Category: Culture

The Reporter in Fond du Lac spent much of last week following what was going on at Fond du Lac High School, beginning with …

A peaceful “sit-in” planned for Thursday morning by students at Fond du Lac High School will protest what they perceive as ongoing censorship of the school newspaper.

Students are being asked to gather before 8 a.m. in front of the main office in support of Cardinal Columns, a magazine-style student publication that has gained national attention this school year and earned awards in the process.

The print journalism class at Fondy High has had the April edition ready to go since early this month, but students are waiting for the go-ahead from school administrators.

Principal Jon Wiltzius told the students to remove a photo of a teen with duct-tape over his mouth that illustrates a story on new guidelines for school publications, withhold the name of an 18-year-old student who talked about going through an expulsion hearing, and remove the word “faggot” from art accompanying a story about cyberbullying.

“It was disrespectful,” Wiltzius said of the photo illustration. The principal said he plans to meet with a couple of students to see how school leaders can respond and work collaboratively with students to make sure the sit-in does not disrupt the school day.

Cardinal Columns co-editor Tanvi Kumar said the requested changes have already been made because, at this point, they do not have an option. She said approval of the publication has turned into a lengthy process.

“In the case of the student and the expulsion, administration felt it would be a liability issue, so we are still checking to see if there is any legal precedence to support something like that,” Kumar said.

Kumar won the 2014 Voices of Courage Award from the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault for her work in a recent Cardinal Columns edition titled “The Rape Joke.” The publication also won 11 journalism awards at the Northeastern Wisconsin Scholastic Press Association Conference at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh on April 9.

This is the first publication of Cardinal Columns since school administrators enacted new guidelines following controversy over the “The Rape Joke.” The article focused on rape culture at the high school and included anonymous stories from rape victims. …

Fond du Lac School Board President Elizabeth Hayes agrees the photo illustration was disrespectful and said it “reflects back in a negative way to one or more individuals.” The school board will review the policy in the future — perhaps over summer, Hayes said — but the board has currently been busy dealing with several major board projects, including a new teacher compensation plan and new insurance coverage for employees.

“I think the students are trying to put pressure on the Board,” Hayes said. “They don’t want any oversight and they call it censorship, but these are student learners.”

Wiltzius said he is not personally taking issue with anything, rather that he is following guidelines provided by the School Board that direct the principal to provide oversight of school publications. …

The principal has also asked student writers to start using courtesy titles as part of their work. When a student quotes a school official, the second reference should use “Mr.” or “Mrs.” or “Dr.” instead of using just the last name of the person as is done by newspapers using Associated Press style.

Vince Filak, associate professor in the department of journalism at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, has followed the issue closely. He spoke at Monday’s School Board meeting and asked that school officials “pull the policy and start anew.”

“If censoring a graphic on censorship isn’t a textbook definition of the word ‘irony,’ I’m not sure what is,” Filak said. “The principal said that this photo illustration was ‘disrespectful,’ which even if it’s true, doesn’t come close to passing the muster when it comes to what the law allows him to withhold from the students. I find his actions in this case to be disrespectful of the law and of his students.”

Here’s one of those instances where the professional me could conflict with the parental me … except that there is no conflict. The school district handled this wrong and badly.

I would be curious as to whose definition of “disrespectful” applied here. My past experience covering school boards says it was the district administrator’s, and Hayes is simply repeating what she heard from him. School administrators usually create policy, though school boards have to approve it. There are probably more school boards, at least in Wisconsin, where the school board does what the administration wants rather than the other way around. That’s not a pejorative statement, simply a fact, and possibly ironic since the school board hires the school district administrator.

I did not go around referring to my teachers by their last names without courtesy titles when I was a student. That wasn’t how I was taught to act, by my parents. I fail to see, however, how not including courtesy titles (including “Dr.,” which really offends me when referring only to someone’s terminal degree; I follow the counsel of A. Bartlett Giamatti, Ph.D., former president of Yale University) in a publication, which is not done unless you’re the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, is disrespectful. The only aspect of this I might agree with was the excising of “faggot,” since it has become a four-letter word. (You know, because cigarette smoking is anathema now.)

What lesson were the students taught? Basically that the adults are the bosses. You certainly don’t get a lesson about expressing yourself, even on controversial subjects, or living with the consequences of your free expression when your expression is stifled from above before it even happens. It seems from the other corner of the state is that the administration was embarrassed about “The Rape Joke” because it made the school look bad, and so school administration acted in a heavy-handed fashion, but of course too late to avoid the controversy that started the policy change in the first place.

I write as someone who, as a high school newspaper writer, had a story pulled, but not by the principal (as far as I know). Our journalism teacher, who obviously was the newspaper advisor, pulled a story I wrote about a controversy over our high school cheerleaders’ quitting because of … well, I wish I could remember exactly what the controversy was about. The story got pulled because the teacher thought I should have talked to the cheerleader advisor, one of the school’s teachers. He was right, and so I did, and the story ran one issue later. That’s not censorship; that’s a lesson about how to do journalism the correct way.

You do not teach being an adult or being a citizen very effectively when one of your lessons is that you must submit to authority because they’re authority. If this country’s Founding Fathers had felt that way, we’d still be British subjects. Wiltzius said the Cardinal Columns staff couldn’t adequately explain what the cover was supposed to mean. You don’t suppose students might be a little intimidated and tongue-tied by a trip to the principal’s office? Moreover, what else could the cover possibly be supposed to mean besides censorship of the magazine by the principal?

So what happened Friday?

Fond du Lac High School sophomore Deborah Reid wasn’t about to back down from her plan to protest administrative oversight of the school newspaper.

Accompanied by her father and grandparents, who came all the way from Indiana, the shy, quiet teen stood her ground Thursday morning when school officials forbade a group of approximately 60 students to hold a sit-in outside the school’s main office.

“I’m still willing to stay and fight. What’s happened this morning has made me that much stronger,” Reid said.

Principal Jon Wiltzius told students planning to protest new guidelines that regulate content of student publications — primarily Cardinal Columns — to move out of the hallway into the commons. From there students were herded into the Performing Arts Center, where the principal listened to their concerns and answered questions.

“We just want to make sure that this is not disruptive to the school day,” Wiltzius said. He told students to return to their classes and he would be willing to meet with them in groups over the lunch period.

Under threat of being marked truant and/or receiving tickets for loitering, only about 10 students remained by mid-morning. They moved outside and continued the protest across the street from the school. …

Wiltzius and [district administrator James] Sebert barred the media from entering the PAC while they spoke with students Thursday morning. Sebert explained that, as a school district, they have that right.

Members of Cardinal Columns staff waited outside the PAC to interview students who participated in the protest for a future article. Caitlyn Oestreich said changes to the April edition have been approved and the magazine should be out soon.

“We replaced the photo with a copy of the new policy (guidelines),” Oestreich said. …

Wiltzius said no punishments were issued, but if some students left school without parental permission there would be consequences. About 20 parents were called to notify them of the situation.

Sebert took issue with an article The Reporter published on the front page of Wednesday’s newspaper “promoting the sit-in” and said he wished the newspaper would be “on our side” of the issue.

When asked why he barred media from the morning session with students, but allowed other adults from the public to attend, he said school officials had the right to choose who was allowed to attend and parents were part of the educational process.

Oestreich handled the editorial decision of the cover perfectly. The school did not handle it perfectly, or well at all, by banning the media. (Which would have brought up an interesting conundrum had I lived in the Fond du Lac school district — do they let in Steve the parent, but ban Steve the journalist?) Schools are built with taxpayer dollars, therefore taxpayers, whether or not they are parents, have the right to know what is going on in the schools they’re paying for.

What else is this teaching the Cardinal Columns students? Subversion. The students simply could go to Blogspot or WordPress, start the Cardinal Columns blog, and write whatever they feel like, and at that point it would be an interesting legal question as to whether the school could discipline the students for activity that didn’t occur at school. Of more concern would be the fact that whatever they write under such a scenario wouldn’t be supervised by adults at all, and that opens the door to the possibility of things that fit under the legal category of libel and slander.

(Related side story: Early in my quarter-century journalism career I did a story about the local high school’s underground newspaper, published by a group of students despite the principal’s frowning upon said newspaper. The principal was successful only in forcing the students to distribute it off the school campus … probably about 25 feet or so off campus. Since the principal and I had butted heads about what he thought my job should entail, I jumped on the story immediately. The following issue of the underground paper listed the staff under the heading “Steve Prestegard Fan Club.” I should show that to my kids to prove that I was cool once.)

Oh, one more thing Friday:

Fond du Lac High School Principal Jon Wiltzius has submitted his resignation. It is effective June 30.

Wiltzius will continue in his role as leader of the high school until the end of the school year. He has been employed with the Fond du Lac School District since 1998 and served the past six years as principal.

“I appreciate Jon’s service to the district and certainly wish him well in his future endeavors,” Superintendent Jim Sebert said in a press release. …

Sebert said Wiltzius was not one of two employees whose contracts were non-renewed because of performance issues. The Board held an executive session on teacher non-renewals on April 28.

It should be pointed out that there is nothing that points to a reason for Wiltzius’ resignation. And I mean nothing at all. No mention of another job, no mention of going back to college, no mention of pursuing another line of work, no mention of whether or not Wiltzius’ resignation is tied to the Cardinal Columns controversy. And the silence, I must say as someone who worked in public relations for several years, looks bad, regardless of the facts of Wiltzius’ resignation. The reader of the story about Wiltzius’ resignation will wonder why he’s leaving, and why the announcement came in the middle of this. Of course, the school district isn’t exactly earning any consideration from The Reporter anyway given the school district’s banning media from the building and then asking the Reporter to be “on our side.” Asking the news media to be on the side of the censors (and this is censorship, because only government can censor) … well, let’s just say that probably wasn’t the best-thought-out statement of Mr. Sebert’s life.

You may think at this point that the students made a mistake by pushing the administration’s buttons by proposing an intellectually provocative cover. Perhaps they did. Children make bad decisions. (So do adults.) Bad decisions, and the consequences thereof, are supposed to be learning experiences. The students involved didn’t learn much other than adults asserting their authority for what really wasn’t a good rationale.

Walt Hickey discusses geographic self-identification:

Here’s a somewhat regular argument I get in: Which states make up which regions of the United States? Some of these regions — the West Coast, Mountain States, Southwest and Northeast are pretty clearly defined — but two other regions, the South and the Midwest, are more nebulous.

I’m from New York, and I generally consider anything west of Philadelphia the Midwest. This admittedly unsophisticated designation is frequently criticized by self-avowed Midwesterners. My boss, originally of Michigan, has many opinions about what, precisely, falls into the Midwest. So I decided to find out which states Midwesterners consider to be in their territory.

To get this broad-based view, we asked SurveyMonkey Audience to ask self-identified Midwesterners which states make the cut. We ran a national survey that targeted the Midwest from March 12 to March 17, with 2,778 respondents. Of those, 1,357 respondents  identified “a lot” or “some” as a Midwesterner. We then asked this group to identify the states they consider part of the Midwest.

There are a lot of things here worth looking into. First, many people aren’t too sure about where the core of the Midwest is. Everybody selected at least one state for the question. But even Illinois — home of the preeminent Midwestern city, Chicago — was identified as Midwestern by just about 80 percent of respondents. …

Several self-proclaimed Midwestern sources I spoke with have a very limited definition of the Midwest: namely, their state and any state bordering it. Minnesotans thought they made up the true Midwest; Hoosiers thought they did. I can’t say either way. …

Indiana, Iowa and Illinois appear to be the core of the Midwest, each pulling more than 70 percent of the vote (that may partly be because of their substantial populations). Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota each pulled at least 60 percent of the vote, so we can probably put them in the Midwest without too much fuss. Ohio, Missouri and Kansas each got more than half.

As for the rest of the states, it seems unclear whether they’re in the true Midwest.

If anything, the Midwest is as nebulous as I’d expected. Too often, people refer to vast swaths of American territory as a solid region. It’s easy to break Americans into tribes such as “Midwestern,” but there are more subdivisions and diversity in these groupings than we generally acknowledge.

The first and most obvious question: If Wisconsin isn’t in the Midwest, where are we? The Great White North? (Better not answer that one. For this week we’re in The Great Gray North.)

This comes up when comparing states of the Midwest on such issues as business climate, because to compare Midwestern states, you have to define “Midwestern.”

One obvious definition would be to use the states of the Big Ten Conference — Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. Well, that’s the old Big Ten Conference, until Penn State joined. (Even though it could be argued that maybe western Pennsylvania is sort of Midwestern, but eastern Pennsylvania definitely is not.) Then Nebraska joined the now-Big T1e2n; Nebraska might be in the Midwest, but it’s also part of the Plains. And now that definition is obsolete with Rutgers and Maryland joining next year. No one with any brain cells thinks Maryland and New Jersey are in the Midwest.

Missouri seems to be in the Midwest according to the sports media, at least the sports media covering the St. Louis Cardinals. If Nebraska is in the Midwest, what about Kansas to the south and the Dakotas to the north? And what about Kentucky, which is mostly equidistant to the upper Midwest as Missouri?

I haven’t experienced this personally, but I’ve read numerous times that southern Illinois and Indiana seem to some more like the South — again, however you define that — than the Midwest.

This also comes up in, of all places, weather. The Farmers Almanac puts Wisconsin and everything else Midwest that is east of the Mississippi River in the “Midwest/Great Lakes.” West of that is the “North Central U.S.”

The Old Farmers Almanac divides the country into 18 weather areas …

… with Wisconsin split thrice. We southwesterners are supposedly in the Heartland, while Milwaukee and thereabouts are in the Lower Lakes, and the rest of the state is in the Upper Midwest.