Teacher’s THREAT

Tom Rulseh was baffled by the email from an angry constituent. Why, the woman demanded to know, had the Th ree Lakes School District allowed Gov. Scott Walker to film a campaign ad in a public school that had nearly been forced to close thanks in part to Walker’s own budget cuts?

The ad, it turned out, featured employees and teachers from the rural Wisconsin district praising Walker’s education policies. “Governor Walker has been very helpful to us with state funding,” claimed one school board member in the ad.

“I was shocked when I saw it,” says Rulseh, the school board president. “I called a meeting right away—an open meeting the public could attend to address the matter.” In front of a standing-room-only crowd, the board passed a new policy barring its schools from being used for politicking. Walker declined to take down the ad, leaving it on the air for the rest of the week.

Walker, the union-busting Republican who came to power in the tea party wave of 2010, is running for a third term. And as the Three Lakes outcry illustrates, the race has been dominated by a debate over the state’s public schools, which have suffered from massive funding reductions and teacher shortages during his tenure.

So it’s fitting that Walker’s opponent is Tony Evers, the state’s superintendent of education. A 66-year-old with nerdy glasses that often sit slightly askew, Evers (rhymes

with “fevers”) has spent his entire working life in education. He often wears a black T-shirt