Andrew McKinney has spent a good portion of his career and adult life teaching students, coaching kids, mentoring young people, and fighting for children. When he officially decided to enter the Monona Grove School Board race last month, it seemed like the natural thing to do.
“I have been thinking about running for a few years now. There was just a need for it. We have so many underserved kids,” McKinney tells Madison365. “There has been a lot of friction between parents and family. The underserved just didn’t seem like they had a voice. And I can relate to that.
“Some people approached me and said, ‘We’d really like you to be on the board. You’re already on a couple of the sub-committees,'” McKinney adds. “You’re helping out, volunteering, and coaching in Cottage Grove. You should go for it. And I said to myself, ‘Let’s do it!’ I got my signatures, got everything in, and I’m ready to do this.”
There are four candidates running for three seats on the Monona Grove School Board in the election that will take place Tuesday, April 3. The Monona Grove School District is governed by an elected seven-member Board of Education representing the communities of Monona and Cottage Grove, both located just east of Madison.
McKinney has life experience that is all over the board. He served in the military, 6.5 years in the Army that included time in Desert Storm. He’s been a teacher and he’s worked at neighborhood centers. He’s worked for Boys and Girls Club of Dane County and at Madison College as a part-time instructor. He’s worked with a grant-funded programs that worked with students that gave them a second chance at a high school diploma. He’s been a coach. He’s been an entrepreneur and a business owner – many people in the Dane County area know him as a very successful deejay.
“Being a jack of all trades gives me a wealth of experience, but it also helped me do more research just on the whole community and working in different areas,” McKinney says. “Working in the big schools and then working in the small suburbs and learning the similarities and differences.
“Everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve always given the kids respect and they’ve always respected me back,” he adds. “That’s important to me. I will always keep track of them long-term as much as I can.”
“I want to make sure on the school board that I’m able to help the teachers and the faculty to understand that kids are not bad. You have to be able to build a trust with them and find out what is really going on. It takes work. And it used to be like that, but I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what year where everything changed where you just come to work, do it, then leave. There used to be a time when [beloved former East High] Principal Milt McPike would be there from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. And he knew everybody. By their name. We don’t have that anymore. And that can’t happen.”
McKinney is a graduate of Madison East High School who spent 6 years in the military and would later go on to earn his bachelor’s degree from Concordia University Wisconsin. He would later earn his master’s degree in education, also from Concordia, focused in counselor education/school counseling and guidance services. Business and education are the two fields, McKinney says, that he has a wealth of experience.
“I am one of the very few in my family that has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. I’ve worked my behind off to get those,” he says. “My message to my kids and to young people is that with hard work and effort, you can be successful. It’s easy to be lazy, but it’s much more rewarding to work hard.”
McKinney has two children, 11 and 8, that are both currently in the Monona Grove School District. By day, he is the adoption/technical assistant quality assurance at Maximus where he applies Title IV-E requirements to cases of children placed in a foster care setting. This includes completing timely initial and six-month recommendations and requesting missing or additional information from counties and tribes and documenting the requests and responses to those requests.
“We review the files on the federal side and see if we’re able to reimburse the state and the counties what they pay out to individuals and places that take these kids in,” McKinney says. “Maximus really solidifies what I’ve been talking about for years – you can’t just look at your job as an eight-hour job where you come in and sit down and leave. Some of these kids are coming from bad situations. You have kids that are raising their siblings. You have kids that have been molested or raped or beaten. This could cause some behavioral problems. They lash out.
“I want to make sure on the school board that I’m able to help the teachers and the faculty to understand that kids are not bad. You have to be able to build a trust with them and find out what is really going on. It takes work,” McKinney adds. “And it used to be like that, but I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what year where everything changed where you just come to work, do it, then leave. There used to be a time when [beloved East High] Principal Milt McPike would be there from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. And he knew everybody. By their name. We don’t have that anymore. And that can’t happen.”
You have to get the parents involved somehow. That’s a must, McKinney says.
“Tell them. ‘Hey, I can see potential in your child. They’re not doing this or that. Can you come in?’” Just get something going with the parents,” he says. “And, so often, that never happens. That’s something we’re currently working on in one sub-committee. You just have to build trust. If a parent who never trusted the school district or the school system when they went to school, has kids in the school system now … they are not going to care as much. They won’t fight as much. There is no trust. So we have to build that.”
There are plenty of people who come from bad circumstances who want to be successful. They want to work hard, they just don’t know how. They don’t have the connections. They don’t have adults that believe in them. McKinney knows how that feels. He grew up poor and on the fringes of society himself, in the projects of Gary, Indiana, which was once considered the murder capital of the United States.
(Photo by Hedi Rudd)
“And that’s where I come in. I can teach you how to get where you need to be because I did it myself,” McKinney says. “I am from the projects of Gary, Indiana. I’ve been a homeless veteran. But it can be done. It takes hard work. That’s why I like working with students because I like to tell them the truth about life.”
Monona Grove High School has students attending from two communities – Monona and Cottage Grove. It is a majority white school, but like the rest of the nation, it is rapidly becoming much more diverse.
“That’s the word that they use now – ‘diverse.’ We need a diverse staff. It’s been talked about for years,” McKinney says. “My question, and one of the things I’m going to work with on the school board is: What are you doing to hire and retain diverse people? You have 8 people of color working in the whole school district and their positions are special ed., custodial, working in the cafeteria. Where are the counselors, teachers, principals?
“We talk about diversity so much, but not much is going on,” he adds. “ Now, I don’t want to win the board seat because I’m black; I want to win because I have the experience and the knowledge to give to my community to help the kids and the staff and the parents.”
McKinney adds that we have the tools to solve a lot of problems we see in schools today but it’s going to take innovative thinking and hard work.
“This is 2018. We all need to be working on the same goal. We all need to be on the same page,” he says. “The student, the faculty and the parent all have to work together and that will equal success.”
