[BEEPING]
Major funding for In Wisconsin is provided by the people of
a lion to energy who bring safe, reliable, and
environmentally friendly energy to keep homes, neighborhoods,
and life in Wisconsin running smoothly.
A lion to energy, offering energy saving ideas on the
web. Next, in Wisconsin, the icons
of Wisconsin's landscape are torn down and reborn.
A look at Wisconsin's first virtual elementary school.
And forced into battle when he was only 12, this man is the
first among elected to public office in the US.
And he's here in Wisconsin.
[BEEPING]
Good evening and welcome to In Wisconsin.
I'm Patty Low.
Our show this evening is filled with new beginnings, not
the least being that this is a new series.
Every week, In Wisconsin will bring you stories from all
around the state, fascinating places, the issues that
directly affect your life and community, and always the
people who make Wisconsin unique.
Tonight we begin with one of those people.
If America stands for democracy, freedom, and
opportunity, Joe B.
Zhang is living the American dream.
On the cusp of adolescence, when American boys are armed
with attitude and sinking fastballs, 12-year-old Joe B.
Zhang was armed with an M-16 rifle.
In the 1960s and 70s, the CIA recruited
mung farmers in the mountains of Laos for a secret war in
Vietnam. Joe B.
Zhang's father was one of them.
Joe B reflects back on his decision to take his father's
place so that he could come back to Joe B's mother and
nine siblings.
I'm the oldest one and I feel that I already know to be
there, to replace him so he can be with my mom and
with the rest of the families.
Only child, but back then, 12-year-old Joe, you have a
lot of responsibility.
And to be the oldest child of the family, you have
a lot of responsibility.
You act like a dog and parents already for the brother
and the sister.
His childhood behind him, Joe B became a soldier.
In 1978, when the CIA pulled out of Laos, they
evacuated high-ranking military officials to Thailand.
Soldiers like Joe B.
Zhang, they simply abandoned.
So we used the hand grenade that we got left,
the ammunition that we got left.
In 1978, we had a very big casualty that the North Vietnam
and the communist troops fight were heavy against us.
And then until our village all wiped out, and then I
decided to took off from my village.
And then I took about 3,000 people, I lived in from the
village and walked from my village to Thailand.
That walk from Joe B's village to the safety of Thailand was
more than 150 miles over mountains across rivers and into
enemy ambushes.
We got many people die on the way.
We got a couple of times that we fight against or they fight
against us.
At the May Kong River, Joe B, now 15, told the refugees
to wait while he and several others crossed into Thailand
to clear the way for the group's arrival.
And when I got crossed to the May Kong River and the Thai
authority would not let me go back.
And the waiting there about a week, and they cannot wait
any longer, so they all separate and find their own way
to Thailand.
And that's why many people got killed, many people
went back, and many people surrendered to the communist.
Somehow, Joe B's mother and father, along with his sister
and brothers, made their way to safety and joined him.
After spending about 8 months in a refugee camp,
Joe B Zhang arrived in America and eventually settled
in O'Clair.
When it first came to the United States, in first experiments
on the electric store, on the hot water, the cold waters,
the drinking fountains, and all those, anything is new
experiment for you.
And then the scales that you have, that you find means
or you use to the machine guns or the guns are not able
to find a job here, so it's like your life, it's totally
reborn again.
Like many of the mong who settled here, Joe B spoke no
English, but learned and then graduated from high school and
earned a bachelor's degree from Mount Scenario College.
But even as he embraced his new American community,
he clung to the music and culture of his homeland.
Mong, we have eight different tones.
We have eight different tones.
This is only six pieces, but example, if I cover this
piece with that one, it make another different tones.
The gang or bamboo pipes is one of a dozen mong instruments,
Joe B plays.
The jaw is another.
Well, pretty much on this aspraship,
feeling to other people, and pretty much this
kind of instrument we use to communicate
for culture and all the type of things.
I may give the whole thing to her and I said, well, I give you
these instruments and then I come back to visit you again.
But if you don't want to go back there and then you actually
ask you to see the instrument, you give her the instrument,
but you hold by the hand.
And after they don't play, you can pull her back.
I did a back.
I mean, he played a very important role in one
sense as a role model for the other mong people.
Eric Linquist, a reporter for the O'Claire leader telegram,
has followed Joe B's journey from immigrant to
citizen to community leader.
He's involved in everything.
I mean, he's for years, he's been a landlord, I believe,
and for a lot of mong families, he's rented to people that maybe
had troubles with other landlords, had
communication issues, so he gave them
comfort in that way.
Can you have to know how association?
He has been the president of the board of directors
at the mong association here in O'Claire.
And now he's serving as the stepped in and a gap
and been the acting director.
He owns property that he rents to mong gardeners
so that they can supply food for the farmer's market
and have an extra income.
In 1996, residents elected Joe B.
Jean to the first of two terms on
the O'Claire City Council, making him the first
mong in America elected to public office.
I feel great and honored, but it's not as much
as the second time.
In my second time, I feel much better and I feel proud
and more honest because I believe that I can do the jobs
and that's why they re-elact me again.
For Joe B.
Jean, who became a citizen in 1986,
being an American means serving the public good.
I do what I can do to help myself, my family,
and my community, and my country.
That means to be the Vietnam War.
And when I came here, I still feel like,
if any war out there that needs me,
I still willing to serve and to protect my country.
He says the events of 9/11 made a powerful impression on him
and brought back memories he'd rather forget.
That's what we've been through, and not just one time,
but many, many times.
You have many good friends and suddenly just one minute
or a few seconds, you lost all.
Interestingly, in the Hmong language,
the word Hmong means being free.
Each year at festivals like this one,
the Hmong celebrate their survival and their freedom.
I'm glad that we came here at the right time.
And then we have the opportunity to go to school.
We have the opportunity to do business that you capable of
or you be able to do it.
I see that we jump in 150 years ahead
when we live in Laos, from the people living in Laos.
And I feel confident that if we continue the way we do it now,
then we probably will be successful in the future.
[music]
Drive down just about any highway or rural
road in Wisconsin and you'll see them.
Weathered barns that stand as tribute to builders
and immigrants long gone.
Many of these old barns have disappeared
and the remainder are quickly decaying.
But Rick Bott of Baraboo is giving some a new life.
[music]
I've always had a passion for these old barns as I was a kid.
I have a great deal of respect for the people originally
built these buildings.
And these barns stand really as a monument to our ancestors
to settle the state.
Unfortunately, many of these buildings are disappearing.
In a lot of cases, they're simply burned for fire practice
or they're allowed to curate at the point
where they're just basically settled into the landscape.
[music]
What we tried it, we reused it.
And we could do anything from salvaging barnsiding
that could be reused as paddling.
But we could also re-mill it.
We could re-sought.
We could make it a flooring trim.
We built furniture out of it.
The old wood has a beauty and a quality and a patina
that is unsuppressed by any other material
that you could get.
This was milled from barnsiding off a barn in Northern Illinois
that rumor has that Al Capone actually stabled
horses in for a while.
These little holes you see here are from buckshot.
Somebody must have, you know, took out a pigeon
or something up against one of the walls.
We'll pay a numb, we'll feed for the salvage
rights of the building.
But primarily what we're doing is we're taking down a structure
is coming a danger to our clients.
Possibly it's the point where it's in liability
because of insurance and because of the tax rolls.
It's not just the case of just going out taking a crowbar
to a building and hauling it away in your pickup truck.
What you have to do is be able to utilize
as much of the structure as possible.
Not just the most premium parts.
Jet Lake, guys.
Flying drill.
This one was split already.
All right.
The point is to not produce kid lake.
I got started doing this back in the 70s
when I was working my way through college
and we would take a few bars and sell the material from them.
And gradually we developed techniques
for using more and more of the building.
So it was a learning process.
The closest we've come to ever really score like that.
There were a couple times when we would have built a pit
a little faster than we thought it was going through.
We just barely got out of harm's way.
This is not something that you and amateurs do
because the learning curve can be quite short
if you don't get it right.
We'll come in and we'll strip the siding off very carefully.
Using specialized tools to pry it off so we don't damage it.
Then we make a series of pre-pots in the structure.
We're very key places.
Then we change the building up and we tip it over.
It comes over just like pulling over a large tree.
It makes big crunch everybody gets a kick out of it.
And if we do it right, we made all our pre-cuts properly.
We damage very little material.
Wisconsin as a state was blessed 150 years ago
with some of the finest standing timber in the world,
particularly some of the old-growth white pine.
These are massive trees that grew in the northern
part of the state.
Often they would grow six or eight feet apart
and they'd be six feet diameter.
And people would speak about them like they were
standing in a cathedral.
These trees took centuries to grow, often 500 years.
And because they grew so slowly, the quality of the wood was
far superior to the lumber that you could
possibly get today.
You'll never see lumber like that again.
It's just not going to occur anywhere
except in very remote regions.
The house is built almost completely out
of recycled materials.
You can see about old virens, old warehouses,
all that say from landfills.
When you work with this kind of wood, it just puts everything
else out there in shame.
This is a good example of post and beam work.
This is a little more finished than a lot of
buildings that we do.
We use large power planers that surface the timber.
We take a little bit of the old rough surface off.
And then you could finish the beams with either
an oil or polyurethane or a good clogged slack.
There's not staying any lumber in this building.
It's all original patina.
And you can see the deep rich tones that you get from it.
Most of what you're looking at here would be in a landfill.
This is recycling on a grand scale.
And I could achieve this look or this finish if
I was using new lumber.
The only way you could really do this and do
this was effectively is to use the old growth
lumber from the old barns, the old warehouses.
Here it's going to have another hundred years worth of life.
Whenever we take down one of these old buildings,
and we see it come down, we always have a
little bit of regret.
It's such magnificent structures.
Wisconsin wouldn't be Wisconsin if we didn't
have these old barns in the landscape, such
an icon of the state.
But if the building has to come down, it's far, far wiser
to at least use as much of it as we can and recycle it
and give parts of the old barn a new life.
A favorite tradition of childhood is the
first day of school.
What to wear, getting on the bus, who will be in your class.
But what if your school is a virtual school?
Hundreds of children are finding out as they attend Wisconsin's
first virtual elementary school.
It's run out of Appleton, but since it's a virtual school,
producer Art Hackett begins his report 115 miles away in Oregon.
In a farmhouse just west of Oregon,
Emily, Samantha and Cila harms are starting their school day
the way they always have, getting books off the shelf
and taking them to the kitchen table where their mother Christy
will teach them.
The family decided to homeschool when their first child, Emily,
was ready for kindergarten.
We just saw that the schools were, I guess,
academically they were okay, but morally, there's
just a lot of things that we didn't agree with.
So from the start, we decided to homeschool
our Emily at the time.
But as the children got older, harm says she
encountered material.
She wasn't comfortable teaching.
Some subjects that I wasn't as knowledgeable in, like science.
I never like science as a high school.
I just am not a science person.
So I wanted, you know, another curriculum where it
actually explained the science and I could understand
it more too.
And the harms wanted a testing program to
provide accountability.
It was easy for us to make a lesson plan from
the whatever curriculum we were using, but to enforce
that it actually happened.
This school gives us that kind of accountability.
This school harms refers to as a virtual school.
Christie Harms checks a website every morning
for the day's activities.
I log in all their assignments, their lesson
plans are on the computer.
So I can look and it gives you some, I mean, coaching tips
and how to teach that lesson.
Harms is the learning coach in virtual school parlance.
She delivers the lessons, the computer, and some
accompanying workbooks suggest.
So even though the computers use to manage what's completed and
what's still left to be done, it's very much a book
oriented activity oriented learning center where the
child is not left alone, but there is an adult with them.
Linda Dawson is an assistant superintendent with the
Appleton area school district.
The virtual school is a public school located in what used
to be Appleton's high school.
It's paid for with state tax dollars funded through
the school aid formula.
Dawson says the district started exploring virtual
education to serve students who had trouble coping in
a traditional classroom or who had been expelled.
The district also has a number of home schoolers who ask
for help from time to time.
But there weren't enough students in the
Appleton district to make the school viable.
So taking advantage of the state open enrollment law,
the district opened the school up to students like the
Harms family 120 miles away.
Thus was born the Wisconsin Connections Academy.
And although it is a virtual school, the
academy does have teachers.
Lynn Rhodes is responsible for about 50 kindergarten
and first grade students.
When your mom said you're going to try to finish your block
tour work before Christmas, so you're really moving
along quickly, aren't you?
Teachers keep track of students' progress and
grade mailed in tests.
When students start reading books on their own,
teachers will discuss the books over the phone.
You're right, and he is one of the main characters
because she's the one that changes Helen and the whole
family's life in the end by teaching Helen sign language
and how it means different things so that they can
communicate back and forth now.
And sometimes teachers have to follow up on exams
which are supposed to be submitted, but aren't.
I need to have the tests on my desk by Wednesday in
order for me to help you.
So that means you have today to finish up whatever it
is you need to finish up and then get that out in
the mail probably tonight.
If you can do that, is that sound like something you can do?
But if you eavesdrop on the conversations, there are
frequent references that sound out of place in a conversation
about a Wisconsin school dealing with Wisconsin students.
I'll put in a request to Baltimore to
get that out to you.
Baltimore is the headquarters of the Connections Academy, which
is the subsidiary of Sylvan Learning Systems, a for-profit
company that also operates franchise tutoring programs.
The Appleton School District contracts with Connections
Academy just as the school might buy textbooks and software
from a private business.
However, the Connections Academy provides virtually everything
the virtual school uses.
This tight connection to a for-profit company
is discomforting for teachers unions.
And the Connections Academy is drawing half of its students
from traditional public schools across the state.
Katie Joe Powell of the Dane County Town of Windsor
is a fourth grader at the Connections Academy.
Her mother Joanne says until last year, Katie was enrolled in
her local public school system.
I felt that she was slowly getting lost in the system.
I started noticing it a little bit in second grade.
But more than that, her mother says it was the stress that
went with homework assignments.
Last year, she also used to be involved in
swimming, horse riding.
And she basically quit all of those extra activities
because she said I just have too much homework.
Here, it's more hand-stung.
And, you know, my mom teaches me more and more until I get it.
And at the regular school, they just do one problem
on the board and say, okay, and then they just slam
a book in your face and say, then do it.
But not all families have been happy with the
Academy's curriculum.
Principal Nicole Schweitzer says about 30 of the schools,
264 original students, had dropped out by the
end of the first semester.
In some cases, the curriculum is either too
rigid for the student or too rigid for the parent.
It's about 192 days of education, which
typically traditional public schools go 180 days
and they maybe get five days for field trips.
And I have the day off for the spring concert, half day
off for the winter concert, things like that.
We've got 192 solid educational days.
And, depending on lawsuit alleges, the
Wisconsin Connections Academy may not be legal.
The Connections Academy is a charter school.
It's students as this pin map shows are spread
all over the state.
The state teachers union points out in a lawsuit that
state law forbids the district from setting up a charter
school outside of the district.
Diane Lang is the president of the Appleton
Education Association, the local teachers
union affiliate.
Because this is statewide, it really does violate
what the law says.
And I think we have to concern is if we're going to have this,
then the legislature needs to make some adjustments
in the laws because the laws are being violated.
You know, and how can you have laws violated?
Violated just because you want to try something new.
Assistant Superintendent Linda Dawson contends the
academy is no different than any other Appleton school,
all are allowed under the open enrollment law to take
out of district students.
It's just that at Connections Academy, most of the
students aren't from Appleton.
Why should the Appleton District be using its
resources to run something that's primarily not
benefiting Appleton?
And that's a good question.
And one of the things that we've brought up repeatedly
is that we're doing it because it also serves
the needs of our kids that benefit from this.
Even though we only have a less than 20% of the students,
those students are still being benefited by
having this as a choice.
Dawson says the district has suggested the state
department of public instruction take over the school
to resolve this issue.
It should be pointed out that the entire cost of
running the school is paid far with state aid dollars,
not local property tax money.
If the courts rule it legal, the Connections Academy
is expected to expand to 350 students in the fall.
Parents like the flexibility the program provides.
I mean, it's a trial and error.
We're seeing what works for us.
I think overall it's going really well.
How many would you have?
The Academy's teachers say they are happy
they can reach students who otherwise might be
totally outside of the public school system.
But teachers being teachers, they miss the kids.
I love being in the classroom and I love the kids.
I'm missing some of that, but I do see kids occasionally.
They'll come by and see us here and I'll talk
to them on the phone.
But instead of face-to-face contact, a picture
on our cubicle wall will have to represent a
student 120 miles away.
For more debate on the lawsuit and the legal issues about state
funding for a virtual school, tune in tomorrow night
to hear a now at 7 p.m.
You can also catch the repeat if both in
Wisconsin and here and now, this Sunday beginning at 6 p.m.
Thank you for joining us for our premiere
edition of In Wisconsin.
Join us again next week when we'll travel to a small town
where people work tripelships to help New York City after 9/11
and stand guard on the Wolf River with a group
protecting Sturgeon.
We leave you now with a postcard of sorts, a video
postcard from Door County.
Good night.
(wind blowing)
birds.
What's your funding for InWisconsin?
It's provided by the people of a lion to energy,
who bring safe, reliable, and environmentally friendly energy
to keep homes, neighborhoods, and life in Wisconsin
running smoothly.
A lion to energy, offering energy-saving ideas on the web.
[Music]