Miguel Campos wants fiscal lens on district activity, more open conversation
Miguel Campos 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?
Campos: I think it is one appropriate place for people to communicate, only from a political candidate’s standpoint. I think there need to be as many options as possible that you can afford to use—both in money and time. You’ve got traditional news interviews like this, you’ve got Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, that covers three generations of voters that may never read a newspaper. Like it or not, it’s there. There are just so many forms of communication, for my candidacy I chose the ones most available, and most familiar to me. But Facebook can become toxic very quickly if you don’t set parameters or mitigate issues that I’ve found you run into. Facebook is no-holds-barred, anyone can say anything they want, and we’ve run into people trolling us just to troll us. But I don’t think there’s any getting away from some of that, anyway. I know that’s a lot of words but it’s a dynamic question, and communication in the 21st century is dynamic. But if I give anyone advice in the future, I’d warn them about 80 percent of what they’re going to get is negative, which is unfortunate because it goes against the positive forum you’re going for in the first place.
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?
Campos: I would say so. For me, when I think of ‘nonpartisan,’ I wouldn’t have put a page out there that explicitly states my political leanings. One could draw the wrong conclusions, one could catch hell from a political party…I think from a candidates’ perspective, to come out and separate yourself with the verbiage of the page, I wouldn’t do that. I think by doing that, you set a precedent immediately that says, ‘Hey, we’re the left, or we’re the right, and so anybody who is not that way is not welcome here,’ or, ‘Go attack the other side.’ I think taking that approach immediately sets division. You don’t even get a chance to discuss things—maybe I’m conservative on some things, but that doesn’t mean I’m conservative on all things. These pages aren’t very productive and they seem to produce a lot of hate.
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?
Campos: Honestly, I think people need to first accept that there is division; there’s a wide division between political ideologies right now. Everyone will say these are nonpartisan but are they really (chuckles). People all say these are nonpartisan positions but we all know that’s not exactly true. Because you’re dealing with parents, and those parents want their children to have the best, so things are always going to become political. So there is a division, it’s very political, even in areas where it’s not supposed to be. Calling that elephant out is the first thing. People need to understand that there are many different issues causing the division. On the school board, I think they need to address some of those issues because they know what the hot-button issues are. It’s no secret who the divisive people are in the school board community, and the district; let’s invite some of these people to the table, both the political left and the political right, and talk about it already. Not everybody’s going to come, but if you get somebody who is very level-headed listening to individuals, moderating, there’s a very good chance we’re still going to leave here not liking each other, but at least where everybody is heard and we get the conversation started. We need some bridge-builders, and that goes on both sides. When you have a teacher taking on a parental role for seven hours a day, and the parent doesn’t like or doesn’t understand something, parents are always going to default to the worst-case scenario out of protection. And then it gets heated, and they’re looked at as idiots or tinfoil hat people, and that’s not productive. My job is to listen and understand where people are coming from.
Q: Can you define Critical Race Theory, and what is your position on it?
Campos: This one I’ve been thinking about forever. I never ran on CRT at all; I’d never really heard of it until I got into this election, to be honest. That said, I have started reading everything, listening to podcasts, to understand it. What I understand is, CRT doesn’t seem to be in our district, per se. I think the concern with parents is, this is a framework for other things that can come under it, it’s basically a guiding light for other things related to it. A lens for people to look through to understand systemic racism and things like that, you’re really delving into why racism occurs and why it happens. For me, I really need to look at our curriculum to see if there are elements of CRT before I can really know if it’s here. For people who ask me where I stand on it, like yourself, I don’t know enough about it. It’s not a platform I’m running on, so I can’t speak intelligently about it. What I tell people in the community is, that I’m aware of what it is on a general level, that I have been talking to multiple people about what they think is going on with Critical Race Theory. So I don’t really know what to tell people other than, ‘I’m educating myself on it.’ There are people who claim CRT is in our schools; okay, fair—show me. We need to invite those people to a conversation and ask them what they mean by ‘Critical Race Theory,’ and then to show specific examples of it. Once they bring that to me, then we can have a discussion on is it here, and what are the problems with it. But no one has showed any specific examples to me yet.
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?
Campos: I’m very much torn on this particular position. One, is, the position was created in a time when finances are dismal, absolutely dismal. So for the district to find over $250,000 for payroll and benefits, that is a lot of money to go o with two very new positions in a time when we are very stressed for money. So, from a fiscal side of things, I’d be more inclined to have more conversation before we did this. It should have started a little bit slower. The other issue I have is, where did this all stem from? I’ve seen over the past two years, suddenly workplace on earth, every school district on earth, every governmental institution on earth, all of a sudden acted as if there has been no progress on the side of Americans—and I say that as a blanket statement—in regard to helping less fortunate people, people of color, or the LGBTQ+ community. As a person of color, I take a little bit of exception to that because I came from a poor family, and I might have been one of the first brown people north of Madison in the 80s (chuckles). So for me, I looked at my situation, and people were skeptical of who I was, and where I came from. I spoke Spanish at that time. I had plenty of issues as a young child—who has more issues than a young child living in a foreign place? So I look at the current state of America, and I ask myself what’s going on that we are in such great need of entirely new positions to help people of color, the LGBTQ community, and lower-income folks—are we not already doing all these things? Stevens Point, a very blue community, a very diverse community, a very—already—inclusive community, with great teachers, are we implying by having these positions that we weren’t like that? The only reason I care about those positions so much is because of the amount of money. Right now with all the mental health issues going on, how many counselors would that have paid for? For many EA (educational assistants) would that have brought on, who could be doing the same things that the board created these two very expensive positions for? It’s not an easy conversation, I understand that, because the national media outlets have made this all about race. It’s made it extremely difficult to talk about in places like Stevens Point, where a majority of the people are white. It’s tough to have that conversation about what does this position actually do? How are we measuring its success? How many people are they serving? I don’t have an answer about if I have a problem with the positions, but I have a problem with the expenditure on these positions. I don’t understand what the end goal is…to make people feel better? Haven’t we already been doing that? Hiring these positions must mean we haven’t, I guess.
Q: Where do you think parental authority ends and school authority begins?
Campos: The way I’m taking that question, I think the schools have a duty to keep our kids safe and to teach our kids. I think parents have the right to understand what’s being taught in the schools, and I think they have the right to protest what’s being taught if they believe it doesn’t fit with their family’s ideology. Parents have the ultimate authority over their children all the time; I don’t think there’s ever a point, or time, when a parent relinquishes authority to a school, ever. I think the schools need to be aware that parents are the ultimate stakeholders and caregivers of kids. I think there needs to be a great amount of communication and transparency because parents want to know more than they ever did before. It seems there is so much more activism going on today in schools, and parents are afraid of that because some of this activism is being done by people who don’t even have children. If parents have a problem with the schools, they should be communicating that to the schools directly.
Q: How should the school board balance the need for providing quality education with the need to respond to taxpayers’ concerns about the budget?
Campos: I think we need to understand we aren’t sitting in a great financial situation right now; we’d be broke if it weren’t for the ESSER funds, as I understand it after talking to teachers and board members. We need to understand how we got here; how did we get into this terrible financial situation in the first place? Second, we need to understand that we’re spending money that doesn’t need don’t need to be spent, or at least not now, but I don’t know a lot of the details because they’re discussed in closed session. Moving forward, we need to understand how we can spend money better, and understand if there are any synergies between districts we can use to cut costs everywhere. I don’t want to be in a situation where we start cutting jobs, but if we’re at a point where we’re going to have to go back to the taxpayers and ask for more money, that tells the taxpayers that we have a school district that just can’t figure it out.
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?
Campos: I can tell you that from my experiences so far in this campaign that there are definitely political activists who do want to push agendas in our school district. Whether you see them or not, I don’t know, but I do know with a number of well-known activists locally who are sending me legislation and other ideas, they have a very definite political bend, and are definitely looking to push ideologies into the schools that in my opinion are political in one way or another. So to say that social media is overexaggerating things that might be pushed in the school district, that’s not true. I think this is why people are so much more concerned with school boards across the country.
