The first Community Collaboration Committee meeting of 2026 for the ISD 200 School Board was held earlier this week in the middle school cafeteria. Community members from parents, members of local Parent Teacher Associations, city councilors, building presidents and nearly all the school board gathered to review the 2025 School Perception Survey results.
The “mixed bag” results as described in November by School Perceptions Project Manager Daren Sievers, showcased relatively stable and positive results from the students and parents with large declines nearly across the board for district staff.
Attendees were able to examine an overview of those results, similar to what Superintendent Kristine Wehrkamp Herman has been presenting across the various buildings in the district. They were then asked to divide into groups and write what they found encouraging, what they thought needed more attention, and questions that were raised from this data.
The results weren’t particularly surprising.
Discipline was a key throughline for areas that need more attention across groups, with attendees noting that distracting students and behaviors was a factor students said made learning hard nearly across all grade levels.
The lowest scoring area across the student survey was to the statement “most kids at school follow the rules,” which students gave a 3.39 on a scale of 1-5, which means they overall don’t strongly agree or disagree with the statement.
As to what attendees found encouraging, attendees were largely optimistic about the survey overall, noting that even larger districts don’t have similar data that they use annually to improve.
Others noted the high level of extra-curricular participation across the district as well as how 64% of student respondents agreed to the statement “Most days, I like my school.”

Staff results
When it came to explaining the poor staff response, which declined in every category save for two statements, explanations varied.
Many wondered how teacher contract negotiations, which were ongoing during the perception survey, might have affected staff’s opinions of the school board and district administration. Others wondered about the low staff response rate of 49% or some kind of breakdown in communication between administration and staff.
Others placed the blame solely at the feet of the school board itself.
“It’s no surprise to me we rank that low,” said Jesse Nowak, speaking to the sunsetting of policy 100 last year in March.
“Time and time again, the community and the staff members tell you what they need, tell you what they want, and you vote against it. That’s why there’s a breakdown in trust,” said Nowak.
Others echoed the point: “We’ve lived in nine different states. These are the best teachers that we have ever had for our children. And I still had to remove my child for policies that were relating to DEI,” said Bex Bender, a parent who pulled her child from ISD 200.
School board members stood by their decision to sunset the policy, citing the inclusion of the “equity and belonging” strategic anchor within the new strategic plan as well as the goal of making the policy “politically neutral,” said Chair Carrie Tate.
“All I hear over and over and over again, we’re not listening, we’re not listening and that’s simply not the truth,” said Clerk Melissa Millner.
Tate emphasized that the huge amount of community outreach to the school board was evenly split for and against Policy 100, which in her eyes was a reason for sunsetting.
“The whole thing is the controversy,” said Tate. “We can’t afford to piss off either side.”
Tate admitted that the messaging about replacing Policy 100 with the strategic plan was muddled: “At this point I definitely wish we would have waited to get rid of that before we had the strategic plan done.”
It has been a common refrain from a number of school board members that many community members still aren’t aware that “equity and belonging” is a strategic anchor within the district’s new strategic plan. At the time of sunsetting Policy 100, that strategic plan was expected to replace the language from Policy 100 but it was not yet finalized and had already changed several times.
Millner was openly frustrated with re-litigating this controversial rift within the district: “How are we ever going to get past the group being mad at us for getting rid of the DEI policy,” said Millner. “I don’t know how to mend that.”
Staff responses to the statement “The school board is doing what it takes to make our district successful” fell by 28.1%, putting ISD 200 in the second percentile of comparable districts surveyed by School Perceptions.

Communication
The broad level of district communication was cited as another area of focus for the district. Parents ranked school communication as the lowest score overall with comments referencing both too much unnecessary communication as well as too little communication overall.
How best to address that dissonance was unclear.
One avenue of direct communication, especially in light of the plummeted staff scores on school board perception, was to bring school board members into schools to speak with staff.
“This breakdown doesn’t happen if we come to you,” said Director Philip Biermaier.
The move had been previously delayed as Wehrkamp Herman presents the school perception results across buildings.
“We’re gonna move on this,” said Biermaier.
Another point of discussion was how to better celebrate the good within the district from dress-up days in elementary schools to community projects like the completion of the trishaw shed at Tilden Community Center, an early project within the district’s new Pathways program.
Parents of students within the district spoke to not knowing about these long-term collaborations even months after completion.
“When you do the work day in and day out you get blinders and think everybody knows,” said Wehrkamp Herman.
The next Community Collaboration Committee meeting is scheduled to take place April 1 at 6 p.m. in the Hastings High School lecture hall. The topic of the meeting is education resources along with showcasing the district’s new Anatomage Table.
The overall report of the 2026 School Perceptions Survey can be found in the meeting and agenda materials for the Nov. 19 regular school board meeting at meetings.boardbook.org/Public/Organization/931