Berlin School Superintendent Emma Dirtry is with us this morning.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thanks for having me on.
Oh, yeah, no problem.
Lots of things we could talk about.
You want to start with the elections because, you know, there were a lot of districts, not the Berlin area school district, but there were a lot of districts that had operational or borrowing.
Yeah,
that's true.
It's not a record number, but a very large number across the state and 56 percent.
a lower rate of the operational past than the capital.
And I think capital pasted about 80%, but the operational were significantly lower than 50%.
I think locally Rippon and Princeton passed, so congratulations to those two school districts.
But I think it reminds us, especially with the election, that there's a bigger issue.
School districts don't want to have to go to referendum for operational.
We know that that's just not a great way to fund schools, in my opinion.
And I think the opinion is probably very school district.
Capital referendums for building and construction, clearly that's necessary.
It always will be.
But for operationally running your day-to-day operations of the school district, there's got to be a better way.
And so as a result of the election, it'll be interesting to see how the new governor, assembly, and senate work out bipartisan deals to look at school funding.
Because in talking to other superintendents and school boards and just kind of over the last
especially 15 years since we decoupled funding increases with inflationary increases that happened in 2009.
When that happened there's just been a gradual eroding away of revenue limits of like that revenue that's coming into districts and so there seems to be a lot of talk with this biennial budget coming up for the summer of
trying to address some of that.
I think some of that will be looking at low revenue districts, like all of the districts around here in the, in my area, right, of Green Lake County, Washera County, Winnebago County, are considered lower revenue districts, meaning revenue limits per child of between 11,900 and 13,000.
And there's a lot of talk about increasing all of those up to over 13,000.
That would help.
tremendously.
A number of districts that I know of would not even consider an operational referendum to go to the taxpayers for increase if that was in place.
The other one you hear a lot about is special education funding, so reimbursement rates from the state.
So there's talk about addressing that and I'd encourage the public just to inform yourself, as I kind of have always said on the show, to learn about funding, school funding, taxation,
and to encourage our legislators to come up with some solutions that won't overtax our communities.
I'm in favor of that, of not overtaxing people, but also having a sensible stream of revenue that districts don't have to go back to our taxpayers for referendum increases.
How do you feel about something like the dissolution of a school district?
in Dodge County, history's forward.
And it's the first one, I guess, in more than 30 years.
Yeah, so I definitely feel for them, right?
Because I don't think that was what they wanted necessarily, but I think they'll have a good solution going into Dodge Land.
What I would say about that is, one, it's like the first in a long, long time.
So it's not a solution for our state, but it's a solution maybe for some of our smallest districts where they are geographically
close in proximity and maybe it's a district of like a K district or a, uh, a bordering high school unified district.
Um, but in most cases in this state, I don't think that's going to be a viable solution, mostly because you can't close some schools down simply because of the number of students you need those buildings or transportation distances and costs will be out of control.
Like a parent may say like, yeah, it'd be great to reduce costs by 20%.
But you want to put your child on a bus for two hours.
And I think that's
what
it's going to come down to, really.
So back to what I said earlier, we need to really look at the financing of schools to ensure that we're not overspending or overtaxing, but we're also giving schools a predictable source of income and revenue that they can then not have to consider as school boards going to referendum.
Okay, just wanted to touch on this one briefly, but I believe the report this morning was that there are 551 measles cases in Wisconsin.
As I touched the Berlin school district.
It has
not but I can say in a district of 1200 students we do have 60 some students that are not vaccinated right and that's a parental choice right they in the state of Wisconsin you can choose to send your child to school without being vaccinated.
You have to have a waiver and there's some other things in that.
The biggest thing is that I just encourage everyone to be cautious.
So if you are properly vaccinated, or if you are, but you don't know the level of that vaccination, there is a simple test, a blood test.
You can go to your doctor and have that done.
Also, if your child is going to school or is out in the community and is not vaccinated out of your choice,
Be cautious, right?
Really watch for those around you that the thing with measles is a little different than COVID, right?
It's completely airborne and it's highly contagious for those that aren't immunized within proximity, even like within the room for a couple hours after that cough or sneeze or that those droplets are in the air.
It's very, very contagious airborne-wise.
So just be cautious.
It hasn't, how it's affected our school districts, we're watching it closer than we would normally.
We have any cases there where definitely we'll be communicating with parents just to remind them to take all the precautions necessary.
If you are someone who is not immunized and you have been around somebody that has confirmed case of measles, you really should stay away from others for up to 21 days unless you get immunized within that window.
Because the symptoms, you can start, kind of like COVID, you can start being contagious yourself.
with others before you even really know it.
And that's the challenge.
So yeah, just another reminder about immunizations and the power of them, but also about the need for all of us to be cautious, especially during cold flu and now measles season.
And the holidays are coming up.
So, you know, yeah, then you're in
Meeting with family from different areas of the country or the state or whatever kind of during
COVID again I predict that there'll be some spread of measles during Thanksgiving
in the
holiday season And so it's a great reminder like thanks for bringing it up.
It's great reminder this time of year just to be aware and to be cautious
Okay
uh fall musical what's the fall musical yeah it starts tonight
it does yeah so our berlin high school of students and some eighth graders from berlin middle school are putting on matilda the musical oh
my which
is based on roald doll's book matilda
that was a great movie
yeah yeah there's so there's been two movies one the original one like the danie de vito reaperlman and movie um and then there was netflix version or movie of the musical which is based on the movie
and the book.
And yeah, so we're really excited about it.
The kids did their dress rehearsal yesterday afternoon and they are ready to go.
They are performing tonight at seven o'clock and tomorrow at seven and Saturday at seven.
People can get tickets online.
It's really easy.
Go to basdtheater.ludas.
Or you can just come a few minutes early, like half hour early and get tickets at the door.
So, encourage everybody to come
out.
If you haven't been to high school musical in a while, there's a certain joy and exuberance that you feel from the students going to those.
So,
love
it.
That's a good story.
Yeah, Bob, you should come.
So, is that the high school auditorium?
High school auditorium, yeah.
Berlin, Berlin area school district, Berlin high school auditorium.
And on the south side there will be an
entrance.
Yeah, hope to see you there.
All right, we mentioned Thanksgiving earlier.
You wanted to mention something about...
The gobbler walk?
The gobbler walk, yeah.
So a club from the Berlin High School sponsors the gobbler every year, which is a walk, it's like a 5k walk, one mile run event.
Thanksgiving morning, you can arrive to kind of sign up at 8.30, and we take off at 9.
They walk or run right by my house, so it's, if I'm not participating, I'm seeing them come by.
So this year I might, I might do it, but encourage anybody to come.
is at Nathan Strom Park, so the historic park there in the center of Berlin.
And hopefully the weather's great.
It typically has been the last few years, so it's a fun way to get out.
So if you're no longer young enough to go and throw the football around, I don't know if you ever did that on Thanksgiving, where my friends
always
go like
the
pick up football game, and then we'd all come home and like be aching and, you know, hurt our knees and backs.
But this is a little bit more gentle.
So you can come out to the gobbler and show your spirit and get some fresh air.
Yeah.
That's great.
All
right.
And I hope everybody has a happy Thanksgiving and a safe Thanksgiving.
You too.
That's
well, Bob.
Well, thank you, Emmett.
You too.
And thanks for joining us this morning.
It's always my pleasure.
We've been talking with Emmett Durche, who is the superintendent of the Berlin Area School District.
Ashley Colberg is joining us.
She is the Emergency Department Administrative Supervisor for SSM Health and Rippin Community Hospital.
Thanks for joining us this morning.
Thanks for having me, Bob.
Now we're going to be talking about National Rural Health Day.
That's today, right?
I think it's next Thursday, but I don't have that paperwork in front of me, but I do know it falls this month in November, yes.
Okay, so, you know, if
It's not until next Thursday, at least we'll be prepared, which is the whole focus, right?
Yes.
All right.
So speaking of preparedness, do you want to start out with emergency preparedness?
Yeah, we can start with that topic.
So we have, obviously the emergency department prepares for emergencies as well as the whole hospital as well.
We want to be prepared in case there are any large scale events in the community.
Being a rural hospital makes us unique in the fact that we live in the communities, we work in the communities, so we understand, you know, the populations that we serve and the unique challenges of those communities.
And it allows us to respond better to emergencies when they come up because we understand kind of what everyone's going through being in a small community.
So do you have drills then to prepare
we do yeah, so we drill on several different things throughout the year We do internal drills.
We also work closely with like rip and fire rip and police rip and EMS Talk about different types of community events everything from
severe weather events or potential chemical leaks at some of our co-ops in town.
We have a lot of industry in town as well, so we talk about possible issues that could come up with those and the unique challenges of treating those individuals.
How does the fire department, for instance, and EMS respond to those?
What challenges do they have on scene that may transition back to our department as well?
How do they keep themselves safe?
How do we also keep patients as well as ourselves safe so we can continue to treat those community members?
in those type of events as well.
Okay, and you have a railroad that runs through town too, and that's quite busy.
There's
always
the possibility of derailment, but you hope it never happens.
Yep, we actually talk about that in our hospital emergency preparedness, and that is one of the things that we talk about every year is the possible risk of that happening, and what we would do in that type of scenario.
All right, Ashley, let's talk next about pediatric preparedness.
So
we're
talking about kids here, right?
Yes, so I think it's important to capture that kids are not just small adults.
They come with their own unique set of challenges.
And rural hospitals do have to be prepared to care for all types of kids' injuries and illnesses, because we don't have pediatric specialists available.
So early recognition and stabilization is very important when we see these kids
as it can, you know, significantly impact their outcomes if we can get them treated early.
I think it's important too that even though we don't have those specialists, early recognition is key so we can, you know, our hope is to keep them in their community so parents don't have to travel far for care.
However, when we get to that point that we realize they may need, you know, more care than we can provide with that early recognition, we can get them, you know, sent to an appropriate facility so they can continue on their care and hopefully have a good outcome.
So we're not talking about some kind of a scenario involving multiple kids, are we?
It could be that.
I mean, when we talk about emergency preparedness, we also roll in pediatric drills.
So we've had discussions on what it would look like if there was potentially a bus accident in town and we would get several kids.
We work closely with the school district.
The school district has an amazing reunification plan.
And so we involve them in our discussions when we talk about those types of events of how can we bring
the plan that they already have in place to ensure that the correct kid gets discharged with the correct parent.
So they, we participate, like I said, with a lot of local resources so that we're not reinventing the wheel.
They have all that created and so we want to lean on them and utilize that to make sure the right kids get with the right parents if there was any type of a large-scale event involving children.
So we would also be including what?
An active shooter scenario in the fold then?
Yeah, so we do talk about what that looks like, especially if there was an active shooter, you know potentially in the hospital or potentially at a local At the schools or one of the industries in town.
So yes, those are part of our conversations as well in the broader scope of emergency preparedness and talking about like large-scale events that could potentially happen and Require our services.
Well, you have your own security officers there, right?
We do and we are very blessed to have security on site 24-7.
We have an amazing group of individuals that provide those services for us and they get along very well with our teams and we're just we're very appreciative to the work that they provide and the safety they provide to us 24-7.
I
know I've gone to the hospital a couple of times really early in the morning like on a Saturday for testing and get greeted in the emergency department by the security officer so
Yeah, they do try to make they do try to keep their presence a little more in the emergency department after hours Because that's most generally where something could happen.
So we do we do get along well with them and appreciate their support
All right, this last one.
I'm not really sure about so this is gonna be an education for me as well trauma-informed Preparedness or is it trauma-informed and preparedness?
Might be both I can touch a little bit on kind of all of that so
I think one of the important things to recognize too, kind of when I was talking about kids and getting them connected, you know, where they need to be is especially relating to trauma.
You know, trauma can happen anywhere.
We're an active agricultural community, so things can happen that are pretty significant.
And, you know, minutes matter when those things happen.
So it's important that...
those patients get to us and we can get them stabilized and if needed to a higher level of care quickly.
Studies have shown that early bleeding control, airway management, rapid diagnosis can make a significant outcome in patients, especially when that happens early.
So especially again for these events, we have very good communication with our local EMS agencies.
They're always calling ahead to tell us what they're bringing in, which gives us some time to get prepared, especially in a trauma for things that we may need.
We also partner closely with helicopter transport.
So if this is a patient that we know based on the report from EMS that'll likely need to be transferred quickly to a higher level of care, we can coordinate with our helicopter services and get them in route so that we can get that patient stabilized and get them where they need to go.
So, even though we are a small hospital, we're very agile.
We provide a lot of different, you know, services to our community and we prepare for a lot of different things.
So, like I said, we prepare for trauma.
We do PEEDs.
We also do obstetric drills throughout the year.
So, even though we don't have obstetrics here, we are prepared if some were to walk in in labor or to have any complications before or after birth.
So like I said, we have a broad variety of skills and our job is to keep you close to home as much as possible.
And when we can't, um, we have those conversations about where we feel the next step would be in your care.
Okay.
So you also work with, uh, Medabag medical helicopters then.
Yep.
Yep.
Okay.
So I imagine that that's part of your preparedness as well.
It is.
Yes.
So and we, uh, we, they're, they're wonderful groups to work with, uh, specifically to work a lot with, uh, like UW med flight, say to care and flight for life.
Those I think are the three services that will, um, come pick up patients and take them out if we need.
All right.
Well, we were talking, I looked it up and apparently national rural health day is next Thursday, the 19th.
So we're prepared now as it goes.
Yes.
Ashley, thank you very much for joining us this morning.
Appreciate your time.
Thank you so much.
Have a great day, Bob.
We've been talking with Ashley Colberg, who's with SSM Health.
She's the Emergency Department Administrative Supervisor for Ripon Community Hospital.