the lake isn’t agreeing with us,” Stepanik said. 

Stepanik’s observations underscore fundamental questions about whether to protect parks or conserve land in its natural state, said Michael Bergum, a DNR district park and recreation supervisor. 

“Do we look at it as protecting the land, or simply understanding that this is a natural process that takes place — whether it be a high water level year or a low water level year?” he said. 

Besides, Bergum added, even an “endless amount of money” may not be enough to solve the problem.

“It’s just too vast,” he said. “You would have to literally riprap the entire Lake Michigan shoreline to address erosion everywhere.” 

Massive backlog in repairs

A sign greets visitors walking toward Lake Michigan from the parking lot at Point Beach State Forest, just north of Two Rivers in Manitowoc County. “Where no two visits are ever the same,” it says. Ice, wind and water continue to sculpt the fragile landscape.

Like at Whitefish Dunes, high water swamped most of the beach in 2020, said park supervisor Erin Dembski-Rodriguez. As the swollen lake limited beach access, visitors often traipsed across dunes or trampled endangered plants. 

But one sight has remained constant for three years: The storm-twisted ramp. A lonely section of wood and metal stands about 100 yards away as waves lap at its edges. 

That leaves most of the beach inaccessible to people with mobility issues “until the water recedes or we can come up with another solution,” Dembski-Rodriguez said.

Visitors occasionally complain about the damage, calling it in eyesore and lamenting the DNR’s delayed repairs. Dembski-Rodriguez submitted a repair request soon after the winter storm walloped it three years ago, she said, but the agency’s bureaucracy moves slowly. 

Projects must compete with thousands of other repairs and improvements across the park system — often getting bumped to a future budget cycle to make room for higher priority projects. 

“Money is always an issue,” Dembski-Rodriguez said. “But in this case it’s not the only issue.”

Timing is key

The DNR must also consider the timing of repairs, waiting for water levels to drop before embarking on shoreline projects, said Missy VanLanduyt, a DNR capital development coordinator.

“Part of what we need to understand is the pattern of the water. We don’t want to go in and repair something just to have it ripped out or damaged again,” she said. 

Fluctuating lake levels cost the park system in multiple ways, although calculating the full price tag is difficult. High waves mean high water tables ashore, said Dembski-Rodriguez. These higher levels flooded the Point Beach State Forest campground in 2020 and forced park managers to close campsites for three months, costing $19,000 in revenue. 

At Door County’s northern tip, Rock Island State Park’s dock flooded in 2020, keeping out the 40,000 annual visitors it typically sees, Bergum said.

Bergum estimated close to $1 billion in repair and improvement needs have stacked up. 

In her 11 years at the agency, VanLanduyt has never seen the DNR fund all needed repairs within a single budget cycle. The DNR leans on external funding — welcoming the millions raised by groups of private citizens who support the parks and exploring state and federal grants. 

But grants often have specific terms that many of the highest-priority projects don’t meet, VanLanduyt added. 

Most states invest more in their parks 

Wisconsin in 2017 ranked 49th in the country, ahead of only Alabama, when it came to per-resident spending on operations for parks and recreation, according to a recent report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum. 

Andraca, the state lawmaker, called lakeshore erosion and high-water damage a key issue for many of her constituents. Aside from calling for more state parks funding, she has proposed a bill to create a loan program that would help homeowners and municipalities pay for projects to protect shoreline properties from storm damage. 

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers included that program in his last budget proposal, but Republican lawmakers on the powerful Joint Finance Committee stripped it from the budget Evers ultimately signed, along with many other items the governor proposed. 

“Climate change is an issue that’s not going away anytime soon,” Andraca said. “I think it’s in the best interest of the state to be aggressive about finding cost-effective ways to deal with shoreline erosion and damage from high water.” 

This story was produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab and in partnership with the Door County Pulse. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (wisconsinwatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

Wisconsin state parks battered as Lake Michigan shrinks beaches, smashes boardwalks is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Editorial Standards Page

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Wisconsin Watch is a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news outlet. We increase the quality and quantity of investigative reporting in Wisconsin, while training current and future investigative journalists. Our work fosters an informed citizenry and strengthens democracy.

We currently have reporters based in Madison, Milwaukee, and Oshkosh, and have other members of our robust editorial and business teams located across the state. We collaborate and share our content with mainstream and niche media across the Wisconsin and the nation.

We are a 501(c)(3) charitable organization operated by a professional staff under the guidance of a nationally noted board of directors. Our legal name is Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ Inc.).

Wisconsin Watch collaborates with, but is independent of, the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication, where it is housed. Our organization receives free office space from the university in exchange for hiring paid student interns and for providing services and educational resources for students. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the University of Wisconsin-Madison or any of its affiliates.

In addition, Wisconsin Watch receives free office space in the Marquette University Diederich College of Communication in Milwaukee in support of its partnership with Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

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To increase the quality, quantity and understanding of investigative journalism to foster an informed citizenry and strengthen democracy.

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Wisconsin Watch values truth and pursues it through accurate, fair, independent, rigorous and nonpartisan reporting. We also value transparency, collaboration, innovation and a spirit of public service. These values guide Wisconsin Watch’s training of journalists and its investigations, which seek to protect the interests of people in vulnerable circumstances, expose wrongdoing and deficiencies in systems, and explore solutions to problems.

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As a reporter, I’m often the one people call when nobody else will listen. 

For the past decade, I’ve experienced a near-sacred privilege: to meet people in their most vulnerable moments, to have them trust me, a stranger, with intimate details of their lives. I began my career as a Wisconsin Watch intern before living on the west coast as a Guardian US correspondent. Now I’m back where I started — much more experienced, but just as eager to do this work. 

My first project with Wisconsin Watch began with such a phone call. In 2012, I received a tip from someone who’d been convicted of a crime and was required to wear a GPS-tracking device around their ankle. The device seemed to malfunction, they said, errantly signaling to law enforcement they’d broken the rules of their release. The tip checked out.

After nine months of work, including combing through thousands of pages of public records, we found evidence to support the assertions of 13 people who said Wisconsin’s GPS tracking system repeatedly registered false alerts, sending them to jail although they had done nothing wrong — wasting taxpayer money and police resources, and disrupting their returns to family and work.

A decade later, critics are still airing legal and technical concerns of the GPS tracking program, even after our reporting spurred lawmakers to request a program audit. Fortunately, Wisconsin Watch plans to produce additional coverage in the months ahead. 

The support editors provided while I reported that story, and the training they offered during the year I spent as an intern, made possible all of my work that followed. Since 2009, Wisconsin Watch has launched the careers of dozens of reporters like me — journalists who have filed stories from Russia to East Africa to Appleton, Wis. 

There’s plenty to uncover close to home. In July, our team of reporters revealed that an Outagamie County judge used an unusual open-ended sentencing approach to monitor defendants’ sobriety or push them to pay fines and restitution. A former defendant said the sentence accelerated a downward spiral that eventually landed him in prison. “This isn’t my life. It can’t be,” he told me one night in tears. 

More recently, we documented the impact of wildly fluctuating levels of Lake Michigan — a trend some climate scientists attribute to climate change — and how issues like erosion impact those living and working along the shoreline.

The reporting Wisconsin Watch produces, the training it leads, and the innovative partnerships and collaborations it embraces are just three ways we provide critical news in a sustainable model. But these efforts cost more than time: we spent more than $3,000 just to analyze court-record data for the story revealing the Outagamie County judge’s questionable practice. 

As newsrooms across the state continue to dwindle, and political divides in communities deepen, your support is vital to sustaining our efforts to hold the powerful to account, protect the vulnerable and search for solutions. 

Please consider it. Your donation will help ensure there’s a reporter to answer the phone if you ever need to make the call. 

Help us answer the call is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Wisconsin’s Great Lakes communities expect to spend $245 million in five years to protect shorelines as a climate ‘tug of war’ drives extreme shifts in water levels. Wisconsin Watch reporter Mario Koran explains the impact this has on lakeshore communities in this multimedia slideshow.

• Reporter – Mario Koran / Wisconsin Watch
• Story editor – Jim Malewitz / Wisconsin Watch
• Multimedia editor – Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch
• Photos contributed by Brett Kosmider / Door County Pulse, Tad Dukehart & Eric Thelen

This piece was produced for the NEW News Lab, a local news collaboration in Northeast Wisconsin.

Microsoft is providing financial support to the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation and Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region to fund the initiative.

Imperiled Shores: A multimedia presentation is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.