MMSD takes 'frustrating' steps to remove risks in outdoor ed

K-12 education reporter

Fifth-graders help rebuild the tree fort in the school forest at Lake View Elementary School in October 2021.

Over the past five years, James Kersten carved three benches out of logs to add to the seating options around the Lake View Elementary School playground, including one he finished just as the last school year ended.

It came as a surprise to the school’s physical education teacher when he approached the playground on the afternoon of Aug. 11 to see they were no longer there.

“They got rid of all my benches I built,” the Lake View physical education teacher observed. “No one told me about that until this second.”

“That’s really frustrating,” he added a few minutes later, still in disbelief.

More than two weeks later, Kersten still hasn’t been told what happened to them, along with other stumps and wooden structures around the playground.

One of three benches carved out of a log by Lake View Elementary School physical education teacher James Kersten, who discovered they had been removed without notice earlier this month.

The mystery came at the same time the district has pushed to make significant changes to the school’s outdoor learning environment, including its forest, which Kersten oversees. The changes include removing the fort he and students constructed out of branches in the school forest nearly two years ago after the old one burned down.

“If the district told me, ‘I think you need to do a little bit more to make the frame of that more solid,’ could I do that? Absolutely. If you're willing to work with me and give me some guidelines to make this safer to use for your purposes, absolutely, I will do that,” Kersten said. “But to just say, ‘Nope, you can't have this, take it down,’ well, that's troubling to me.”

This spring, a new Madison Metropolitan School District risk manager came out to Lake View — and other schools’ outdoor areas — multiple times to assess them. Her evaluation found issues with old pots and pans in the “sound garden” and the district asked Kersten to remove all rotten wood, even logs on the ground lining the paths through the forest.

Kathryn Wingier began her role as the district’s risk manager in March, according to LinkedIn, after two years as an Employee Relations Analyst here. District communications staff declined a request to make Wingier available to discuss her evaluations.

“As I'm sure you can appreciate, this time of year is extremely busy, and our shared collective focus is on being best prepared to welcome scholars back to their schools in a few short days' time,” MMSD Communications Manager Ian Folger wrote in an email Monday. “Our Risk Manager has a full slate of responsibilities that require their full attention, and that play an important role in our being ready to promote learning on day one.”

The Cap Times submitted an open records request on Aug. 16 for the risk assessments and has not yet received a response.

A post on the Crestwood Elementary School Association of Parents and Teachers website earlier this month requested that families write letters about the importance of the school’s outdoor learning area, citing the risk assessment that was “calling into question many of our outdoor garden and forest spaces and the need to keep them versus removing them for safety, cost, or aesthetic reasons.”

As of Monday, a new post on the website stated that the organization has “been assured that the outdoor program will remain a stronghold in our community.”

“We are still waiting to find out what the district intends to do with our outdoor spaces long term, but are hopeful that all our gardens, orchard, forest, and prairies will be preserved,” the post states.

Outdoor learning advocates are expected to speak about the issue at Monday night’s School Board meeting.

In an Aug. 16 statement sent to the Cap Times, MMSD Deputy Superintendent TJ McCray extolled the virtues of outdoor learning, but suggested some parts of outdoor spaces were unsafe.

“In every instance, we made the decision for removal with the interests of our staff, students, and community members firmly in mind,” McCray said. “We are working, and will continue to work, to source safe, code-compliant replacements for each impacted school.”

Kersten is skeptical.

“If this has something to do with risk management and making sure that less people are getting sued from the district and we're saving money,” Kersten said, “Well, I challenge you to tell me how many lawsuits have come out of my school forest here at Lake View.”

Lake View physical education teacher James Kersten shows fifth-grader Banak Riek how to drill screws into branches as they work together to rebuild the tree fort in October 2021.

Tony Abate said risk assessments in outdoor education spaces are important, though not exactly the way the district has gone about it.

“School is really the refuge for that place where especially really young kids can learn physical literacy and learn how to assess risk on their own outside — and I’m using that term pointedly a little bit here,” said Abate, who is the conservation director for Groundswell Conservancy. “All kids need to learn how to assess risk in their own life.”

Groundswell helped the school district purchase the forest property in 2017 with a $130,500 contribution, and has helped maintain it in the years since. Abate said it’s an important opportunity for kids to have a place where “they can explore nature and feel safe and comfortable.”

“Children need to learn how to ask themselves, in the instance of the green schoolyard, ‘Is this log strong enough to support me?’ They’re asking themselves those kinds of questions consciously or unconsciously, ‘Is it strong enough to support me? Am I losing my balance?’” Abate said. “They’re learning that physical literacy of, ‘Oh, if I squat down it’s a little easier to maintain my balance versus if I stand up.’

“This is something that kids aren’t necessarily going to learn if you pull all of those things out of the schoolyard.”

The natural area at the school is especially important for Lake View’s students, Kersten said, many of whom live in nearby apartment complexes that don’t have as many opportunities to connect with the outdoors. When he started at the school, he recalled, many students would come up to the edge of the forest and refuse to go in because they thought it was dangerous.

“One of my favorite things to remember is where I started at, how kids would never come in here,” he said. “Now most gladly will come in here, or I'll have kids be like, ‘Oh, that's my tree, I adopted that tree and that's my tree forever now.’”

He recalled how often he’s seen firsthand examples of the team-building outdoor spaces can provide, including some of the pieces the risk assessment suggests need to be removed — like old wooden pallets currently housed in the fort, which students often like to move around the outdoor area.

“They're five, six years old and so you have seven, eight kids moving one pallet, working together,” he said. “They don't get along on the playground, they don't get along in the classroom whatsoever, but they'll gladly spend 10 minutes walking that pallet from that spot all the way to that spot.”

Abate outlined a similar scenario, one he’s witnessed, of kids using their imagination to “build a palace” that requires a log to be moved to a different place.

Physical education teacher James Kersten shows fifth-grader Ibrahim Al Sawalim how to spread mulch as they work together to rebuild the tree fort in the school forest at Lake View Elementary School in October 2021.

“Two kids can’t do it, and they’ll coordinate and bring over five kids and then they start rolling that log to create their little palace,” he said. “In the structure of school, things can get very rigid and a lot of students don’t learn well that way.”

“For some students, that’s where they’re going to learn how to have those appropriate social interactions and team building and that kind of thing. It’s not in the classroom when you’re sitting in a group in a circle.”

Immediately after realizing the benches were removed, Kersten reached out to district officials to find out what happened.

As of Monday, he still doesn’t have an answer, and Kersten said the district hasn’t directly acknowledged taking them or apologized for their removal. He has received permission to build new ones, he said Monday, but the district wants to have its carpenters assess them for safety.

Folger, from the district’s communications team, did not have an answer Monday, either. In response to a question from the Cap Times, Folger wrote in an email that he has “no information to share as to the location of these specific items.”

An email from McCray to School Board members on Aug. 15, provided to the Cap Times by a board member, acknowledges that “Building Services removed structures deemed unsafe to ensure that students would have access to a safe space.”

“We will also work with the school and community to rebuild these structures in a manner that will avoid any further issues,” the email states.

One of three benches carved out of a log by Lake View Elementary School physical education teacher James Kersten, who discovered they had been removed without notice earlier this month.

He further wrote that the risk manager, on her visits in the spring, “discovered that Lakeview Elementary has various outdoor classroom structures that are not safe, and many areas contain nails, broken pallets, rotten wood, and other safety concerns.”

State Sen. Melissa Agard sent a letter to Interim Superintendent Lisa Kvistad and School Board members on Aug. 25, expressing concerns about the removal of the benches.

“Echoing the concerns I have heard, I would ask that a hold be placed on all future removal of outdoor education equipment at all MMSD schools until a more transparent process of communication is established with leadership and community stakeholders to discuss what needs to be removed and why,” Agard wrote. “Moreover, there appears to be a need for a clearly written policy that defines the safety standards for outdoor equipment.”

Susan Hobart, who led the school’s outdoor learning program before retiring and passing it onto Kersten, sees the situation at Lake View as an example of a lack of transparency.

“I think about this word, ‘transparency,’ that people keep using and it’s become code (for) ‘Don’t worry,’ but there’s no substance behind it,” Hobart said.

“Transparency to me means really good communication, that’s transparency,” she said. “So where’s the communication in this to bring the stakeholders together?”

Kersten recalled that the new risk manager came out four times in the spring to look through the forest.

He felt that many of her concerns, especially related to the music garden that features various metal objects for students to hit and make noise, came down to her “personal opinion that it’s dangerous.”

“She has no actual data or regulations or stipulations or code that says it needs to be built like this, it needs to look like this, you have to have this; she's just like, ‘It's dangerous,’” he said.

One of three benches carved out of a log by Lake View Elementary School physical education teacher James Kersten, seen in the process of its creation before he finished it at the end of last school year. Kersten discovered the benches had been removed without notice earlier this month.

Kersten called the approach “demoralizing” after putting in so much free labor to maintain the forest in his eight years at the school. He pointed to a nearby rotting stump in a sitting circle, suggesting that he would have moved it out of the seating area regardless of the risk management assessment; but rather than get rid of it, he’d move it to a spot where it could become a “talking stump” instead of a seat.

“How many different questions can come from a rotten stump from a 5 or 6 year old?” Kersten asked, quickly listing six himself and connecting some to subjects like math and science.

The district, however, has concerns about splinters and other potential dangers for students from stumps that are not painted or coated. Crestwood Outdoor Education Committee member Kristin Pavelec, who sits on the Association of Parents and Teachers board, told the Cap Times in an email Monday that district officials met with the school last week to discuss concerns.

The school had paint donated from Hallman Lindsay and Sherwin Williams to help cover its wooden benches. Pavelec said the conversations began as they considered replacing the school’s shed this spring, but the district hasn’t provided feedback on that plan yet.

“My concern is that if we replace it without district approval, they will take it down where a lot of time and money will have been spent,” she wrote. “Other than that, we are trying to move ahead with the start of our school year thinking of the wonderful learning opportunities students will gain in our outdoor spaces. This morning, staff took a walk in our school forest and they are excited to bring students into the space as well.”

In 2021, Kersten said the district seemed to take a hands-off approach at Lake View as he and students rebuilt the fort that now is in question. Kersten said that after the fire, he asked the district if it had any guidance before they rebuilt, and they didn’t send anything in response.

“So we did, and I did, what I thought was safe and appropriate and fun for our students and the staff,” Kersten said.

“It's frustrating because they come in and it's like a scorched earth approach, ‘You’ve just got to take it all down,’” Kersten added. “Instead of working with me and giving me some form of rule and regulation that I can work with to make it better.”

Hobart is not confident replacing what’s removed will be high on the district’s priority list.

“They have too many other things that they have to do, and yet this letter from (McCray) says, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, we’re going to take care of it,’” she said. “No discussion happened beyond the walkthrough with James (Kersten) at Lake View.”

Scott Girard joined the Cap Times in 2019 and covers K-12 education. A Madison native, he graduated from La Follette High School after attending Sennett Middle School and Elvehjem Elementary School during his own K-12 career.

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K-12 education reporter