Madison Mayor Bob Courtney (above, right) and members and coaches with the Madison Junior High School academic team listen as eighth grader Jack Heckler (standing) explains the purpose of a recent roundtable discussion at Madison City Hall with the mayor. (Madison Courier staff photo by Mark Campbell)
Madison’s next generation of leaders made their concerns known at City Hall Monday, but it’ll be a few years before they’re old enough to run for office.
The Madison Junior High academic team sought Mayor Bob Courtney’s advice Monday while brainstorming their next submission for a contest with Future Problem Solving Program International (FPSPI), a program that aims to get youth thinking critically about future problems and solutions. School teams submit entries to multiple contests each year, and navigate an eight-step process to solve complex problems and compile a report to send to FPSPI, academic team coach and science teacher Kenton Mahoney said.
This time of year, the students are on their third submission. Madison middle schoolers finished second in the state on their first two submissions.
“We want to get that first place,” Mahoney told Courtney, outlining the process.
While the problem and solutions for this round won’t be submitted until January, the students were there to gain perspective. Mahoney asked the mayor what problems he dealt with that the students could brainstorm and use to prepare for the next round.
“Have you ever gone to an arcade and there’s a game of whack-a-mole there? To a certain extent that’s what it’s like on a daily basis, because things pop up that you don’t anticipate that you have to react to,” Courtney told the students.
“We try to be as proactive as possible because we kind of break down our day into a couple different stages,” Courtney said. “One is the long-term, more strategic planning — things that we know may take a year or two or three years, for example, to come into fruition — and then there are the immediate needs. Someone’s trash didn’t get picked up, or there’s a water leak, or there’s a pothole that we have to go fix. So we’re always reacting to things that happen every single day that have a sense of urgency, or those things that we can plan more strategically that we know will, like I said, take a few years to resolve.”
Working in tandem with Courtney, the students identified eight community issues — including education, substance abuse and economic development — and identified potential solutions following the eight-step process.
Eighth-grader Jack Heckler stood at the easel and wrote down suggestions from classmates for the first four problems: stable education, substance abuse, poverty and homelessness, and mental health. Courtney chimed in with four more: safety, economic development, infrastructure and preserving buildings from blight.
Safety as a priority, Courtney told the students, is paramount for local government leaders.
“Safety is number one,” Courtney said. “... That’s one you can’t put on the back burner and say ‘well this is a long-term plan, we’ll get to this in two or three years.’ Safety is something that we literally work on every single day.”
Courtney encouraged the students to think more specifically. He asked them: what do you see as the biggest safety concern?
Heckler listed driving as a hazard, specifically around Wolf Trails Drive where he lives, and said speeding posed a danger for kids in the area. Courtney agreed and said that was an area of concern; drivers come off Lanier Drive and speed down Green Road past the neighborhood, and ignore the speed limit.
Thinking like a policy-maker, Courtney said issues like safety need to be broken down — like with speeding — and addressed in a way that maximizes time, money and resources.
He gave the students a practice problem to demonstrate: speeding and safety concerns at the entrance to Anderson Elementary School on Michigan Road.
“That’s a 40-mile speed zone through there,” Courtney said. “However, with the school buses and the kids that are getting picked up and dropped off, it can become really, really unsafe because you have speeding and traffic and you have people kind of coming out with their cars, staging to pick up their kids from the school, [spilling] out onto the highway.”
Heckler again spoke up and suggested adding more police officers and plastic cones to mark the pickup area. The mayor took to the idea, and said that while the city was already working on an ordinance to reduce the speed limit in that area, cones would be a cheap way to make drivers more aware without having to enact a new law.
“There’s no barriers separating parked cars to the cars going north and south, so I think cones, like you just suggested, would be a really good, economical way to create awareness of safety and a parking lane so that they’re not out there blocking potential traffic, either going in the same direction or the opposite direction,” he told the eight grader.
Then another hand went up. Alex Wang, also an eighth-grader, suggested that investing in economic development in the city would help solve short-term and long-term problems by reducing the scarcity of resources.
Courtney agreed, but elaborated. By incentivising certain types of jobs that help people rise out of poverty, the city can help those struggling with substance abuse or mental health, he said. He mentioned that good jobs attract services, which is needed in areas like Jefferson County that have a shortage of mental health professionals.
“If we focus on investing some dollars, some of these scarce resources, in the right way, it can be a catalyst to address some of these underlying issues that we may be facing in our community,” Courtney told the students.
From there, the conversation shifted entirely toward resources. Courtney introduced the concept of a cost-benefit analysis, and gave as example that incentivizing businesses that pay high wages to move into the community also has a domino effect on money circulating throughout town.
“These sorts of things generally happen over a long period of time, but the up-front investment could be really significant,” Courtney said.
The mayor also introduced the students to the concept of consensus-building — letting the community members decide which issues are most important to them. He noted that figuring out where money was coming from on the local, state and federal level adds another dimension to city problem solving.
“If we have 25 people in the room, and we talk about all eight of these issues, I would be surprised if all 25 would agree — if we wanted to rank those from one to eight, for example — all 25 would not agree with how these are rated. All 25 may agree, and say ‘yes these are issues we need to address,’ but then we go through a process of consensus building with our stakeholders and prioritize them, and you work on them very methodically ... one through eight, for example. And then, again, you want to deal with cost-benefit — what’s the biggest impact you can make that’s going to have the broadest effect on the community, and how much is that going to cost.”
Mahoney chimed in and said that maximizing resources was a major part of the Future Problem Solving process. He also asked Courtney what role he thought students could play in the community, and what areas the team could be addressing in looking for solutions.
Courtney said that while many of the topics they had just covered are broad, the issue of safety remains the most important and can be compartmentalized in many ways to help the community. He recommended they start there.
“That is a foundational element of our community. Without a safe community, you really can’t have anything else,” Courtney said. “You can’t have a high quality of life, you can’t attract people to move here, you can’t attract investment, our schools aren’t going to be as strong as they can be without safety. And I think that’s a really pragmatic goal that each of you can think about, because it’s also something you experience yourself every day. It’s not necessarily conceptual, because you can see it every single day.”
The mayor left the students with the goal-setting tool SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely) and answered a couple questions about his job before the students headed back to the middle school. Before leaving he invited group to present their project to city council once finished and voice their concerns.
“So far I’m waiting for a taker. I’m waiting or someone to come up to the podium and say ‘We, the student body or student community here in Madison, we feel that this issue needs to be addressed, and I would like to be a part of it,’’’ Courtney said. “And that’s how you make a difference. If it’s always somebody else’s problem to take care of, there’s not going to be a lot of solution being made out there, in my opinion.”
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