Updates on Schools & More Bread
Updates on Schools & More Bread
And get hype for a farm tour!
Good morning bread friends.
I’ve got some exciting news for this week! Tomorrow, I’m going to be taking a tour of the farm where we get our flour from.
The majority of the flour that I use to make your bread each week comes from just about 40 miles away at Meadowlark Farm & Mill. I learned about Meadowlark's flour during the first year that I was baking. At the time I was just looking for flour that would make my bread taste a little bit more interesting and would include more of the nutrition from whole wheat flour. Only later did I learn about how valuable it is that they have a practice of regenerative farming. These days I’m really proud to be using flour that is additive to our ecosystem and food economy rather than extractive.
You can expect that I’ll have a bunch more to share next week about this tour of their farm. I’ll post pictures from my day tomorrow on my instagram @bakingmo, so feel free to follow along if you're interested.
After my last newsletter about school funding and the importance of this upcoming Madison Schools referendum, I got several reply emails with encouragement, questions, and feedback.
First, let me say that I ALWAYS appreciate getting replies to these newsletters. It is a joy to get to exchange ideas and field your questions. Some of those questions prompted me to sit down yesterday with one of America’s foremost authorities on school law and funding… who happens to live right here in Madison. Julie Underwood, the former dean of the UW-Madison School of Education, was kind enough to sit down with me over a long coffee meeting to discuss the state of Wisconsin’s school funding formula.
In short, Wisconsin’s funding for schools is broken. I could write a couple thousand words about that part, and how/why elected officials in the Capitol are choosing to keep the system broken. However, we discussed some of those challenges in last week's newsletter. And honestly, I don't want to rehash that and run the risk of discouraging you all.
After a long conversation about all the ways that we got to the place of having chronically and intentionally underfunded public schools, Julie leaned forward holding her coffee with a big smile.
“Do you know what’s at the bottom of Pandora’s box?”, she asked me.
(I didn’t, so there was a long pause)
“Hope!” She said emphatically.
And that is what I needed to hear.
The Wisconsin State Constitution currently has an education clause, which the Wisconsin Supreme Court has interpreted to mean giving all children equitable access to an adequate education.
There are plenty of people hard at work ensuring that we’re upholding this standard.
An important step for us will be to have a state legislature committed to living up to that responsibility. With the adoption of our fair maps this year, this November we hopefully will have a lot more members of the state legislature who will see the wisdom in repairing our state funding formula, and will be less motivated to be hoarding the 7 billion dollar state surplus that we’re currently holding on to for purely political reasons.
If public sentiment is clearly in favor of it, we should be able to hold our state legislators to adequately fund schools fairly across the state. These aren't brand-new ideas. This isn't new uncharted territory that requires policy innovation. Plenty of states have more fair funding for schools than Wisconsin. And organizations like Wisconsin Public Education Network have clear proposals already in place that policymakers could use as a starting place for drafting a sustainable funding formula. Heck, the Department of Public Instruction has been proposing a funding formula change. You can read about that Fair Funding Formula here, which was first proposed by Tony Evers when he was state superintendent. This would move us beyond playing politics with our student's education every budget cycle.
We also need a Wisconsin Supreme Court that will hold the legislature accountable to a just and generous interpretation of the constitutional requirement to provide students across the state with an equal opportunity for a sound basic education. Supreme Court elections are in April of 2025. You can expect me to have more to say about that when the time comes.
For now, I want to put on your radar a couple of opportunities to get more information about these specific school referenda. If you know anyone who has more questions about what voting Yes will support, or what the consequences of voting No might be, you might encourage them to check out one of these upcoming public meetings:
MMSD is hosting a public meeting today at Cherokee Heights Middle School
Date: Thursday, Sept. 19
Time: 6:00 – 7:00 p.m.
I’ll likely be there tonight
Wisconsin Policy Forum & Downtown Madison Inc is hosting another meeting in October at the Edgewater
Date: October 17, 2024
Time: 6:00 – 7:30 p.m.
And as always... if you know anyone who likes eating great bread... and might be excited to know that the profits from the bread that they're buying are going towards efforst to build a more just society... please tell them to sign up for this newsletter!
Oh - and tell them they can buy bread right now, for pickup on this Saturday!
I know that I buried the lead on order bread ordering today, but I was excited to share the rest of that news with you all. Click here if you just want to order bread 🥖😎
See you soon! Thanks for being an awesome part of this Bread & Justice community!
Cheers!
Mo
Community Baker just trying to get good things done for our community