The Board Was Looking at Selling Public Property. Nobody Said Anything.

Most Elmbrook residents had no idea it was happening. Sometime in 2022, the district began exploring the potential sale of school property — property purchased with public money, owned by taxpayers. No agenda item. No community notice. No disclosure policy requiring one.

Board member Linda Boucher raised it at the June 14, 2022 meeting:

“The School District doesn’t own that property solely. The taxpayers of the School District own that property as well as the entire School District.”

She was right. It shouldn’t have needed saying at a public board meeting — but it did.

Community members were back at the August 9 meeting pressing the same point. One resident noted the board had “kinda struggled with the issue of disclosure of school properties for sale” across both meetings, and flagged the continued absence of conflict-of-interest policy updates.

Board member Kathy Lim made a clean argument for why the full elected board — not a small committee — needed to handle this (timestamp 49:10):

“We are elected officials… if you were to build a task force, which is two people, that is lesser representation. I think it’s just the right thing to do.”

Finance & Operations members Jian Sun, Jean Lambert, and Jen Roskopf resisted the transparency push throughout both meetings.

Eventually the board updated its process — property sales would now go on public agendas, community feedback could trigger a public forum, and a website was created to list properties under consideration. Those changes are real. None of them happened without residents spending two months demanding them.

Debt Expires in 2028. Leadership Is Already Talking About What Comes Next.

On December 5, 2022, the full board and senior leadership gathered at Pilgrim Park to discuss long-range facilities. Superintendent Mark Hansen ($213,000/year) and Finance Director Tanya Fredrich ($147,000/year) led the conversation.

Elmbrook’s current referendum debt is set to expire for taxpayers in 2028 — meaningful relief on property tax bills, three years out.

At Pilgrim Park, administration floated the idea of a new referendum timed to pick up where the current debt leaves off. Rather than letting that savings reach taxpayers, the goal was to keep capital spending running continuously.

When board members asked what specifically needed to be done at Pilgrim Park, leadership offered broad answers — facility standards, addressing gaps — with no hard numbers and no defined scope.

The library spending pattern is worth understanding here. As Milwaukee Mainstay reported on the Brookfield Elementary renovation, the board’s $500,000 library remodel in 2022 — approved without the standard review process — opened the door for senior leadership to argue every elementary library needed the same treatment, with projections reaching $2 million total.

The Pilgrim Park meeting suggested a similar logic at work: one project justifies the next, and the next, and the one after that.

To generate ideas for the facilities push, they proposed a task force.

Two Recent Task Forces Worth Knowing About

Elmbrook has used internal workgroups for significant decisions before. Two examples stand out.

The DEI Workgroup, formed in fall 2020, proposed replacing “equality” with “equity” in the district’s Strategic Map. It generated significant community pushback when it became public. Board members Scott Wheeler and Mushir Hassan both sat on the group. Meeting notes from November 23, 2020 documenting the workgroup’s direction were later made private.

The School Reopening Task Force in summer 2020 ended with a member being removed after she used blunt language to criticize colleagues in her field. Superintendent Hansen called it “a violation of community values” and confirmed her removal.

In both cases, small groups operated with limited public visibility and produced outcomes that caught residents off guard. The question isn’t whether those outcomes were right or wrong — it’s whether the community had a real opportunity to weigh in before decisions were made.

Three Candidates. April 7.

Three Elmbrook school board seats are on the ballot this spring. Sam Hughes is a current board member, engineer, and business owner. Kevin Klandrud is a former military officer and educator running directly against Board President Scott Wheeler. Bob Burlage is a college professor and administrator.

All three have said publicly they want higher standards for transparency, more community input before major votes, and fiscal caution ahead of any new referendum discussion.

Early voting runs March 24 through April 3 at City Hall. Election Day is April 7.

Sources: Elmbrook School Board meeting recordings (6/14/22, 8/9/22, 12/5/22); District Strategic Map materials; Elmbrook BoardDocs public records.