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2025 School Board Candidate Kevin Hundt

A February primary will be required to narrow the number of candidates down to six.  The term of office for a school board member is three years beginning on Monday, April 28, 2025.  Six candidates will appear on the April 1, 2025, spring election ballot for three school board spots.

LA CROSSE SCHOOL BOARD

KEVIN HUNDT

CAMPAIGN WEBSITEhttps://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100089114011143

About You:
Can you tell us about yourself — your professional background, family, education, and history in La Crosse?

I’ve lived in La Crosse for my entire life and have a Public And Policy History degree from UWL.  I’ve been an advocate for reduced car use for over a decade, and recently published a short book about the history of housing and transportation infrastructure in La Crosse and how car-focused decisions have caused many of our present crises.

Reason for Candidacy:
Why are you running for school board, and what motivates you to serve in this role?

We need to fire the Superintendent, end the so-called “coherent governance” policy that puts all the power in the hands of the Superintendent, and clean house at Hogan.  It’s clear that the Superintendent has irreconcilably lost the trust of the community.  I’m running for School Board because I seem to be the only person willing to say this.  My motivation is that the 2022 referendum was a terrible idea for a plan which was so sparse as to be most accurately described as nonexistent. I was particularly upset that the location would have forced hundreds more students to become drivers than might be necessary at the current high school locations, which would have been devastating to efforts to reduce car dependency and use.

He and other Administration staff have also been very dismissive of community concerns and input for over two and a half years, and probably longer.  He should not be in this role.

Top Priorities:
What do you believe are the top priorities the school board should address and why? How would you advocate for them?

The School Board needs to fire the Superintendent, both 1) because he has proven himself to be either a bad planner or bad communicator or both, and 2) in order to establish that the School Board is in charge of the school district.
I strongly disagree with the decisions to close schools.  The closure of Lincoln was carried out with practically no planning and public input beyond the legal bare minimum.  The elementary school referendum wasn’t a vote, but a hostage situation.  It’s clear that La Crosse residents highly value neighborhood schools, and I believe there are creative solutions for keeping them open which District leadership has deliberately ignored due to an unwillingness to actually listen to the public.  I wrote about this with some more details and evidence on my campaign Facebook page.
Communication is the top priority that I want to focus on because you can’t have anything else until you have good communication.  The Board is the best mechanism for communicating with the public, and particularly with parents groups, neighborhood associations, and groups that have sprung up to advocate for their neighborhood schools to remain open.

Public Schools:

Why is public education important to you, and how do you see it shaping the future of our community?

First off, I believe in public education as a public good which is necessary to give people the skills and knowledge necessary to have a fulfilling life and to be responsible members of the public.  Everyone has this right, and we have a healthier society when the public education system is robust.  I uncompromisingly oppose any and all privatization efforts and anything that smells like privatization at all.

Second, the school district is a major employer and thousands of people – students, teachers, and support staff – pass through the doors of schools and other District facilities every day.  This is a major logistical operation which has an enormous impact on the way the city functions overall.  Traffic, land use, infrastructure, housing, emergency services, parks, businesses, etc, are all impacted by the locations and operations of District buildings.  I am not an educator and have practically no knowledge of school operations or management, but at least I understand the scale and impact of the district as an institution.

We have an opportunity and need to reshape how the school system operates, in order to make it more responsive to the community, more economically and environmentally sustainable, and more in line with the future direction of the City as a whole.  For example, we need to reduce car dependency, by which I mean the number of travel obligations which can only be done efficiently and safely by car.  Car dependency causes and is caused by infrastructure which assumes everyone will be traveling by car.  But car-oriented infrastructure is extremely expensive for taxpayers, and makes it more difficult for people to choose to drive less, creating more stress on the roads and parking- this is a death spiral.  The City recently dropped minimum parking requirements, and I believe more reforms like this are coming in the next few years, including hopefully an overhaul of the MTU routes to make it a viable mass transit system.  Neighborhood schools tie in with these car reduction goals, by reducing the distance students and workers need to travel and hopefully allowing more of them to not have to use the car.  That will let more high-density housing be built, further increasing the need for neighborhood schools, and so on, helping to reverse the death spiral with just a little bit of public planning.

Also, the rumors and investigation I’ve cobbled together strongly suggest there has been no collaboration between the District and the City on almost any topic, including a lack of transportation coordination, which I find completely ridiculous.  That will change if I am on the Board.

Declining Enrollment and Facilities:

The district faces financial challenges due to declining enrollment and older buildings. What specific strategies would you propose to attract and retain students and address facility needs?

I disagree with the question: the problem is not declining enrollment and aging buildings, but a lack of strategy, planning, vision, and communication- in other words, mismanagement.  It’s clear that the current District leadership is bad at planning and communicating, the strategy is questionable, and the vision is nonexistent.

I believe that there are many, many ideas in the community that could address these issues and pave a better path forward, but which the District leadership has ignored.  The “Facility Advisory Committee” in 2023 is a great example, because it brought together really the best and brightest of the community, people and groups who I’m sure could have come up with some great ideas if allowed, and then essentially told them that they were only allowed to decide what elementary schools to close.  Unacceptable!

I have some ideas of my own about this specific topic, but I don’t want to prioritize them, because that’s beside my point and I don’t have any particular expertise there.  Suffice it to say that declining enrollment is not an inevitable force of nature, and there are several reasons to think we may have a large increase in enrollment over the next twenty or thirty years.

Community Engagement:

How will you foster greater community involvement in decision-making to ensure transparency and shared ownership of the district’s challenges and successes?

I will make a motion to fire the Superintendent.  He is the greatest impediment to solving the District’s problems.  I believe that when he, and possibly several other people in the Administration are gone, it will be like fresh air blowing through a moldy attic.  I’ll leave it at that since I’ve addressed this in responses to other questions.

Childcare:

Do you see a role for the district in addressing the childcare shortage? If so, what solutions would you propose?

Possibly, but I have no expertise on this matter.  I would defer to those who do.

Student Support:
What programs or resources would you advocate for to enhance students’ academic achievement, mental health and overall well-being?

I also have no expertise on this.  We should ensure that there are enough nurses and mental health experts in the school, though, based on a frank look at the need and number of personnel.

This is probably the appropriate place to mention that we should make all school meals free, at a local level if the State continues to decline to do so, and hire or contract with nutritionists to make school meals healthier and more palatable, and expand the farm-to-table program to source from local farms as much as feasible.

Teacher Development and Retention:
How would you support teachers in their professional development and address challenges related to workload, compensation, and job satisfaction?

The Administration is a millstone around the necks of the teachers.  The amount of micromanaging and pettiness from Administration staff towards teachers and other staff is unacceptable, and it’s unclear what many of these administrators actually do.  Empowering teachers means giving them control over their workplaces as much as legally possible.  Administrators should be subservient and deferential to teachers and other workers, not the other way around.  The teachers union should be a managing partner of District operations, not merely a negotiator for wages.  Teachers electing their own principals, why not?  I can think of few better ways to increase job satisfaction than by making the workers the masters of their workplace, co-equally with parents and neighbors via the Board.

Wisconsin State Budget:

What priorities would you advocate for in the Wisconsin state biennium budget to support the district’s needs?

I expect no good news from a state legislature which will be controlled by right-wing maniacs for the foreseeable future.  We cannot rely on them suddenly deciding to do the right thing after over a decade of the opposite.