Neillsville District Administrator Discusses Items from the Neillsville School Board's April Meeting

Thursday, April 30th, 2026 -- 2:01 PM

The Neillsville School Board approved several items at their monthly meeting on Monday.

I spoke with Neillsville District Administrator Corey Peterson and he discussed some of the items in more detail.

Listen to the interview with Mr. Peterson here!

If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact Mr. Peterson at the District and make sure you take a moment to fill out the survey(s) for the District’s Strategic Plan.

(AI assisted transcription via Otter.ai)

Riley: "So, the first thing I want to talk about is the Neillsville School Board did approve the Educators Rising Club application. Can you talk about what that is?"

Mr. Peterson: "Yeah, the Educator Rising proposal that came forward is a club that is set up to inspire students to become future educators. We know that the numbers going into the field of education continue to decline and this gives us an opportunity to try to bolster that with some local pipeline, look to what we can do."

"We have a very solid alumni group that comes back and we welcome those students back. It's great to see that excitement and energy going into the education field. This will continue to enhance that so through collaboration, building leadership skills, working with a student body, taking on different organizational roles, gives them a chance to network with others throughout the state."

"Our local chapter allows them to see what the field education is like and, also, what they could be getting into for the future and just working in the interim, whether they go into the education field or not, how to build their leadership skills to help them in any field that will go after in the future. So, very exciting time to see the fact that we have excitement within our hallways, maintaining the field, the education that we are looking to have."

Riley: "And then one item that the Board did deny was the mid season co curricular payment schedule. Could you explain that please?"

Mr. Peterson: "So, the request on the table was to have a co-curricular payment schedule that allowed for mid and end of season payment and in looking at that, between reviewing our policy and how our contracts are currently set up, the denial was taking place."

"And, again, we look at it from the standpoint of typically, our past practice has been that we would offer a payment at the end of the season when everything is complete, and that's what stated really up to this point in time. So, the consideration was to alter that or not and the decision was not to alter our current practices for that."

Riley: "And as usual, the community was very generous once again and it provided several donations to the neilsville School District. Can you touch on those?"

Mr. Peterson: "Exactly, again is the key word there and we continue to get the benefit and the support of our local community. We appreciate that. We have multiple different donations this month, several from the same companies, but we had donations that range from, you know, local individuals donating just feminine hygiene products or day to day operations, to the fact that we had dirt brothers excavating that provided us with a mini excavator to help with completing our softball field improvements."

"We had Unity Bank that provided the spirit card donation that we were provided in the past as well, but that then built into additional support with their Kick Donation. So, Kindness in the Community, which provides for us the negative lunch balances, so help covering for kids that may be struggling to cover balances their families."

"And then finally, thank you for Atmus. Atmus has donated $10,000 towards our elementary playground project, so we continue to work to improve our playground and this is a huge piece towards that. So, thank you very much to our local community and everything they do to help support us in our cause.

Riley: "And now, one item that I would like to touch on that wasn't discussed during this last school board meeting, but is something that the school district is doing, is you do have a survey out there in regards to helping with a strategic plan? Can you touch on that?"

Mr. Peterson: Our strategic plan is underway and so hopefully people have seen posters throughout town or have had a chance to see it on social media or wherever they may have run into it."

"If not, please let us know. But, ultimately, we are looking for everybody's input. We want parents, we want community, we want business, we want students. We want everybody's input as to what we want Neillsville to look like three to five years from now."

"This is a chance to paint the picture for what the vision is for our district moving forward. To do that, we need everybody's input. So, we're doing that in several different ways. First and foremost is the survey that is out there currently."

"It closes on the fifth, so if you are in need, we have paper copies here locally on campus. We have paper copies at the Neillsville Library. If you're a person that would like some paper copies, let us know."

"Conversely, we also have the copies that are available through taking it through our QR code or the links that are online and we pushed out that in many different ways. But if there's a way in which we can encourage more people to take that, we would appreciate that. The more voices we have, the better."

"If you're a person that just relates to several different realms, say, I'm a parent, well, I could take the parent survey, the Community Survey, I could take a family member survey. Take the surveys. You get multiple service taken per family, again in the same household, making sure that we get everybody's voice."

"This will help build our planning for the future and what will allow us to do is create our mission, our vision for the school, our pillars, so that when we come to our budgetary decisions and we come to our programming decisions, we know exactly what the importance is to the community and where we want our priorities to lie."

"So, this is a key piece for us moving forward. To help create that long term plan we would love to get everybody engaged with that. The next layer beyond our survey to engage people is going to be our focus group."

"So, on the 11th of May we have focus groups that will be coming in. So, CESA 10 is our vendor that will help us with the strategic plan. They are coming in to host focus groups. We'll have a focus group that will hit with our student group, our staff, our parents and our community, and we'll continue to lock in times."

"Right now we're slating our staff right after school, our parents for roughly 5:30pm and our community for 6:30pm. We have a middle school, high school choir concert that night that we're trying to make sure people can still get to."

"But we would like to have everybody's input. And you can come to one, you can come to as many as relate to you. We would love to get your input that will give us a chance to do in person discussions based upon our survey results and questions they may have for our panel, and we'll have to guided discussions to help us get a personalized feel for what people are believing and feeling, for the vision for our district moving forward."

"So, key pieces coming up, the end goal is that we will then take all that input and start harnessing that to construct our plan. So, we create the action plans that will have the metrics and we'll have the steps to say this is how we're going to be successful in attaining the pillars and attaining the aspirations that we've set out as a district goal is that we will have that approved in July at our board meeting."

"So, this will create our planning for the 2026-27 school year and beyond. So, we would welcome everybody to get engaged, and if you have questions, please reach out to me so they can help out. We were here to serve. We want to make sure that we get everybody's voice involved in the survey planning."

Riley: "Is there anything else then, anything else you'd like to touch on in regards to the last school board meeting, or the district in general?"

Mr. Peterson: "Overall, we have a very busy time coming up here. We have an amazing staff on site that is here to serve as well. So, thank you for all the parents that have connected with staff and our staff that have connected with parents this year."

"We've had a lot of great work there and I applaud everybody for the communication back and forth in the mix. We have a busy season coming in. Our spring concert season is well underway, so we had our band concert already take place, but we are looking ahead."

"On the 11th, we do have our middle school, high school choir concert. The 13th, we have scholarships taking place. 14th is our elementary concert. The 15th is 4k graduation. And the 23rd of May is our high school graduation."

"So, we have a very busy time coming. But in the mix, we have other activities taking place, sporting events well underway. But again, thank you along the way for all the parents that have been engaged in helping out and communicating their interests. We want to continue with that, and please know that we are here to help out in any way we can."

(Photo courtesy of the School District of Neillsville)

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