Fundraising festival will help the school
pay off its legal bills fighting the City of Madison
Girls just wanna play soccer!
Teenagers are driving cars like they stole them (which they did). They’re crashing into homes and innocent motorists all over town. Minority students in the city’s public schools are functionally illiterate. Madison families are sending their kids to suburban schools or private schools in town, like Edgewood high school. What is the City of Madison’s response? They’re afraid a girls’ soccer game might break out at that Catholic high school.
To the fainting couch!
Nothing in Edgewood high school’s master plan specifically allows competitive girls soccer, the pecksniffs on the Madison Plan Commission have decreed. The city arbiters are kowtowing to the well heeled and politically correct inhabitants of the Monroe-Dudgeon neighborhood. These good liberal/progressive/socialists are fighting Edgewood’s proposal to install spectator stands, bathrooms, lights and sound to its athletic field so that school sports teams can play on their home field like everyone else. The WI State Journal reports that over 100 people, most of them NIMBYs, spoke at Monday night’s (08-26-19) seven-hour plan commission meeting. As is customary in city politics, the commission came to no conclusion.
Only it would be held at night
Fun for the whole family!
Blaska Policy Werkes concludes there are worse things than a two-hour high school football game on a Friday night where maybe one thousand fans attend. Things like kids stealing cars right out of your garage. Given that the even-tonier University Heights neighborhood abuts Camp Randall field where 80,000+ Badger football fans revel all day long and into the night, especially after night games. Drinking beer and Jello shots, unlike high school sporting events.
Edgewood has brought suit in federal court alleging religious discrimination, given that public high schools like Madison Memorial play on their home fields while Edgewood is forced to play all its games as away games. That lawsuit and the Jarndyce v Jarndyce saga with city planning is running up the school’s legal bills.
Blaska Policy Werkes to the rescue! Our event planners have drawn up a fund-raising festival we’re calling “Make Edgewood Great Again.” Admittance to MEGA-fest is free to the school’s Monroe Street neighbors!
Madison’s favorite governor
The all-day spectacle begins with a welcoming address by former governor Scott Walker (“The Reforms are Working”) over a rented sound system. Shut-ins for blocks around will hear every syllable! Following is the dedication of the Bishop Morlino Memorial Shrine for the Victims of Abortion.
Kate Smith’s recording of God Bless America precedes a low-altitude flyover by the Air National Guard’s new F-35 fighter jets. (Flying so low, as General Buck Turgidson described it, the exhaust will fry chickens in the neighbors’ back yards!) And what a midway! MEGA-fest will feature traditional Wisconsin festival activities:
- smash a Prius ($1 per swing of the sledgehammer)
- wet bikini contest
- motorcycle burnouts on Monroe Street
- greased pig wrestling
- Civil War re-enactment (will the South win this time?)
- captive elephant parade
- carnival freak shows (don’t miss the Bearded Lady)
- Coors beer tent
- hip hop music battle of the bands
- all-faiths spanferkel
- Hobby Lobby crafts fair
- Chick-fil-A food stand
- dunk tank (Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, Brenda Konkel, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, invited)
Headlining MEGA-Fest is special guest star Andrew Dice Clay, reprising some of his classic routines from the 1990s (including the one about Little Bo Peep and her sheep).
Do you smell smoke?
Vicki McKenna & Brian Schimming will do a live remote for their WIBA radio show. Security provided by Los Diablos motorcycle club (more multi-culture). An educational aspect: sign-up for NRA concealed carry firearms course. Visit the U.S. Marine recruitment booth. Be sure to sign the Recall Mark Pocan petitions!
You won’t want to miss the evening’s finish-to-the-death automobile demolition derby! (Blaska’s legal department concludes there is nothing in the campus master plan specifically prohibiting automobile demolition derbies.) Thrill to the wanton destruction of Detroit steel — metal grinding against metal. Tires churning up that rich Madison alluvial soil, spraying participants and spectators alike. Pungent, black engine exhaust wafting over the rooftops.
MEGA-fest ends with a midnight fireworks display timed to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Time for the Edgewood Crusaders to raise high the crucifix and channel some Constantine the Great: “By this sign you will conquer.”
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
Thank you David. My 2 kids attend Edgewood and this saga has pushed my limits of chivalry. Thank God you’re around with your candid analysis
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Love this blog posting. I have often said I wish I could trade the crime in our southwest neighborhood for a few football or soccer games. But as usual the elitists in Madison are only charitable when they don’t have to actually be charitable. Edgewood has been there a lot longer than probably all the neighbors. It’s not like Edgewood is bringing Visions to their neighborhood or a drug house. Sheesh!
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Cute, but it brought to mind what a critic said about the works of George Bernard Shaw: “The quality of his satire suffers when one realizes that it took aim primarily at bishops and other slow-moving targets.” And there’s no slower moving target than Madison’s liberal elites.
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Lost in the commotion is the issue of frequency of these dreaded Monroe Street contests. We’re talking a comparative of handful of games, folks. It won’t be a 24/7 slaughterhouse operation.
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Kevin Wymore says the frequency of the sports events are a “handful of games”. Quite the understatement and thoroughly misrepresenting what’s going on currently – or what might expand to – in the event of Edgewood further commercializing their vision of a more marketable stadium that could be rented out to all sorts of other competitions, concerts, and other special events given the amped up sound, 80 ft lights, 1,200 seats.
Edgewood High School has scheduled more than 50 competitions on the athletic field this year. (https://badgerconference.org/public/genie/77/school/8/date/2019-04-01/view/month/) . The city attorney has determined that every single game is in violation of the zoning for their property, which states the field is to be used for physical education classes and practices only – so, under the current agreement that the school signed onto, they are intentionally violating their own promises to that neighborhood.
It is not a liberal NIMBY conceit to state that Edgewood needs to abide by their promises. It is a very UN-Christian way for a religious school to set an example to their students – ie – if you don’t like the rules you agreed to with your neighbors and the city – break them.
If the school wishes to change what they agreed to over a lengthy negotiation in the past, then they should marshal their resources to go through whatever appeal is allowed in the context of the city master planning process and possibly wait until this 10 year master plan agreement expires and re-approach that process “in good faith”.
Kevin Wymore is even further underestimating his minimizing “handful” …..
Here’s a link to the school’s 2019 summer schedule – these are practices – like football mini-camps – allowed under the agreement – but none the less some events have a 6 am start time. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bd6338a4d87118fef9bb94e/t/5d051ca2d83145000173e1c6/1560616101541/EHSsummerschedule.pdf
These 25 or so practices are in addition to 50+ competitions this year – so that in “comparative” terms this is no “handful” unless that hand belongs to both hands of King Kong or the Jolly Green Giant combined – and a few of their gigantic kin.
From what I understand Edgewood enrollment has been declining – someone please correct me if that is wrong. In any case, making this new stadium a marketable income-maker for other rent-producing venues is likely as much a financial motivator as any Benedictine religious values. Playing the “religious discrimination” lawsuit is really begging the question of what kind of leadership & values is guiding decisions at Edgewood – from where I sit – they look unethical at best.
Let them abide by the rules they have promised to agree to until which time the current master planning agreement terminates when they can re-engage their neighbors in a new negotiation – or go through an appeals process before that 10 years are up if that is an option. “Play by the rules” – isn’t that what sports competition teaches us Edgewood?
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Dave, I normally appreciate your wry wit and the tweaking of the “liberal nose” but your mention of a
1%er motorcycle club as security is highly offensive. There is a local community oriented alternative if it is actually needed. JP.
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I am an equal opportunity offender.
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It’s incomprehensible…. Until ya drive Woodrow and see the NIMBY homes w/ “natural” lawns (we call ’em unkempt). Used to be occupied by solid hardworkin’ folks who never minded athletics on the…. athletic field. For 75-90 years never a complaint. Further, why the discrimination, Edgewood is one of many who’s mysterious “Plan” had not been updated. Why would they, do one else did? BTW, the “Smash a Prius” is sold out -I bought every swing. And… I’m sending that Demo Derby pic to a few alumni -especially the ones workin’ pro-bono…. Excellent parody, David….
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