Fred Wildnauer, Witchtrot Road, is running for the one open seat as a South Berwick representative to the SAD 35 Board of Directors
See all the236diner stories on the 2009 elections
The following are Wildnauer’s answers to the questions posed by the236diner:
-Tell us something about yourself?
Thanks, Molly, for offering me this forum. I have thought long and hard about this and am excited to share some of my thoughts with those who visit the diner.
I am a product of public education – graduated from a small high school in a class of 120. I went to Bucknell University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. I am married to Patti Mitchem. We moved to South Berwick in 1984. My cabinet making business was in a rented shop in Durham. When that burned down, my neighbors suggested I rework the crumbling chicken barn on our property into a woodshop so I could be home with my two young daughters. That was 21 years ago and we have made a life here. Both our daughters went through the MSAD schools, graduating from the new high school. My oldest, Johanna, may have been in the first class to start and finish in the new building. My very first public participation was to be part of an ad hoc committee to drum up grass roots support for the building. No mistake there! Johanna went on to Saint Michaels College where she graduated with a degree in business and environmental studies in 2008. Maggie is now a senior at Johns Hopkins University majoring in Civil Engineering.
-What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities facing MSAD 35?
An obvious challenge is the budget. Most likely the recession we are in has sharpened our focus on the budget. But we have always had that challenge and always will. What I really would like to address is what we are supposed to be doing here – educating our children. I believe passionately and strongly in education. I don’t believe you can be too smart. We do a very good job educating in MSAD 35 – above the state average in every way you measure it. But we can be better. As St Jerome said (supposedly): “Good, better, best. Never rest, till the good be better and the better, best” We need to challenge our students, our teachers, our staff and , not least, ourselves to be better. As a society, we are failing. Our education system, which used to be the envy of the world, is now in the middle of the pack while societies with fewer resources are doing so much better, not just in the easily measured math and science, but in arts and letters. The big challenge we face is preparing our students to solve the huge problems we have left for them. Pick any issue in the world – energy, religion, security, family, etc. – and you’ll find complex problems that can only be solved by people with the ability to learn and to think creatively. When I go to school board meetings I am amazed that not everyone sees the incredible responsibility and opportunity we have in preparing these young minds. I want to be a part of that.
One of the reasons Americans are falling behind the Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Japanese, and others in education is that those societies have a deeply ingrained belief in education. Our challenge is to restore our belief in education to the levels it was when American education was the envy of the world. This starts on the local level. I waited until my daughters were out of MSAD 35 schools to run for school board because I knew I would be such a fierce advocate for their education that I would not be objective enough. I want to harness that fierce advocacy in the service of all our students. The biggest challenge we need to overcome is to get every tax payer to see just how important education is. If we rise to that challenge, all others will be so much easier.
-If you are elected, what priorities will you have for your term in office?
My first priority will be to hold our students and staff to the highest standards possible. We graduate 93% of our students; I want to find out what happened to the other 7%. I want to figure out a way to squeeze that sponge that soaks up our property taxes until we’ve gotten every drop of education out of it. I want to inject excitement and optimism back into education. I want to figure out a way to get those who want to teach to give to those who want to learn and I want every teacher to want to teach and every student to want to learn.
Next, I would like the schools to be good citizens in the towns. It is not enough to just educate our kids. A school community that is actively involved in the towns they serve gives practical experience to their charges on becoming contributing members of society. The schools teach this lesson by example.
Next, I want the school board to assume that the town is not against them. Perhaps I am naïve, but I believe we all have the same goal here and we can and should work together. It is not us versus them. This is especially true in these tough economic times. Part of the problem as I see it is that some of the policies of the school board do not encourage transparency. I’m not sure what can be done about it, but these policies did not come down off the mountain on clay tablets – they were made by the hand of men and certainly can be changed.
High on my list is an examination of the reason we negotiate long term contracts with the teachers. Economic cycles seem much shorter and a long term contract makes us less able to adjust.
If I get elected, one of the first things I would like to do is to have the superintendent arrange a fact finding trip for me and any other interested school board member. I would like to go to each of our schools and visit with teachers, administrators, staff and students to see how the schools work and what concerns are evident.
-What strengths, skills, and qualifications would you bring to the office?
I believe that I have problem solving skills and the ability to think creatively that comes from 25 plus years running a successful business. I have an entrepreneurial work ethic and a predisposition to totally involve myself in a project. I have always enthusiastically embraced new technology and am very comfortable with computers including design, spreadsheet and word processing programs. While I don’t think anyone truly sees the complete potential of the internet, I believe it is the greatest revolution we have seen in my lifetime and I am totally committed to its use. This technology is no substitute for books and magazines. I just recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success , a book assigned by the superintendent to the faculty and the school board. I was moved and energized by this book. There are great ideas here that we could apply today.
My only qualification is that I believe it is the community’s responsibility to educate all its children and that I helped raise two human beings who love to learn and who seem to be capable and productive members of society. With rights come responsibilities. I owe a debt to the schools for how they helped raise my children and its time to pay down that debt. I will bring a slightly different perspective to the school board as a reasonably successful business owner and parent.
-MSAD 35 accounts for the largest portion of our property taxes and many residents express concern that the MSAD 35 budget is large and continues to grow. How will you address these concerns if you are elected?
I think it is unrealistic to think of education as a business so standard business solutions don’t apply completely. If we think unemotionally about the budget, we see that increases in budgets are mostly unavoidable. We all know from our own lives that insurance costs go up, energy costs go up and many consumer items go up in price as a reflection of costs of materials, transportation and labor. Like most of us can in our personal budgets, the schools can postpone purchases, look for the best deal, take advantage of economies of scale by forming “buying clubs”, look farther afield for extremely competitive pricing and put everything out to bid to force as low a price as possible. We certainly must employ these methods in order to save as much money as possible. The biggest portion of the school budget is labor costs. Our school employees are also tax payers and are facing the same personal financial pressures we all face. We have to pay them enough to live in our communities. Can we freeze their pay or eliminate their jobs? Those are the tough questions we may have to ask.
We see some consumer items getting cheaper and cheaper with quality getting better and better. You only need look at flat screen TV’s and other electronic gadgets. Much of this perceived price fall is due to improved manufacturing technology but much of the race to the lowest price is because of the “Walmart-ization” of the market forcing producers to move their plants to ever cheaper labor markets. We can’t apply this kind of market force to education. We cannot “outsource” education (although I read that some school districts in parts of our country that can’t attract teachers are going to the Philippines and other countries to recruit teachers for their classrooms). We need to educate our tax payers to understand that forces that drive costs down in the consumer world cannot be harnessed in our schools.
Another pressure on our school budget is technology. Moore’s Law states that the amount of transistors that can be placed on a circuit board doubles approximately every two years. This drives the cost of all technology down. A graphic example is computers from the 1960’s had only hundreds of thousands of bytes of storage, took up hundreds of square feet and costs millions of dollars. Now the same computer power is in your cell phone and cost lest than a hundred dollars. This makes us believe that if we wait to invest in the newest technology, the cost will be much less. Yet these advances in technology were made by the early adopters of the very technology that was improved. Unfortunately, schools must be the early adopters so they end up possibly buying technology when it’s the most expensive or, worse yet, buying the technology that doesn’t become the standard (remember 8 track tape!). Often new technology requires an infrastructure upgrade. While we need to make smart decisions on our technology, it is more important that we jump in. However, one of the great things about being an early adopter is that often the supplier of the new technology is anxious to get their products into the schools just to see what creative and challenged students will do with it. It is important for our administration to search out those deals and jump on them.
The school budget is a yearly event but we must not lose site of the future. There is spending that we do now that will save money down the road. You might look at this a pre-emptive maintenance. We have such a spending proposal on this ballot. We are being asked to approve a school bond for 3.2 million dollars. There will be a district meeting to explain this bond to the public on October 27 but I would like to quickly address this as an example of smart spending. Bonds seem to upset taxpayers because a bond obligates us to a scheduled payment. We cannot postpone bond payments in a bad economy but we can postpone some major building maintenance projects until we feel we can afford them. Sometimes that can be penny wise and pound foolish. This is such a case if the debt is not looked at in its long term context. This bond is being funded through the normal channels by that famous federal stimulus package that we’ve heard so much about. Washington is making this money available to the state with the promise of tax breaks to the banks that loan it out for “shovel ready” energy projects. Our district has 3.2 million dollars of shovel ready projects on the books. This was the product of a study the district commissioned so it would know what projects they should anticipate (a list is available to down load from Eric Pelchat’s South Berwick Update Forum ). Some of these projects would result in immediate savings; some in longer term savings and some will just bring our old buildings up to current code but not necessarily result in savings. The stimulus package money is structured in such a way that not only will we be able to get a loan at no interest but we will be able to earn interest on our payments on the loan (this was explained to me by Dr. Bearden – I encourage anyone interested in the long explanation of this to attend the public meeting on the 27th). Figuring very small interest rates, we could save another bunch of money over the 15 year life of the bond. We are also saving money because the 0% interest on the bond is much less than inflation (assuming current inflation rates). Finally, because of the general slow down in the construction business it is very possible that the actual price of the work will be lower than the estimates. Just using very conservative estimates, if we do all the work that was approved for the bond, we might get 3.2 million dollars of work for 2.8 or even 2.2. We are obligated for the bond payment, but this money could easily come out of the contingency money budgeted every year for needed building repairs. Nobody sees any new school construction in the foreseeable future and the majority of our buildings are old. Here we have an opportunity to do necessary work on our buildings and possibly save a third of the cost by taking advantage of this bond. And as an additional benefit, we will save some operating costs and avoid more costly repairs in the future. This is more than smart spending, this is brilliant spending. We need to tell our citizens that we are not only careful about how we spend their money, but that we are spending it wisely.
It is almost impossible to increase revenue. Perhaps some of the extra-curricular activities could figure out a way to be self funding. Tuitioning students from Traip Academy has a revenue potential, but we can’t count that chicken until it’s hatched. That being said, it would be interesting to look at everything the schools are involved in – athletics, extra-curricular activities, etc. and see if there is a revenue stream there that has just never been tapped.
There are people in our community who feel as I do – that education is the most important thing we do. I would love to reach out to those folks not just as mentors but as resources for our schools. Look at the success that the Marshwood Educational Foundation has already had. We need to actively search out resources in our community, our government and the private sector nation wide if necessary. Perhaps these resources could be used to plug the holes budget cuts may force on us or perhaps these resources might actually help fund some part of our education process. How about a booster club for education?
The school board’s job is education and this might now include educating our citizens. I believe in the power of education to solve even this problem.
-If you could change one thing about how the school board operates during your tenure in office, what would it be?
What I would like to change is the attitude of the school board. We need a more upbeat, positive school board and that we need to figure out how we can rather than why we can’t. I read recently that optimism prevails only when people are engaged and excited. I want our school board to be engaged and excited. I want the optimism then generated to be contagious and spread into every corner of our schools and our towns. I’m not sure I know enough yet about the rules that govern the operation of the school board to suggest procedural changes. Maybe our school board members have been too long dealing with the mundane tasks of defending budgets and dealing with the mind-numbing rules and regulations that govern education. Perhaps our members are burned out. That is the main reason for change. I want to rekindle that optimism by injecting a little excitement, passion and even humor into the board. Our school board needs to be part of the nation wide rebuilding of its infrastructure. As Bob Herbert said in an op-ed piece in Saturday’s New York Times:
“America has to be rebuilt, modernized and re-energized — from its water and sewer systems to its schools to the smart grid and the alternative energy sources that so many are talking about and beyond. That’s where the jobs are for the long term, and that’s the only route to a truly flourishing future.
These investments would be costly and require vision. Seeing them through would take an enormous collective effort by politicians and the public alike. But some variation on these themes is absolutely essential if the U.S. is to pull itself out of the economic quicksand and its long-term, potentially very tragic consequences.”
The intent of Maine school law, according to the Maine School Board Handbook, is that school boards “….concentrate on big-picture educational policy decisions…” If the MSAD School Board approaches that task with optimism and enthusiasm then, with the help of the community as a whole, our children will get the opportunities and education necessary to move to a truly flourishing future.
I would like to have a school board more open to discussion. While school board meetings are not seminars in educational theory, I believe some constructive dissension would raise the level of engagement. Too often, controversial issues are decided unanimously. I understand the necessity of appearing united to the public, but I also see that the public would feel better knowing that the tough decisions were made in a thoughtful and serious manner with all sides of the issue examined.
