School Board “Recall Collaborative” Shrouded in Secrecy, Ethical Questions

MILWAUKEE – Campaign finance reports submitted by a group attempting to recall four MPS Board Directors have left Milwaukee voters with more questions than answers.

The “recall collaborative” is led by individuals with close ties to private voucher and charter schools. Their headquarters are identified as a rented mailbox in the north shore suburb of Bayside. Before the end of the June 30 reporting period, the collaborative recruited for paid canvassers who have reported being paid through CashApp as independent contractors, boasted of “thousands” of signatures collected on printed materials and used donated spaces for signature collecting events. Yet none of these items, including the rented mailbox, appeared on any of the four campaign finance reports. One report, for School Board District 1, listed no activity whatsoever.

Leaders of the recall effort refused to answer questions about their financial reports when asked by the media, and said they did not know who in the campaign would be the correct person to talk to. The group’s treasurer told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel she could not answer questions about funding and when asked about the finance report, she hung up.

“It is ironic that a group of individuals who claim to be upset about transparency and financial reporting at MPS themselves failed to file the most basic finance reports required of them and now refuse to tell voters the truth about it,” said Ingrid Walker-Henry, President of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA). “As ethics complaints about the ‘recall collaborative’ pile up pointing to multiple potential violations of campaign and ethics laws, voters deserve answers about exactly who is funding these secretive recall campaigns and what the real goal is.”

The recall effort is led by Nicole Johnson, the former executive of a failed private charter school, and Tamika Johnson, a former charter executive who now teaches at a religious voucher school that enrolls zero students with disabilities and takes almost all its funding from taxpayers. Just this week, Tamika Johnson took to Facebook to defend Donald Trump‘s Project 2025 agenda that would eliminate federal funding for students with disabilities and dismantle public education throughout the country: “Please stop with the fear mongering about Project 2025,” Johnson said. “Y’all fall for anything.”

“Milwaukee should see this recall effort for what it is – local affiliates of the deep-pocketed, nationwide anti-public education voucher industry seeking to capitalize on the recent troubles with the MPS financial office,” said President Walker-Henry. “Instead of constructively working with the community to strengthen public schools for our students, they seek to tear them down further with funding cuts and chaos. Voters, reporters and other stakeholders should ask the privatizer leaders of the recalls to explain exactly what their motivation is, who is funding their efforts and how much money they really brought in and spent since announcing their campaign.”

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.

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