A state lawmaker sent out a warning last month urging the Milwaukee City Council against signing off on a competing concert complex proposed for the city’s famed Deer District. The council did not heed the warning.

In the area where I grew up the conversation about high-capacity irrigation wells has taken on a louder and more robust tone over the past decade. It is pitting farmers against those who wish for more considerate and wise use of natural resources.

The politicians who are at the forefront of complaining about rampant crime are the same ones who yield to the gun lobby, refusing to even acknowledge that there’s a link between all that crime and all those easily available weapons.

Gov. Evers won by 90,000 votes but still the Republicans gained more seats in the Legislature, coming within a whisker of a veto-proof majority.

We have allowed our governments at all levels to be too big, too intrusive, too powerful, too coercive, and too corrosive.

The UW System’s Office of Educational Opportunity (OEO), created by the Wisconsin Legislature in 2015, is well on its way to overseeing more K-12 schools than the superintendents of most of Wisconsin’s 423 school districts.

As an American educator and Wisconsin’s first Southeast Asian assistant state superintendent, please join me in lifting our students’ lived experiences, so we can start to appreciate and allow them to be their whole selves.