Montie Bowie just wants to listen. To listen to (and to hear) the voices of the community as they talk about their children’s lives, both currently and their futures, is what Bowie aspires to do as a member of the Sun Prairie School Board.
Bowie is one of six candidates running for three seats on the Sun Prairie Board of Education. With three of the six candidates being current incumbents, it’s an uphill climb for the three challengers, but it’s also possible that after the April 2 election day, Sun Prairie could have a very different board.
Bowie is running against 21-year incumbent Caren Diedrich, four-year incumbent David Hoekstra and Steve Schroeder, who’s served on the board for seven years, as well as challengers Tim Fandek and Bob Jokisch. The top three vote-getters will take the three seats.
Across the region, school board and city council and mayoral races are in full swing. Many of the candidates talk about what they want to do in those capacities. What their agenda is. What their plan would be about x,y and z.
Bowie is going the opposite direction. He just wants to hear what the actual families think.
“It’s just an opportunity to help better the community,” Bowie told Madison365 of his decision to run for school board. “It wasn’t political. Transparency is the key to making things improve in the community. If you’re transparent, you can build trust. And if you build trust, you can build a community.”
Bowie, who is the Global Sales Director for Thermo Fisher Scientific, says that he didn’t have to stay in Sun Prairie in order to do his job. But he and his wife love the community and decided to stay. Since they were staying, they figured, they might as well get involved. And that’s when people started asking him about joining the school board.
“We decided to stay here because we feel connected to people,” he said. “We wanted to get our hands in the community and get involved. So we did. We got involved with Shelter from the Storm, a women’s shelter. We got involved in Camp Tuesday, which is for kids in the summertime who sometimes seem to get lost. Right away people got excited about me running.”
Lately, school board meetings have been contentious locally to say the least. Madison’s Metropolitan School District Board has seemed impervious to public input and has hosted hours-long sessions during which members of the community literally scream their feelings, while the school board sits mute and appears oblivious. As if the words of the community are just background noise.
Bowie has witnessed that and says it can’t be what happens in communities.
“You have to communicate with people so you don’t get that froth,” he said. “You have to communicate so people know you have their best interest in mind. I don’t intend to hide. My intention is to be available to people. We can communicate our path even if we’re not done deliberating on an issue. We can tell people we’re deliberating and we’ll come back with a decision but communicate so people know you’re not in a back room hiding.”
Sun Prairie is growing at a huge rate. Sun Prairie has recently added two new elementary schools and is in the midst of a referendum about adding a second high school. But Bowie says that it’s important to make sure these new school are serving the entire Sun Prairie community, not just economically advantaged families.
“You have to start thinking about equity,” Bowie said. “In building two new middle schools we may have created some challenges. It’s around color lines but also around economic lines. The two new schools serve people who didn’t really need it economically and left out a lot of the rest of the district. I think we missed on that.”
Bowie says that if there is a new high school, it has to be an entity that serves the entire community and not just the economically well-to-do.
For Bowie, that comes back to his original point about being a member of the public in touch with the community. Not getting on the school board to push an agenda, but really letting the community dictate what the agenda should be.
“I think just listening and being patient enough to listen is the key,” he said. “I wanna make sure I don’t come in with a preconceived notion.”
But things like teacher pay and school safety are things that Bowie is already concerned about. He said that Madison teachers are paid better than their colleagues in Sun Prairie, and also that several Madison teachers live in Sun Prairie. He wants to make teaching in Sun Prairie schools more attractive.
As for safety, Bowie is concerned about the crowds of kids hanging out in hallways instead of being in the classroom and some of the subsequent safety issues that brings about.
Bowie doesn’t think there’s one solution to any of these issues but that it will be important for him as a school board member to take a multi-faceted approach.
On March 17 there will be a school board candidate forum at the Westside Community Building in Sun Prairie. The forum is hosted by SPARK and will begin at 1pm. The general election is April 2. The three candidates who get the most votes will take the three seats.
This story has been corrected to reflect that Sun Prairie has recently added two new elementary schools. A previous version identified them as middle schools.
