I’ve joined the Eau Claire River Watershed Coalition mailing list in order to better understand the challenges facing the Fall Creek Pond. You can join too if you wish by sending a request to either the person running that list, DANIEL P ZERR, or his associate Chris Straight, which is how I got on the list. I see that Village Trustee Karen Herbison is on the list, but don’t recognize any other names as local notables.
I’m going to provide you here with all of the documentation I’ve received thus far from the list. The next Zoom meeting will be held on Dec 8, 2022 03:00 PM. Apparently they only meet via Zoom. Here is the link to join the meeting at the appropriate time, if you’re interested. If I can, I will attempt to record the meeting and provide it to the public. The process for improvement appears to be a fairly slow years-long process, and I’m not quite sure why that is. Perhaps the meeting itself will reveal more.
All of the files that I’ve received so far are shown at the bottom of this post, but I have extracted from them all the parts that specifically mention Fall Creek in the next section, if you don’t want to read through it all. However, I would recommend reading through it all, as Fall Creek is not isolated – what affects the greater Chippewa Valley affects us, and vice-versa.
Note above from the “2018 Plan Accomplishments” reportNotes above from the “late 2018-2019 Plan Accomplishments” reportNotes above from the 2020 “Plan Accomplishments” report
One of my interests in the Village is the state of the Fall Creek Pond. One day, I’d like my kids to be able to play in the pond like they can at Coon Forks or Big Falls, perhaps even with a small beach. Call me a big dreamer.
I’ve done some investigating, and learned that the “scummy” pond water and substantial algae blooms are mostly caused by leakage of nitrates and other runoff compounds from local farmer’s fields into the watershed. These act as nutrients for the “scummy” algae and other plants that have taken over the pond.
I’d like us to do whatever we can to reduce this issue. I see many possible steps forward, including but not limited to:
Potentially increasing the size of the “Riparian Zones” around the creeks and streams that feed into the pond.
Promoting local farmers to not just allow their fields to lie fallow during the winter time, but rather planting cold weather crops after their main crops are harvested to prevent those nitrates from leaving their properties, also potentially giving the farmers increased financial incentives and production on their farms.
Investigate the economic and ecologic viability of the creation of a “Permeable Reactive Barrier” towards the mouth of the pond to keep those nitrates further “upstream”.
Note, that I wish all of these ideas/suggestions/proposed changes should be based on the mutual consent un-coerced of the nearby landowners. The Village should partner with these farmers to create a local goodwill coalition to improve our local watershed. Perhaps a “Fall Creek Watershed Coalition”?
With the permission of Dr. Sanfelippo, Teresa Reetz has been graciously providing me with a copy of the “packets” that the School Board members receive at the beginning of each meeting. I’ve scanned all of the ones for the meetings that I’ve attended for the past six months (I unfortunately could not make it to the October meeting due to a previous obligation.). Below I have provided these for your information and to download at your leisure:
This is a short post to release a pent up frustration that I have. This post may make me some enemies, but I will stand by my statements. Because I am PASSIONATE about our children and their education.
Our priorities as a community are messed up, frankly. Our 190 Middle School students currently have to essentially BEG the public for money to support fields trips that will help in their primary education. PLEASE support them by following the link below:
Apparently, there wasn’t room in the school’s budget to pay for class field trips. However, you know what the sitting School Board did find money for? A pole vault platform:
No need to start a fundraiser for this, no sir! They consider a pole vault platform that will service perhaps a couple dozen students twice as important as the entirety of the Middle School being able to go on their academic field trips for the year.
On a related note, I, an individual parent whose annual salary is roughly equivalent to that of one of our teachers, was able to match and exceed the entirety of the PTO’s “Directed Funds” for the 2020-2021 school year with individual donations over time directly to our teachers, largely funding over a dozen projects that the teachers felt were directly necessary for the education of our children:
While I’m sure that most of the PTO’s projects are worthwhile, only a couple of them appear to directly assist with the education of our children.
And that’s what a School District, and a PTO, should be primarily concerned with. Education. First and foremost. While the other stuff is “nice to have”, it should always come secondary to the direct education of our children’s minds.
While a pole vault is certainly a good thing to have to help train our student’s bodies and coordination, the likelihood of it directly helping them be successful in the workforce is slim.
While it’s important to give to families in need, and to support children during Christmas time, I would think we’d want to make sure that our hard working teachers have EVERYTHING they need to educate our children FIRST and foremost.
This, makes me sad. We can do better. For our children’s education. For their future. I know that we can do better than this. And we should.
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has released (as of two days ago), the scores for the past school year.
I am now providing updated timeline ranking which now includes the new data. Something else that I’d overlooked was the Altoona School District. I could have placed it on the Eau Claire/Chippewa chart, as its proximity is so close to Eau Claire that it can be hard to tell whether you’re in Eau Claire or Altoona. However, I decided that it would make more sense to place it into the “Rural Schools” chart, as that is how the Altoona School District has been “behaving”, more similar to other rural schools than the more “urban” school districts.
As you can see in the chart above, while Chippewa Falls is frankly abysmal, Eau Claire is quickly starting to catch up to our district after many years of worsening failure, matching our climb with their own.
Fall Creek is still showing a positive trend in its ranking compared to other schools in the state, jumping up from 181 to 142. This is good news! We have survived the pandemic, and not only that, the pandemic doesn’t appear to have harmed our position as it has for other school districts. I think that credit goes to our hard working teachers that adjusted to the situation and did fantastic work through remote learning and adjusting to the needs of their students.
However, it’s still not quite caught up with the loss that it suffered between 2013 and 2018, and has a little left to go to catch up to itself from where it was when this data was first recorded back in 2012-13, when it had a rank of 134 out of 423 schools.
Now, let’s look at the rural schools. I’m going to make this one a bit bigger so that you can see more detail:
As you can see, we started in “third place” amongst rural schools, and have so far ended in third place. So, at least, we have maintained our position in the Chippewa Valley. Adding Altoona to this chart is interesting, as it shows that that district has substantially improved since 2013-14 compared with most of the other districts and is now the “top dog” right above Stanley-Boyd.
Conclusion: We’re on a positive path forward. However, I still think we can do better, and certainly better from a state-wide perspective. We should be at the top of the state in how well our district is performing, rather than “third place” in the Chippewa Valley.
You can find my datasheets and charts here, if you’d like to look at the numbers yourself:
The last time that I released information from Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) regarding the Fall Creek School District, I was met with some criticism that I was misinterpreting the data, or that the values didn’t mean what I thought they meant. However, those that made these statements didn’t provide any alternative interpretations of the data to contrast with my analysis. I stand by my past statements that on a hundred point scale, we SHOULD be comparing ourselves based on a standard educational grading system.
If the scale meant something other than that, if for example it was similar to the way that SATs are scored 400 to 1600, or the ACTs are scored 1-36, they would have a point. Or, even, if the schools and districts themselves didn’t actually fall along a 0-100 scale on average, and the schools and districts only ranged between 40 and 80 points, then that should surely be taken into account.
However, that’s not the case. The possible range is from 0-100, and schools and districts absolutely fall within that entire range.
For example, last year’s scores (for the 2020-2021 school year), show that the Swallow school district outside of Waukesha scored an Overall Accountability Score of 96.9, the highest in the state, while our closer neighbor Lake Holcombe, north of Cornell, had the lowest score for that year with a value of 46.9. Fall Creek, meanwhile, was somewhere in the middle of all districts with a value of 72.9, making it district #181 out of 420 districts overall, slightly “above average”, in the 43rd percentile meaning that 43% of schools were “above” us and 57% of schools were “below us” in ranking for this score.
I want the best for my kids, and for yours. As such, I would like to see the Fall Creek School District at the TOP of that list someday. We already do well for our students. My children personally have received excellent care from their teachers, who have been open, honest, and conducive to working with my wife and I to try to get the very best possible outcome for my twins.
However, some have responded to my past data releases with statements similar to “how about us vs. other local districts as opposed to the state of Wisconsin as a whole?” or “it’s not fair to compare us to schools elsewhere in the state”.
This is an absolutely fair point.
As such, and since I’ve had some time to spare for once, I’ve crunched the numbers and plotted them, for your convenience. First, I compared Fall Creek to our other fellow “rural” school districts. Looking at by district-by-district scores, and only looking at the Overall Accountability Scores, which are the amalgam of all of the other scores that the DPI judges our schools on, here’s where the local schools pan out:
We started in “third place” regionally behind Stanley-Boyd (which has been the consistent top regional school) and Elk Mound. And while we in general maintained our score for the most part and had fairly stable numbers over the years (with only a slight trend downwards), other local school districts shot up and started to surpass us, namely Colfax, Osseo-Fairchild, and Cadott. We now sit in “sixth place” in terms of rank using this DPI metric.
Secondly, I performed the same comparison to the Eau Claire and Chippewa School District, as I’m sure we’re all interested in how we fare against our more “metropolitan” neighbors. The results should not be a surprise to anyone:
Aside from a temporary dip in 2015-2016 where Eau Claire surpassed us in this metric, Fall Creek has FAR surpassed the two larger cities in Overall Accountability. So, for this we can be PROUD.
However, I think it is important for us to keep aware of these values, as well as all of the other metrics, and work towards improving them even better.
Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to just have “good feelings” about our schools. I want our schools to be PROVABLY better than the rest. We’re already provably better than Eau Claire and Chippewa. I want to see us push to be better than ALL of the regional schools, and push even further than that to become the best primary academic institutions in the STATE.
I hope you wish the same as well for your children, and mine.
All of my data sheets can be found below, for anyone else that wants to perform their own analysis.
Due to a previously scheduled family event, I will be unable to attend the next School Board meeting. Anyone that may be interested in assisting documentation of the meeting by video recording it, please contact me. I would be more than willing to lend my recording equipment and provide basic training on their functionality if anyone would be willing to step forward for this.
