Jeff Ebel says ‘seek to understand’ instead of accuse; wants less division

Jeff Ebel is seeking one of four seats on the Stevens Point Area Public Board of Education.

Questions submitted by Metro Wire readers.

Q: There has been a lot of communication between candidates and members of the public on social media, particularly on Facebook, that is not available to the general public. Do you believe Facebook is the appropriate place for such communication, and if so, why?

Ebel: I think Facebook is appropriate but it should not be the only way that a candidate should their message across. You’re dealing with a specific audience but I think there are other people in the community who need to hear your message, like a newspaper, meet-and-greets, on the radio. I think it would be inappropriate to use Facebook exclusively.

Q: There are a lot of group pages on Facebook that contain labels like ‘Progressive’ or ‘conservative’ or some variation thereof. Do you think that could be furthering the division in our community—especially considering that none of these positions are partisan?

Ebel: I do believe that, yeah.

Q: You’ve been out in the community, shaking hands, and knocking on doors. Based on your communication with people in the community, do you have any ideas on how we can close that division?

Ebel: That’s the $60,000-dollar-question…with inflation, it’s probably a $600,000-dollar-question (chuckles). We’re going in the wrong direction, and there’s momentum with that, so it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I don’t know what it’s going to take. We have been thrown into political discussions, ‘arguments’ is probably more appropriate, not by ourselves—we were thrown into it. As long as divisive politics works, it will continue. So what I will encourage voters to do is forget the labels. There are red herrings out there meant specifically to enrage; the reason they are out there is because they work. I’ve seen the results, and I’ve had talks with people who are enraged. That’s not a good place to be coming from on any board, let alone the school board.

Q: Can you define Critical Race Theory, and what is your position on it?

Ebel: No, actually, I can’t define Critical Race Theory, and neither can most of the people I’ve talked to—including academics. I think people have invented their own definitions. I have yet to identify a school K-12 that teachers CRT. What I do know it’s a graduate-level program at some universities. You talk about red herrings, there you go, that’s one. This is a non-issue. We don’t teach Critical Race Theory, and I bet no one in the district had even heard of it until two years ago. It’s a hot-button issue; that’s the purpose of it. It has no bearing whatsoever on our district, our curriculum, or our students whatsoever.

Q: Did you support the creation of EDI (Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity) positions in the school district, and do you support continuing to fund those positions?

Ebel: Yes. Equity, I am absolutely in favor of treating people equitably, which is different that ‘equally.’ Equality is giving everybody $10. Equity is saying, ‘Wait a minute- you make $2 million a year. This person over here makes $20,000 a year—I’m going to give this person $20, and you $10.’ That’s equity. Equality is treating everybody the same. And that’s basically the way our property taxes work. Diversity, absolutely; I work with entrepreneurs, and that’s one of the things we look at when we evaluate a company, we look at diversity. When I say ‘diversity,’ that has nothing to do with race. If you’re green, purple, pink, it doesn’t make any difference, as long as they have a diverse perspective and diverse skillsets to take that company from a startup to a successful company. And it takes diversity to be successful; why would anybody want to put blinders on and not see things from other people’s eyes? Inclusion, yes, I think we should include everybody in our society. Everyone has something to offer, no matter how you might look at their skillset, they might want to include something. Why would we want to shut them out? I can’t understand why this would even be a point of discussion.

Q: Where do you think parental authority ends and school authority begins?

Ebel: To me, parental authority trumps everything. Parents have the responsibility to bring up children the way they see fit, within the law. Fortunately today, they have options. If they don’t like public schools, they can take their kids to a different school. I just got a flier on open enrollment today in the mail. There’s also a wealth of education online; my niece went to high school all online. So homeschooling is an option. You have options you’ve never had before. And you do have the option to pull your child from a specific class if you feel it goes against your family’s teaching. We do the best we can to understand the needs of our students—it’s in our mission, to ‘teach every student to be successful.’

Q: How should the school board balance the need for providing quality education with the need to respond to taxpayers’ concerns about the budget?

Ebel: How do we balance that need? Very carefully. I have to go back to 1993 when the state passed revenue limits. It was done very poorly at that time and it has never been addressed. It has been brought up many, many times. We happened to be a very low-spending district when that was passed and we were locked into that low per-student spending. All the schools in the state are locked into it. When the state feels generous, they say, ‘Well, we just put $500 million into education.’ We get those one-time dollars, and we take it off the levy but we still get the same amount per student, that never changed. We got exactly the same amount of money. So they put money into tax relief and they call it putting money into education. Even some people who work in the district don’t understand that. School finance seems to be so esoteric but it’s really not that complicated. We are locked into the per-student funding unless we go to the community and ask for permission to raise it with a referendum. I think we’ve done an exceptional job at being extremely fiscally conservative but it’s really been challenging over the past couple of years during COVID. The past couple of years has just been horrid on our staff but I have a deep respect for what they do every day.

Q: Because of social media, there’s a lot of fake news out there, rumors, etc., that different groups seem to believe, and some people seem to stick with those groups for news, so there’s some “group-think” out there. Some groups in the community have become quite vocal and local government meetings. Based on that, what would you say to people who believe that the district is “indoctrinating” children with certain controversial topics?

Ebel: If there was anything I could say, I would. People are dug in; it is not about knowledge, facts, or what’s really happening. It’s all about emotion. These hot-button issues are intended to enrage people. I think if people seek to understand, not react…ya know, once you fall into that anger, you lose the ability to think and act objectively. Now, there might be a kernel of truth to the hot-button issues…maybe there is, somewhere in the United States, a K-12 that teaches CRT, I don’t know. But if that’s the case, you need to ask questions and seek to understand. If you’re going to any governmental body, anger is not a good thing to bring to the board. Anger has its place, and usually, it’s more effective in raising awareness of an issue. But first, you need to make sure if that issue really is an issue.