Welcome! My name is Nick Silvaggi, and I am running for the Cedarburg School Board this spring (April 2). 

The long-winded version:
I earned my B.S. in Biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and my Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Connecticut. I have been a resident of Cedarburg since 2012, when my wife Jessica and I moved up from Mequon. Both my daughter and son have attended Cedarburg Public Schools from the beginning. I have been a university-level educator and biochemistry researcher in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UWM since 2009. I teach both undergraduate and graduate-level courses in Biophysical Chemistry (UG), Protein Structure and Function (G/UG), Introduction to Biochemistry Laboratory (G/UG), and Practical Macromolecular Crystallography (G). 

Like many Cedarburg residents, my wife and I moved here, in part, because we had two young children, and the Cedarburg Public Schools are some of the highest-performing schools in the state. I see the strength of our schools firsthand in the Cedarburg students that wind up in my classes. They are, without exception, exemplary students. I am running for a seat on the Cedarburg School Board to do my part to maintain the excellence of our public school system in Cedarburg, and to do what I can to improve it further.

My experiences as a university professor, father, and volunteer catechist have given me insights about life, leadership, and what it takes to be successful that I think are important for younger generations. Lessons like the value of hard work, self-reliance, self-confidence, and personal responsibility cannot be taught directly. Instead, students must be put in situations where they can learn these lessons through their own experience, with the guidance of caring, engaged educators. It is imperative that students are equipped with these basic life lessons.

I believe that every student should feel empowered; that they are not victims of their circumstances but are rather powerful agents for their own destinies. This empowerment does not grow out of constant praise from adults, or from educators putting students in situations where they are all but guaranteed to succeed. Rather, true empowerment only comes from overcoming challenges. When students are challenged in a context where failure is a real possibility, they develop the mindset and mental skills to overcome those challenges. 

I also believe that students need to take ownership of their educational experience. Rather than allowing students to fall into the trap of victimhood – “that teacher does not teach well” or “that exam was too hard” – we should show students that their success (or failure) is entirely in their own hands. They own their outcomes. For example, 5-10% of my undergraduate students each year will come to me in the days leading up to the last exam of the semester saying something to the effect of, “I worked really hard, but I am not doing well on your tests. What can I do?” In almost every case, these students never asked for my advice or assistance earlier in the semester. They come to me at the eleventh hour looking for a handout, for me to save them. My responses to these students are always the same: “After you failed the first exam, what did you do differently to prepare for the second, third, and fourth exams?”. After a series of long conversations, these students most often re-take the course and have much better results, because they understand that success is up to them, and that they are up to the challenge. 

In my conversations with these students, it became clear to me that their reliance on external lifelines and unwillingness to ask for help connects back to their K-12 educational experiences. In most cases, their teachers provided constant opportunities to mitigate poor performance, so when they reached the university level, which functions a little more like real life, they did not know what to do without the safety net, and they did not know how to ask for help, because they never had to do it before. There was always extra credit, for example, to save them. This is not how the real world works, and we do our students a disservice – we hinder their development into competent, capable, self-actuated individuals – by making it nearly impossible for them to fail. If elected to the Cedarburg School Board, I would work hard to ensure that policy and personnel decisions are made with these principles in mind, and that our schools work efficiently with limited financial resources, so that Cedarburg Public Schools not only continue to perform at a high level but continue to improve.