Selling the Madison School District

Since the Madison School Board election is coming up soon, I've been going through the candidate answers to The Isthmus' weekly questions. It's a good series that you can find here.

The extra credit section of the questions for week five has this:

Convince a family moving to the Madison metro area that Madison schools will provide as good as or better educational opportunities than they would receive in a suburban school district.

So you would think the candidates would really talk up the positives of the district right? Maya Cole, Juan Lopez and Arlene Silveira do just that. Lucy Mathiak decided to take a different route.

She starts off saying the district has some good teachers but them moves on to these rather odd selling points:

At the same time, I am dismayed to learn that colleagues, children of colleagues, and graduates of our schools are increasingly questioning what they see in our schools and hear when they listen to the board. In the past two weeks I have learned that a family member who went through the East attendance area schools is moving to Waunakee, in part due to the school system.

When I mention that I'm running for school board, I am hearing about friends who are trying to decide whether to stay in Madison's public schools -- the range of options that I am hearing about include home schooling, private schools, and moves to nearby districts. I also hear of people who decline to move here, or accept jobs elsewhere, because of their experiences with the schools.

This is how she would convince someone to send their kids to school here? It's along the lines of trying to sell a used car with an ad that reads "Used car for sale, really good color but the brakes don't work, it needs new tires, transmission is shot, the windshield is cracked and the gas tank has a hole in it."

There are a lot of different ways to answer the Isthmus' question. But when you are trying to convince people that are currently sending their kids to Madison schools to vote for you to become a big part of the school district decision making process, talking about home schooling, the Waunakee School District and people moving out of Madison because of the schools is not one of them.