When she became president of the District 186 Board of
Education, Cheryl Wise shifted her seat three spaces to the right. Her old
seat, at the end of the board table, is now occupied by outgoing board
President Judy Johnson. Now, whether she or anyone else likes it, Wise is
front and center — and both she and Johnson will have to get used to
the change. Johnson, a straight-talking board veteran, has often
used her position to speak her mind on such controversial issues as racial
profiling. But where Johnson has made some uneasy in her
outspokenness, Wise plays her cards closer to the vest. She’s tougher
to read — and that scares people. In 2004, Wise offered up the idea of ending
Springfield’s busing program, which had been the district’s
solution to a mandate to desegregate its schools. At the time, members of
the school board, as well as people in the community, said that Wise should
have discussed her idea with others before floating it at a public meeting,
creating a brief public-relations nightmare for the district. Wise again ruffled feathers last month when she
decided to run for the school-board presidency. She brokered a deal with
Republicans on the officially unpartisan board whereby they’d support
Wise for president if she took on board member Cindy Tate as vice
president. At that meeting, several audience members, including
Springfield NAACP president Ken Page, called Wise a racist. It was all the buzz for about a day and a half. Now that the dust has settled — or so Wise
hopes — still very little is known about the new board president. One on one, she is relaxed and articulate, even
congenial. When she’s in the spotlight — be it on a morning
radio talk show or in front of a newspaper photographer — she falters
and has difficulty expressing herself. Most who have worked alongside her believe Wise to be
well intentioned. Cinda Klickna, secretary-treasurer of the Illinois
Education Association, worked briefly with Wise. “Her heart is in the right place, she cares
about students, and, with her background in finances, she is always looking
for money-saving options,” Klickna says, “so she often asks
some tough questions and ones that may cause controversy if they
aren’t understood in their context.”
The 47-year-old board president last week allowed Illinois Times pick her brain,
talking candidly about her plans for the District 186 school board.
Bridging the gap
In 1976, a federal court ordered the desegregation of
Springfield’s District 186, a ruling that led to district-wide
busing. Two years ago, Wise broached the idea of ending the
busing program in the district of 14,000 students, saying that children
might benefit from attending schools in their neighborhoods. Her rationale: Ending busing could also help close
the so-called academic-achievement gap between black and white students and
students of varying economic backgrounds. Since her proposal, Springfield’s black student
population has grown to 38 percent. Meanwhile, the number of white students
in Springfield schools continues to fall. Wise’s opinion, at least with regard to a
community-based approach, hasn’t changed much. Though Wise is no
longer calling for an end to busing, she believes that Springfield’s
communities are more diverse now than they were in the ’70s.
She clarifies her side of the conversation with
former board president Johnson, who has said that Wise told her that during
her tenure she focused too much on minority issues: “I don’t think [Johnson] focused too
much, but I am starting to worry about students who are already achieving,
so to speak — whether they’re being challenged, whether
they’re moving along. “There’s a misperception out there that
I’m for segregation, and that’s not true at all,” she
says. Wise points to her own Washington Park neighborhood
as proof, saying that if Springfield’s African-American population is
12 to 15 percent, “I would say that we’re pretty close to that,
so maybe where I live is just a little bit different from everywhere else
in town and there’s a lot more diversity in our neighborhoods now
than there was 30 years ago — there was practically none. “The areas where I drive regularly — to
work, to the grocery store, down MacArthur — there are plenty of
black people I see all the time, so I don’t feel that there’s a
segregation of neighborhoods like there used to be, but I truly believe
that a community needs to get around its students, its children to help
them achieve. “It hasn’t helped the community to
support its children by packing them on a bus and sending them across town.
I don’t think it supports families that way.”
Would it be acceptable, then, if schools were
racially segregated yet meeting adequate yearly progress standards set
forth by the No Child Left Behind Act? Wise, who was one of an experimental group of white
students bused to Southeast High School, says that the experience was great
for her. “I had never been around black people, so
it’s great for people like me. I don’t know if just going to
school with a white person makes a black person automatically smarter. “It depends on who are you are, if that’s
an issue for you.”
School bored
Board meetings are usually not very interesting for
the average person, Wise admits. They’re also long. For those who’ve never
attended one, the public meeting begins at 6:45 with comments from the
president of the board and special recognitions, followed by acronym-heavy
presentations, approval of new district policies, and reports from the
board president, superintendent, and business manager. On a good night, the meeting is
adjourned around 8 p.m. Before that, board members have already batted around
personnel and student-discipline issues during a closed executive session.
Wise, who works part-time as an accountant and has
two sons — one in grade school, the other in high school — with
her husband, Peter, thinks the agenda can be streamlined to make meetings
run more efficiently. “We’re there from 5:30, so by 8:30 or 9
we’re ready to go — or, at least, I am. It makes for a very
long day. I’m just trying to make it so that our volunteer efforts
are as efficient as can be.”
One solution she will propose is to have “board
salutes,” where board members give special recognition, once a month
instead of at every meeting. She also wants to skip roll-call votes on
every issue and use unanimous consent more. “Right now our meetings are business meetings
and there’s no real opportunity to interact with constituents, and it
would be nice to give people an opportunity to come in and say, ‘This
is really good’ or ‘No, we don’t like this.’
“I think it would be really great,” she
says, to hear the voices of students and parents. To that end, she proposes
adding a student-advisor position, likely a high-schooler, to the board and
holding quarterly town-hall-style meetings with parents. On Tuesday, the board got on board with Wise’s
proposals for streamlining the meetings. Next Wise will introduce her ideas
for improving student achievement, which the six remaining members of the
board would have to agree to before they can be implemented. “This is how I see it; I’m not the
consensus of the board,” Wise says. Rudy Davenport, president of the Springfield NAACP
during Wise’s controversial busing proposal, isn’t sure the
board can now reach a consensus. In his view, Wise’s credibility both
on the board as well as in the community is ruined. “Everyone I have talked to seems to think that
bringing the issue up two years ago didn’t do any good and it
wasn’t any good how [Wise] became president of the board,”
Davenport says. Although it may have helped solidify her decision,
attending a Sunday-school class, as the State
Journal-Register reported recently,
wasn’t the catalyst for her choosing to run for school-board
president, Wise says.
“No, no, no,” she says. “I never
— well, I shouldn’t say that I don’t ever — but
it’s not very often that I make a rash decision. I’d given it
some serious thought last year, when I became vice president. Typically,
that’s the path.”
Though it was not a “great aspiration” of
hers to even serve on the school board, Wise says, three years ago, when
she did run, she won 65 percent of the vote in a four-way race. “‘You earned the most votes out of all of
us — would you like to be president?’ ” Wise says a
fellow board member asked. “I did not want to be school-board
president then, not as a brand-new school-board member.”
As time passed, Wise decided to work toward achieving
a comfort level with what she knew would be a sizable learning curve
serving on the school board.
“If you’re just a person off the street
like me, you don’t know the ins and outs of the running of a school
district, and so there’s a lot to learn. I thought, ‘After the
first year I’ll feel comfortable in this position,’ and really
it took two years to really learn what to expect and how the system
works.”
In fact, running for board president involved a lot
of thought, Wise says because she knew that overcoming her fears would be a
challenge. “I don’t really like to get up in front
of people and talk, so that’s going to be a challenge for me —
so I had concerns about that.”
Then Wise’s mother died, and Wise wondered
about the wisdom of taking on the responsibility of running board meetings:
“I didn’t know if I was ready for that, because her death was
quite unexpected.”
To be sure, she’ll have to grow out of her
shyness as the new public face of the District 186 school board, where she
views the board’s role as a conduit for voices of the community. She says that she and other members of the education
community are just hoping to remain focused and knuckle-down to get as much accomplished
as possible in the next month, before the school year ends. Robin Ehrhart, president of the Springfield Education
Association, wants the board to take a team approach and work on building
relationships with each other, as well as the district. The community, Ehrhart says, is certainly part of the
team. As a somewhat controversial figure, Wise isn’t
sure whether her serving as a board president will translate into increased
attendance by members of the community. Sheila Stocks-Smith, education liaison to Mayor Tim
Davlin and the organizer of recent local education seminars, expects
Wise’s presence to reinvigorate the discussion of student
achievement. “Members of the community are concerned and
will be paying closer attention. I’m optimistic that these issues
will be highlighted. Stocks-Smith says the district has to move past
Wise’s election and move forward. However, there was one more change at this
week’s meeting. According to District 186 Superintendent Diane
Rutledge, several board and community members requested that a Springfield
police officer provide security at the meetings.
This article appears in May 4-10, 2006.
