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Waunakee DEI committee reviews year-two plan; community group donates new pride flags
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Summary
The Waunakee Community School District DEI steering committee presented a draft year-two action plan that includes student surveys with Equal Opportunity Schools, expanded K–4 instruction, restorative-practices training, and family-engagement work. A local group, 1 Key Idea, offered to donate a new set of pride flags for June display.
The Waunakee Community School District DEI steering committee reviewed a draft work plan for the coming year and accepted a donation of new pride flags from a local group during the committee meeting on Monday, May 19.
Gina Pagel, a teacher at Arboretum Elementary School and a member of the community group 1 Key Idea, told the committee that “the 1 key idea has purchased new ones” and said the group would like to “donate these to the district so that the district can continue to, celebrate pride month for the month of June.” The committee recorded public comment on the donation but did not take a separate formal vote to accept it during the meeting.
The draft plan presented to the committee focused on expanding and sustaining initiatives begun in year one. Tiffany, a district staff member who led the presentation, said the document is a “really, really rough draft” and described priorities organized by what can be completed in year one versus multi-year efforts. She said the district intends to keep certain training annual: “So that’s something we wanna make sure that we do every single year,” referring to the district’s speak-up training on interrupting bullying and harassment.
Tim Shell, the district’s secondary curriculum director, described the district’s planning work with the nonprofit Equal Opportunity Schools. “Their main focus is on increasing access to rigorous coursework, specifically AP and dual credit courses,” Shell said, and he said the partnership will include an administrative data review and a student survey in the fall that is not anonymous. Shell said the survey will produce an “insight card” for each student to inform counseling and course registration conversations.
Committee discussion and the draft plan covered several areas: - Professional development: continuing annual refreshers for speak-up training, expanding developmentally appropriate lessons for K–4 students, and additional online learning modules for staff. The committee proposed a summer work group to prepare K–4 materials ahead of the school year. - Curriculum access: working with Equal Opportunity Schools to reduce barriers to AP and dual-credit enrollment, including changes to prerequisite practices and using insight cards to guide student counseling before course registration. - Student engagement and MSAN: continuing participation in the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN), supporting student attendance at national conferences, and using student-led action plans to guide district priorities. - Restorative practices: expanding training beyond current administrative and student-services staff to reach more classroom teachers and school-based staff; a future January professional development day may focus on restorative practices and building classroom community. - Family and community engagement: improving multilingual communications, exploring text-messaging options for family outreach, offering parent trainings on topics such as the harassment policy, and producing a quarterly DEI steering-committee newsletter. - Policies and procedures: the committee noted the district started the year proposing an anti-hate-speech policy and, after board feedback, embedded those provisions within the district’s harassment policy, which the presenter said “just passed recently.” The committee indicated the need for training so staff, students, and families understand the policy and potential consequences.
On next steps, Tiffany said the district will form summer work groups and highlighted an upcoming, fuller presentation on the Elevate feedback cycle at the curriculum committee meeting on June 2. Shell said the Equal Opportunity Schools student survey will be administered in the fall and that counselors and staff will use the resulting insight cards during next year’s course registration period.
The committee opened and closed the meeting with routine motions to approve the agenda and to adjourn; neither action changed the district’s policies or adopted new requirements during the meeting. The DEI steering committee will return to refine the draft plan and move specific items—such as K–4 lesson development, family engagement tools, and restorative-practices training—into implementation steps over the summer and into the 2025–26 school year.
