or will the school board fight back?
Madison homeowners rent their garments and cried unto the heavens after their school property tax bills hit their mail boxes. None of that wailing made a bit of difference in last week’s school board elections. Both incumbents were rewarded with new three-year terms because their challengers never made the case for change. The UniParty!
Now the district anticipates spending $10.8 million more on health insurance (wasn’t Obamacare supposed to hold the line?) and another $14.2 million for higher salaries on the way to growing the budget an additional $40 million — a 6% increase in spending despite declining state and federal aid. Tightening belts? Madison’s public schools have no belt!
We wanted Ray Mendez to run for school board this year but he has more sense than that. No entity in local government more needs a disrupter than the Metropolitan Madison Board of Education. We introduced the gentleman to Werkes readers in November 2025.
Mr. Mendez picks up on a platform this on-line scribbler campaigned on a few years ago: school discipline.
“The grooming case at Memorial and the head-stomping assault at West made headlines,” Mr. Mendez tells us. A week ago, a 14-year-old was arrested for breaking a 13-year-old’s arm in a fight at Sennett middle school. “They are not random events,” Ray maintains. “After each incident, we hear the same language about care, equity, and process. … Then very little changes.”
‘Reshuffling risk’
Mr. Mendez says the school board is looking at but unlikely to reform the student Behavior Education Policy instituted by the terminally Woke superintendent, Jennifer Cheatham, in 2014. The BEP is on the agenda today 04-17-26 by the policy committee, consisting of Nicki Vander Meulen, re-elected on April 7, and Maia Pearson, arrested for disorderly conduct in December 2025. Except there is no agenda. The meeting isn’t even posted because, the district spokesperson says MMSD don’t need no stinkin’ public notice. Actual words of Edell Fiedler: “The policy committee meets on an ad hoc basis; because it comprises only two members of the Board of Education, no legal notice regarding its meetings is required.” The UniParty has spoken!
If these two recommend anything, the full seven members would consider it Monday 04-27-26. Mendez says:
“The current policy allows repeated unsafe behavior without clear mandatory escalation and fails to clearly distinguish serious safety threats like weapons or ammunition. …
“A student who brings a magazine of bullets to school is treated … the same as vaping. Expulsion is rare and often temporary. In some serious cases, including knife fights and assaults, students are transferred rather than removed. That does not reduce risk, it reshuffles it.”
Using a freedom of information demand for Madison West high school data, Mr. Mendez found “a real increase in aggression and fighting, with hallways standing out as the main hotspot.”
E-mail the school board board@madison.k12.wi.us to encourage a revamp of the BEP. To speak at the next full school board meeting 04-27-26 do this or submit a written comment.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: We honestly cannot remember a single fight in our four years at Sun Prairie senior high school so don’t give us the boys will be boys line. We do credit Supt. Joel Gothard for asking $1.2 million for more school safety people — but four cars to get them to football games? Better to give them authority to put hands on. The BEP is too legalistic.
Mr. Mendez agrees, to an extent. “I also favor giving more discretion to classroom teachers and building principals. But they still have to operate within the BEP, and the BEP is confusing and full of gaps.”
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