DE PERE – De Pere School Board member Brandy Tollefson is requesting fellow board member Melissa Niffenegger correct statements she made to the media and apologize to a district administrator.
“I’m asking the board to ask Melissa to please go back to these newspapers and say that she was not denied access to questions, and she was not denied access to classrooms, and she was not denied access to anything as a board member,” Tollefson said during Monday night’s board meeting. “These are false claims.”
Tollefson laid out a timeline of events, starting when Niffenegger asked her first questions about Act 20 in July. She said multiple opportunities existed where Niffenegger could have raised concerns or requested more information, and that she instead chose to report the district to the state Department of Public Instruction and lie to the media about lack of access .
The confrontation came near the end of a more than three-hour meeting that began with public comment about the Act 20 investigation in De Pere. Act 20 requires that all Wisconsin schools teach students to read using science-based methods.