Madison Metropolitan School District Engagement Team: Providing Seamless Educational Support
Adam Clausen began his career meeting the needs of Black and Brown East and La Follette High students as a volunteer for Life Church.
Fourth in a Series - Part 1 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
For Adam Clausen, student achievement has been about values and the humanity of all students. It wasn’t about the money or even the recognition. It was about meeting the needs of students, doing what he could to help students achieve in spite of what others believed about them or even what they believed about themselves.
Clausen led a youth mentorship program from 2006-2015 at Life Church on Femrite Drive working with students from East and La Follette High Schools who were disengaged from their schools and their education.
“It grew from about 12 students to 125 in about seven months,” Clausen recalled. “It was almost all African American students with no bus lines. We’re not in a residential neighborhood. It was through a church, but there was no apostatizing in the program. I just mentored a couple of students, one from each school. They happened to be influential and started to invite their friends. And so it just grew. We just became a safe space for students in the middle of the week. We spent a lot of weekends with them and their families. They came on family vacations with us. Some of them lived with us. It really wasn’t just a program. It was a way of sharing life with one another. It was just a transformation in those students. And it ended up opening some doors where administrators and others were inviting me back to come walk the halls of East and La Follette and do some mentorship with students who didn’t want to go home and didn’t want to go to class.”
It was all about the people.
“We were just loving students where they were at, believing in them and seeing the potential that they did bring and creating spaces for them to be whom they are,” Clausen said. “It benefitted not only the students, but also the families and members of the broader Black community who have opened their homes, their arms to me who is a Korean adoptee. Their embrace and receptivity and hospitality for all of these years have shown me who they are. I received far more than I have given.”
Clausen has been able to see how the program bore fruit over the years.
“One of the former students who had lived with us and was part of our youth program is now the one leading the barbershop at East High School,” Clausen said. “It’s fun to see him who barely graduated and was living with us his senior year and we were hoping he would finish to get his diploma and giving back himself and able to continue his mentoring students.”
Clausen’s work and his commitment to the students was noticed by MMSD officials.
“We got plugged into schools when I became the senior leader of the church,” Clausen said. “I was also invited by another community member to join an advisory council, the Superintendent’s Human Relations Advisory Council, SHRAC under a previous administration. I served on that. I connected with the former chief of schools and chief of staff. They were trying to focus on something for some students at La Follette. They wanted to engage in creative ways to get them into school and learning. They approached me and asked if our facility would be available to host a pilot program for a micro-school, which is what they called it. We hosted that pilot and had 13 La Follette students.”
During this time as a volunteer, Clausen was filling a void at the schools. In essence, he was wandering the halls, being a friendly face and helped students with problems they were experiencing while keeping them engaged in the schools and in the classrooms. Clausen wasn’t part of the official school structure, but he was a vital ingredient for furthering these students’ education.
When Dr. Carlton Jenkins became MMSD’s superintendent, he met with Clausen and obviously liked what he saw. He brought Clausen on board as paid staff
“I had the honor of serving exclusively out of his office in fall 2021,” Clausen said. “And then over winter break last year, he had convinced the former state superintendent, Dr. Carolyn Stanford Taylor, to unretire and wanted to pair me with her to create this new department to really take all of the things that I was observing in my short time with the district and be a part of the efforts to create something new with the deputy superintendent.”
It was a great combination. Stanford Taylor had decades of experience as a teacher, principal, and state education leader. She knew the system well and what students needed to achieve. Clausen, on the other hand, knew what the students needed from working from the grassroots up. Together, they created the Office of Youth Engagement of which Clausen is the director of the Department of Engagement, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion under Stanford Taylor.
“When the deputy superintendent and I were sharing ideas from all of her life’s work and all that she was seeing around the
state and just as a local leader and community member, she had some ideas,” Clausen said. “I had some experiences within the district and the community. But a lot was informed by me spending time in the secondary schools throughout the fall of 2021. We merged those ideas and that is what really conceived the Village Builder project. It was approved by the board at the June 30th meeting. We developed positions at the elementary level. We wanted to bring a lot more to the students who had entered education during the pandemic and would learn to re-socialize into society or be socialized for the first time into a community, into a classroom and experiences and a culture.”
Overall, what the department is putting together is a series of supports from elementary school through high school for those students who may be “lost” in furthering their academic advancement. The supports take many forms depending on the circumstances and the academic level.
In many ways, Clausen served as the model for the Village Builder positions in the elementary schools when he would walk the halls as a volunteer giving support and encouragement to students at East and La Follette. That kind of unstructured, insider/outsider support is somewhat duplicated on the elementary school level.
“Those are people from the community who we wanted to come in with our earliest learners to just really receive that warm, nurturing presence and to offer the teachers that classroom support where the students can be more quickly redirected and reengaged before things may escalate,” Clausen said. “Also they’ve been going through our district’s LETRS training. With the superintendent’s prioritization of early literacy, these staff have been able to offer that sort of tutoring and support for the students in the classroom and sometimes beyond the classroom. This has also, we have found, been beneficial with all of our staffing shortages as there are teachers who have to take time off because of COVID-19 or all of the other illnesses going around. We have substitutes coming in and we have heard that these Village Builders have been really instrumental in helping the class with those sorts of fluid day-to-day transitions and new experiences while providing some stability and cohesion for the classroom.”
Next issue: Elementary to high school support
