Wisconsin Way Kenosha Forum Excerpt

On December 4, 2007 The Wisconsin Way held a forum at the Parkway Chateau to solicit comments from the public about how to address the need to control taxes and maintain the level of services throughout Wisconsin. The following is an excerpt from that forum.

Speaker 16:
Michael Orth

I’m a teacher in Kenosha. First, we have to call off the dogs. We have to stop beating each other down. For me, as a teacher, the dogs came out in 1983 with “A Nation at Risk”. They said the schools in America are failing. No they weren’t. The crisis they pretended was there made people scared of what was happening, when they didn’t need to be. Right now we’re terrified about social security. The solution is there; politicians need to find the answer. How is it that in the 1950s, when business taxes were extremely high, we managed to build over half of the schools in the city of Kenosha? Why? There was a shared responsibility there, a community responsibility. Sally Heideman talked about the need for community. That’s right. We need community to be rebuilt. We all had a chuckle about the list of things schools are being asked to do; it’s because the community needs those things to be done. We need those services. The question is what is fairness? Fairness is people getting what they need, not everybody getting the same thing. Poor people need more than the well off. The kid in the inner city needs a lot more than I do or my children will ever need. We need to take care of those kids, because if we don’t, they end up in the prisons. Prisons aren’t on the face a bad thing. People need to be incarcerated who make legal infractions. But that’s not the solution for the future; that’s reactive. We need to get in front of things. We watched a video with Bob Lafayette, a Progressive Republican. Where is that combination today? We need it. We need people to step up. We also need Democrats to move back to the middle. There’s got to be a common ground that we can find. In the old days of campaigns, people got together at the end of the day. When social security was solved temporarily in the 80s, Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill got together to solve that problem. Why can’t we do that today? At the national level, I don’t see it happening, but it has to happen at the local level. If we don’t do it now, where are we going to be 25 or 50 years from now? Another concern is that I continually hear people talk about business models. But a business model in education does not work. We cannot cut our losses. They’re our kids. In business, cutting your losses is the right move to make. When you see that’s not going anywhere, stop investing. We have to keep investing in education. We can’t just pare back; it’s not an option. It’s not an option for the future.

As we go forward looking for solutions, the Wisconsin Way is an awesome thing. It’s an amazing feat that the sponsoring organizations have come together to do this. If the big dogs can call off the dogs, come together to work together, and come up with solutions for the state, we’re all going to be better off. Thank you for doing this and I hope this doesn’t go away. I will be with the Wisconsin Way all the way. We need to get Wisconsin moving forward again. Wisconsin isn’t just a way, it’s a promise. We made a promise to future generations, your grandparents and parents; I made that promise to my kids. We have to keep Wisconsin strong. Bring business and education on board and let’s keep it going.

For more information on The Wisconsin Way check out their web page http://www.wisconsinway.org