 And welcome to the Donahue Group. We're delighted that you can join us. We're a small but interesting, hopefully, group of citizens from the local area talking about issues of interest to people living in the city and in the county. Joining me today, former state senator Cal Potter, also former assistant superintendent for libraries at the Department of Public Instruction, Professor Tom Paneski, math teacher at the University of Wisconsin-Shabuigan Center, former alderman. You're not a college student. I'm sorry, excuse me. I knew I'd get that wrong. And Ken Risto, a simple social studies teacher, as he says. But also the director of the social studies curriculum for the Shabuigan Area School District. And tell me how I got that title wrong. Not even close. Not even close. But he kind of runs the socials. But they change my title every year, so it doesn't make any difference. Well, there we go. It gets more complicated. That's a simple. It gets longer and the pay gets shorter. But that's it, that's it. Along with the school year. No, no, just kidding. And my name is Mary Lynn Donahue, and I'm a local attorney. I thought I'd start out. I had just a wonderful time reading Bill Moyer's speech to the National Conference for Media Reform. And this was given in May in St. Louis, apparently. And just for all you public television friends out there, let me just read this real brief little paragraph from his speech. He says, public radio, public TV, cable access, public DBS channels, media art centers, youth media projects, non-profit internet news services are all a part of a nearly invisible feature of today's media map, the public media sector. They do not exist to make a profit, not to push an ideology, not to serve customers, but to create a public. A group of people who can talk productively with those who don't share their views and defend the interests of the people who have to live with the consequences of corporate and governmental power. So I thought, here we are, not serving customers, but to create a public. And so with that, I think we can get started. Just was kind of a high purpose, I thought, to the discussion today, besides just sharing some information. Interesting times in the city. The front page article in the Sheboygan Press on Sunday talked about, and actually the headline was interesting, County grapples with diversity. Kind of implies a fight, but saying that in 1980, Sheboygan's, this is the city of Sheboygan's total population of 48,000, 98.3% was white. By 2000, 20 years later, 88% of the city households were white. Now 88% is still a fair amount, but that's a significant change with 3,200 plus Asian ancestry and 2,800 of Hispanic ancestry. And the black population grew to 348 in city households. Now I know at least Ken and I grew up in Sheboygan. Cal, you did? But Tom, you're a... I came here in 69, so... Oh, you're a newcomer. A newcomer, yeah, you don't qualify. I did not grow up. It was certainly at least 98.3% white when I was growing up here. And so it's a changing face, and I think that's one of the points of the fairly lengthy article that was in the press. What are your thoughts? Are we grappling? Are we gracefully dealing with issues relating to different skin colors, different cultures? Well, I think it's, I'm glad the paper's doing that. There's gonna be a series of articles that are gonna look at different aspects of this. But we see incidences that have occurred recently where people have called people of other colors or other cultures, certain derogatory names. And I think that's an indication of a populace that's experiencing something new. There are places in this country where people have grown up having almost a 50-50 split in different cultures and races, and what Sheboygan's going through here is something new. And I think it's gonna take some adjustment and hopefully some improvement on the part of some people and how they behave towards each other. One of the really dramatic places, I think, that the diversity issues really have arisen is in the Sheboygan area school district, which, at least when I was on the school board, was nearing 30% minority kids with 29 different languages being spoken within the district. And some stunning challenges, I think, for public education as they try to deal with kids who come not only with different cultures, but just no ability to communicate in the language. Is that my cue? It really has changed dramatically. I've been in the district for 22 years, and in those 22 years, the diversity of the student body, both at North and South High School, and across the entire district has changed dramatically. It's been a real, and of course, we have a department now called ELL, which is English Language Learners, which didn't even exist when I started this profession well these many years ago. And it's been a challenge. It's particularly a challenge for us, of course, because the no child left behind legislation requires that all those racial groups, eventually the gap between them and Caucasian groups have to be narrowed. They have to be showing adequate yearly progress. So far, we've been able to do that, but every year the bar gets higher and higher. And eventually, I'm not sure if we're gonna be able to do that. It's gonna be a real challenge for us. What's really, on the positive side, you've got an old Hispanic mayor, obviously, the school board had, of course, won on the school board before that. We just recently added a Hmong representative of the board. So there's some beginnings, and we have an Hispanic female on the board right now, as well. So we have some representation. The sense, at least in the high schools, is as I watch the students and as the faculty talks about this is that the Hmong population, as time has gone on, at least the wave that showed up, say, five, 10 years ago or 15 years ago, have really pretty much assimilated. When you start seeing the graduation rates and the number, we had Chris Yang over at South and we've had previous Hmong valedictorians and salutorians, and so they're beginning to get in the mainstream. We haven't, quite frankly, and in all candor, we've not cracked the Hispanic riddle yet, though, in the school district. That still remains a challenge. When you look at our test scores, Hmong performance is generally better than Hispanic performance. The gap between Hmong students and Asian students in general and white Caucasian students has narrowed somewhat, depending on which building you're looking at, but overall, there's been progress there. So we have a ways to go. What is the school challenge? This week's Newsweek is an extensive article on that and the mobility that does occur because of education. And when you have first and second generations of certain cultures that are not moving ahead educationally as much as they ought to, that has a ripple effect throughout the whole assimilation game. The campus at Sheboygan recently has, with our new dean who's of Hispanic, Ray Hernandez, he's made a concerted effort to expand the minority student population. And over the last two, three years, I could, you know, it really is different. I mean, there's a lot more Asian students represented than I can recall in past years. But I'm going to go back to when I started here, back in 69, since when did I come? The population was 52 or 53% male. Now that's changed. We're probably 53 or 54% female at the university. So if you talk about diversity, there's a little bit of a switch to more. Female's going to the university as just opposed to ethnic kinds of things. And adult students going back to school, coming back to school adult education. So in the educational area, there's a little more diversity than it was when I initially started here. And then of course, let's go back to the ethnic. It's just fun watching the Hmong in the parade. They're so proud to be a United States of America citizens. They wave the flag, they dress appropriately in their attire, but they wave the flag. And that's kind of exciting. I remember when my kids were little and went to grant school, and that was a magnet school for Hmong kids. And 35 to 40% of grant school at that time was Hmong children. And it was a neat thing for my kids to be able to go to school with children who certainly had a different culture and looked different from them. And it was a good thing, but I think those kinds of trends are going to continue. I remember my dad was a pharmacist for Reignitz drugs for years and years and years. And he was at Fesslers for a long time. And that was in the 50s, 60s, and even into the 70s when he spoke what we called pigeon German. But there were a lot of particularly little old ladies who had come in and they would just speak German with him. And the dear man that he was, he didn't really quite understand German, but he could kind of understand what they were trying to get at. And that meld of language. And I think that ethnicity of people speaking German in public schools or institutions is pretty much gone, but not that long ago, where you still had- It wasn't long ago that the WHBL had German church services still broadcast. So it is amazing how in terms of immigrant populations, we really do absorb. But it is the case, and I think Cal, you were mentioning in just an earlier discussion that Hispanic students or a lot of students coming from Mexico, and I know a lot of our Hispanic students are from Mexico coming up here during the job boom in the late 90s, more or less, just not making that transition. Any, you three educators, any ideas? I don't know. Well, there was a simple solution we had to found it by now, even us, I think. But part of it is cultural, and it's hard for me as being the white German Caucasian guy in the audience, to figure out exactly how to decode Hispanic culture for us. And part of it has to do with the lack of male role models, I think, at the high school level. I think our Hispanic girls are more likely to be a little more successful in classrooms and move on and get their degrees and things and say, our Hispanic male students do. And that's part of it. And part of it is a culture that perceives school learning perhaps a little bit different than Asian culture. When I have parent-teacher conferences, I rarely see an Hispanic parent. I really do see lots of long parents and they're a little more, the way they express their concern is a little more typical of what we'd expect from a majority culture, where we get telephone calls or they show up at parent-teacher conferences and those kinds of things. I know that, and the public doesn't really much know this, but the next couple of years south and north in different ways are gonna start exploring ways to build what we call in the profession small learning communities within the high schools, breaking these large high schools down into schools within schools in some way. We're just beginning to have that conversation and get parents involved and students involved. And one of the reasons we are doing that is because in a place where it's south, the south will have probably about 1500 students next year, north about 1750 because of the boundaries and the way the cities are growing. We just really feel we lose kids in the shuffle. You've got really what is a factory model. Every kid's rotatory 50 minutes, teachers change from semester to semester. You may never see a kid again. And that's I think gonna be part of what we're gonna try to do in establishing some more human contacts with kids and more continuous contacts and more mentoring. You mentioned culture earlier in your comments. You didn't really say you didn't quite understand the culture because of our background. Well, I belong to St. Clement's Church and that's a Spanish, I mean St. Clement's Church is really two churches. It's a Spanish church and then it's the White Anglo-Saxon church. And they've tried to get together over the years, but they, I mean they do, but they still keep their separate cultures. We have a Spanish mass and we have a regular mass. One of the analysis about the integration of cultures is the uniqueness of the Hispanic community that's coming to the United States. It's overwhelmingly Mexican. And it's a higher percentage of Mexican than any other group we've had for many, many years. If you go back and say, well, in early immigration, how many, what percentage was Italian? What percentage was French or Hungarian or whatever? And the members are rather small. But we have this large influx of Hispanics, majority of which are Mexican. And so you do have a culture that becomes almost a very large subculture. And so their activities, their language, their whole community is one of a size that can almost be operable within another community. Exactly, exactly. And the assimilation challenges are maybe not there. If you're the only one of 20 Russians in a community, you probably are forced to become maybe more assimilated than if you were one of several thousand of another culture. So that's one of the challenges that they say Hispanics and particularly Mexicans are facing in becoming part of a new culture. And the flip side of that in some respect is that it is an important part of life that we keep the ethnic cultures that are our backgrounds. That I grew up in a very Irish family, I mean, you talk about a minority in Sheboygan, being Irish was certainly that. But people do want to, and rightfully so, hang on to their wonderful cultures and traditions. And one of the nice things you see in Milwaukee, which I just love, are all the Fest. So you get Polish Fest and Irish Fest and Italian Fest and on and on. So people do celebrate their cultures and I think, so we're always doing that balance between assimilation and celebrating what is uniquely ours and so forth. So it'll be interesting. Never has Sheboygan though been much of a magnet for African American people. The press article says that in 1980 there were 57 black residents and in 2000 that had grown to 348. That's hardly a huge boom. And it's always been interesting to me because with Milwaukee not far from us, substantial African American population in Milwaukee, why not the migration up to Sheboygan, which is certainly a wonderful and pleasant place to live. And I don't know why and I think of all the minorities that live within the area, the black residents maybe feel the most isolated. I don't know, is that a fair statement? I think there was a lot of homogeneity in Sheboygan as far as white culture, I mean German, Dutch and you had pretty well new, that was established. I think Milwaukee, for example, had the same situation. Look at the tensions they had with the Polish South Side and Father Grappi in his desegregation efforts. He was gonna march across what was a six street viaduct into the Polish area. So I think some of that probably is just a solidity of the uniformity of the white culture that was in Sheboygan for many years. Yeah. It wasn't there, I may be overstating it. If you were from Sheboygan, you were in, if you were an outsider, you were out, so to speak, on the social networks. Was that something 15, 20 years ago, new people coming to Sheboygan? Well, at St. Clemens, one of the priests at St. Clemens when I was there growing up, Father Ken Fieber, was very involved in something called Youth for Integration, why for I? And I was involved in that just even in grade school and then as well into high school of trying to figure out why whites were not comfortable going into the inner core of Milwaukee and why blacks were not comfortable coming up to Sheboygan. But whatever issues were there certainly seemed to remain. I just find the complaint of Isaac Thomas, the African American fellow who indicated that he had been beat up by the police. It's a fascinating thing and I saw in the paper that he's filed a notice of claim with the city, which he needs to do within 120 days to preserve any right that he might have to sue for damages. But as far as I understand, he has yet to file any charges with the police and fire commission about the way he believes he was treated that night. So the police and fire commission, which would be a place for this fellow to get a hearing at least about the facts of what happened, he's just simply not taken advantage of and according to the newspaper picture, has his house up for sale. He's gonna leave, he's gonna leave, yeah. So it hardly seems to be a welcome sign at least. Back to Tom's question, I think there was a time where like all small towns, it's very difficult for me because I didn't live any other place in this place for any long period of time to know how typical we are. But Sheboygan certainly was insular and there was a certain set of, I mean, families know one another, there's names and there's intermarriages and I talked about three degrees of separation from anybody for quite some time. I think as a person who comes into the community you have to spend some time now trying to figure, again, decode all that, try to figure that all out and navigate that, negotiate that and understand how families fit and how there's the meeting after the meetings and the meetings that take place, whether they be at Pine Hills or wherever they might be. But that being said, you know, you got Mark Hanna who just is a school board president, he's a relative newcomer to the community, Juan Perez is a relative newcomer to the community. I think when you look at the, say, our school board, Ron is, Ron Rindfleisch is probably a lifetime resident but I think the vast, large majority of those members are no longer the locals. And you look back at the board, say in 1978, 79, there was, you know, Garten and Rischel and I mean, these are people, names have been around for quite some time. So I think the place is opening up, I think for African-Americans, not that I can speak for them but I think there's sort of a critical mass that needs to, before people become comfort it gets to what Cal was talking about earlier. And I still think there's this sort of notion that if you're an African-American walking down the streets of Sheboygan, everybody's pretty much still looking at you. Not that there's any necessarily animosity or unwelcoming, it's just unusual. It's a contrasting color. Yeah, it's unusual. Exactly. I mean, I remember a time in a kid where, you know, the only African-American I knew in Sheboygan was a postal employee. I mean, everybody knew, I don't know what the gentleman's name was but that was it. You're starting to see that now, what's interesting at least at South where we have a good, not probably about three dozen African-American students. Do they tend to keep to themselves? Not, I'm not really. And there's interracial dating that's going on and that doesn't seem to be a terribly, terribly big issue. So to that degree that the city is welcoming. You know, we've been talking about race but one of the things that nobody really much is talking about it's kind of under the radar screen is when you looked at when the state testing began and we started gathering all these demographics over at South and North. It's like say South for example, because I'm more familiar with those numbers. We had the same percentage of minority students as we do today some seven, eight years later. But what has really changed is the number of students who are coming from what the government would define as poverty families that qualify for hot lunch. That used to be about 10% of our student body. It is now about one third of our student body. And so you really have an undercurrent of some fairly poor white students that are really coming into our system and part of our reality that's really not being discussed in the community whatsoever. And I don't know if that's because of the deindustrialization that's going on and all that that's happening in the community. But we start looking at our test scores and trying to figure out who's the populations of kids we really got to work with. And we start looking at it's things have really have changed in the sense that we're becoming more of a poverty school and that's true for the entire district by the way. And probably somewhat reflective of other communities but we don't have that data readily available. I think the badger care statistics are a good example of that places like Walmart in other words where they have a high percentage of employees on badger care because they don't provide benefits and their workers are rather low pay. So as we move to a service sector and we know number of those industries in Wisconsin or in Sheboygan just don't provide benefits as it did 20 years ago. As the income level of the city of Sheboygan or the county of Sheboygan, median income level of families going down from census I'd have to look at that. I think they've been pretty stagnant once you adjust for inflation. But that's happened in the national level too but if you look at the gap it's different. You've got the wealthier, more wealthy and the poor are becoming greater numbers but you average it all together and it looks very similar to what it looks pretty decent but the numbers do rely on, don't rely or don't tell a story of what has happened to the discrepancy between the rich and the poor that is that's really developing in this country. And I think just as we kind of segue into another topic it is my understanding I could be wrong that Mayor Perez is actually looking to constitute a citizens group to talk about diversity in the community and the challenges and the richness that it provides and so that'll be interesting to see how that develops. Speaking of the city, there have been some victories and some losses. Park and Forestry Commission is back by a 14 to two vote. I believe that was at last week's city council meeting if I'm not mistaken. And Alderman Danburg apparently thinks it's just one too many committees as I read the newspaper article I did not see the meeting. It's a campaign promise that has been enacted pretty quickly. We're looking at police sites. Do we have any betters to where where the police station might end up? Sure is quiet. It is, isn't it? There's a front runner, I haven't seen it either. And you know the sleeping giant here is where's the money gonna come from to build this? Little by little there's starting to be a community discussion instead of emanating from city hall. People are now starting to throw ideas out. Somebody said maybe we should decide what shared services we wanna work to provide before we decide where we place this new police station. And I thought, okay, that's a decent idea to think about. In other words. Think about the goal before you start building. But where are the money's gonna come from to build this thing? Cause you mentioned the money. And if it comes from savings and shared services then we want it to be close to the county facility so we could more adequately save them. But it seems like there's been a lot more input community kinds of talk on how best to serve. Everybody says what the center of the city is. And my own opinion is the city's too small to have a center. I mean, our police station could be located on the other side of I-43 and it'd still be close to everything. Well, it's funny. So it's where do you, you know, where best to locate it for start services? Yeah, we all have relatives who live in big cities who are astonished by our thought. We have to drive all the way out to Menard's or all the way out to Home Depot. It's gonna take, I had to come all the way out to the University of Wisconsin, Sheboygan. You know, it took me, I got it, it must have been almost 10 minutes to get out here. And so I think there is that. It's an entire 15 minutes to get across town. There you go, there you go. But nonetheless, and I understand that the line, the actual, the geographic line as to the center of the city is a little bit to the south of where the station is now. So the North 23rd site, at least now, is not the center of the city, but that with building trends and so forth at a certain point, it may be much closer to the center of the city than say a downtown site. So those are interesting pieces. If it goes to a referendum, if that's one of the funding mechanisms that we're looking at, do you think that the citizens of Sheboygan will vote in favor of a police station? I think they would. I think even some of the physically conservative letters that the editor recently have said, well just kick out everybody else in city hall and give them the city hall to the police department. So I think they appreciate the police are rather cramped in that rather old building and they need something, they need more room. Yeah, and it is a relatively rare thing to hear. There've been one or two letters saying, ah, we don't need this new police station, but by and large, I think that the recognition of the need is pretty universal. So I think even at a referendum, but the borrowing for it is going to be tricky. Because it really is just that expensive and... And we still haven't resolved the Tabor issue that's going on on the state level. I mean, it's kind of quiet now, but you don't know what's going to be wrought in the state budget and other documents to control municipal spending, which further exacerbates the financing factor. Yeah, and I'm sure we'll hit on that at some point in the future, but just as we begin the city budget process, I think it's very tough. We talk about actually who really would want to be a mayor or a city council person or a governor or a senator in just these very, very difficult times. I think it's kind of tough. So, well, as always, the time seems to have gone just very quickly and we've solved, as usual, the problems. I think if the four of us were just in charge of everything, it would be very smooth, you know, just as... We have all sides represented in that. Fastest recall election show ever summoned. This diversity group here, a diverse group here. Exactly. So, well, thanks again and we'll be getting together again and thanks for joining us.