(The Center Square) – Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction framed its new Portrait of a Graduate initiative from a steering committee that included employers and those in Wisconsin’s industries that would help frame what graduates need to know.
But the steering committee actually included just one member of private industry in Wisconsin, Sargento’s Anne Troka, along with 26 public employees from the state, according to the response to a records request from The Dairyland Sentinel.
The committee is filled with high school teachers and members of the Family, Career and Community Leaders of America along with members of state agencies such as the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
DPI presented the initiative as an effort to define the “knowledge, skills and experience” that graduates need to be prepared for “college, careers, community leadership and civic life.”
Rather than providing the list of 27 members of the steering committee, DPI made Dairyland Sentinel’s question a public records request.
“Shifting a routine press question into the statutory open records track is a classic government delay tactic,” Dairyland Sentinel wrote. “It allowed DPI to avoid answering immediate questions during the launch week, effectively killing the immediate news cycle and buying the department weeks of silence while they promoted their unvetted narrative through friendly channels.”
The department also said that there were no documents showing the selection process or criteria to be invited to join the committee.
Critics questioned the initiative when it was announced because it didn’t mention basics such as improving reading, writing or math scores.
Questions surrounding the new initiative follow Dairyland Sentinel’s questions related to a 2024 Forward Exam standards-setting conference in the Wisconsin Dells that has led to a lawsuit over a potential Open Meetings Act violation involving the conference as well as a multiple year battle over public records related to DPI’s efforts to keep details of the $369,000 conference hidden from the public.
IRG’s General Counsel and Director of its Center for Investigative Oversight Jake Curtis told The Center Square in February that he believed the 88-member standards-setting group filled with school employees and leaders fits the exact definition of an Ad Hoc Committee and that meetings of that committee should be public and not subject to the non-disclosure agreements signed by conference attendees.
Dairyland Sentinel has asked Wisconsin’s Department of Justice to intervene on a public records request related to the conference that the outlet believes is still incomplete.
Dairyland Sentinel Publisher Brian Fraley previously told The Center Square that he believes there are minutes and recordings from the conference that should be public records that DPI has not released related to its workshop and that he plans to continue to fight for those records.
