New Legislation Targets Grooming, but What About DPI Enforcement?
When an agency partitions only minimal resources toward investigating sexual misconduct, it creates blind spots that predators can exploit.
This article by UW-Madison student Rebecca Draeger was originally published by the MacIver Institute.
Madison East High School held their 4th Annual Drag Show on Thursday, February 12. The performance was marketed as a “family friendly drag show to help encourage cultural awareness.” The high school promoted the event across social media platforms like Facebook and wrote that the show would feature “local pros” and even some of the schools own high school students. The school turned off comments on this post.
Responding to the event advertisement, Talk Show Host Dan O’Donnell wrote on X, “I have reached out to the Madison Metropolitan School District for comment on the appropriateness (and legality) of having presumably underage students perform in such a sexually charged show inside a school.”
The event also drew criticism from various Wisconsin Representatives like Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany. “Public schools have no business hosting drag shows, and featuring minors makes it completely unacceptable,” Tiffany wrote in a post on X.
Madison East High School was in the news just a few years ago as well, but for a different reason.
In August of 2021, one of their teachers was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for “attempting to produce obscene depictions of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct and transporting minors in interstate commerce with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct.”
David M. Kruchten, a former Madison East High School teacher, placed hidden cameras in his students’ hotel bathrooms and sleeping areas in places like air fresheners and thermostats to spy on them during school trips that he arranged.
One doesn’t have to go back as far as 2021, however, to find cases of teacher misconduct in Madison’s public schools. Earlier this month, Madison elementary school teacher David Fawcett was arrested and placed on administrative leave after an investigation relating to child-porn and exploitation of minors was conducted.
While hosting a drag show with minors doesn’t exactly quell the concerns of parents whose children may have been in proximity to sex-offenders at school, the Madison Public School District is not alone in its vulnerability to staff misconduct.
These local controversies raise a larger question: who is ultimately responsible for investigating and disciplining educators accused of misconduct across Wisconsin? The answer lies in the way that the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) carries out these teacher investigations.
In October 2025, journalist Danielle DuClos broke a huge story in The Cap Times about how DPI investigated over 200 teachers, aides, and substitutes between 2018 and 2023 who were accused of grooming or sexual misconduct in Wisconsin schools.
DuClos found this information through an open records request. She was sent a Google spreadsheet used by the DPI to track its investigations into teacher misconduct, data which the department is statutorily bound to maintain.
From the data, DuClos found that the allegations included “educators sexually assaulting students, soliciting nude photos from children or initiating sexual relationships immediately after students graduated.”
What is more concerning is that the DPI seemingly allows teachers accused of misconduct to avoid an in-depth investigation if they choose to forfeit their teaching license.
The concern here is that a teacher who forfeits their license before an investigation into sexual misconduct may move to another role that involves kids. A teacher who gives up their license could even hop districts and work in another role at a school.
In the aftermath of the article, the DPI implemented a database to look up which people have surrendered or had their teaching license revoked. The agency does not currently tell the public why the individual no longer has their license, but announced that they are looking for ways to add this information.
The Cap Times investigation also found that, despite the substantial amount of allegations of grooming and sexual misconduct in Wisconsin schools, DPI is only partitioning “scant resources” to investigate them. The department only has one full-time and one part-time investigator to handle the average of 113 investigations opened each year.
According to the article, DPI Spokesman Chris Bucher “blamed state lawmakers for underfunding the department rather than pointing to Underly or other agency leaders, who oversee how state funding is used internally.”
The legislature did cut DPI’s budget by about 10% in the latest biennial budget. However, Bucher didn’t mention that, while State Superintendent Jill Underly pushed for funding to modernize the agency’s background checks and licensing platform, DPI hasn’t requested any funds specifically for its misconduct office.
That office actually doesn’t even appear in the state budget at all. It falls under general operations, meaning that it is entirely up to DPI to allocate resources to that office based on the state superintendent’s priorities.
If not investigating sexual misconduct in schools, what are DPI’s priorities?
In November of 2025, a legislative committee approved an audit of the “educational licensure revocation, suspension, restriction, and investigation by the Department of Public Instruction (DPI).”
The audit will evaluate how long it took DPI to conduct investigations once allegations were made, how the agency gathered evidence, how work was prioritized, how much DPI followed its own procedures, among other things.
Just recently, a report on how DPI’s money is being spent came out that also caused DPI some controversy. State lawmakers delayed a scheduled vote to release $1 million to DPI after journalist Brian Fraley published an article in the Dairyland Sentinel when he found that the department spent over $368,000 on a “standard setting workshop” at a resort in the Wisconsin Dells.
Despite the substantial cost, DPI did not provide the Dairyland Sentinel with an itemized list of their expenditures and didn’t include receipts.
The workshop was conducted, at least in part, to change the result standards for the Forward Exam, a statewide standardized test. The Dairyland Sentinel report found that after the conference, “Proficiency rates jumped 12% under the new state benchmarks, causing a majority of students to ‘meet expectations.’”
Where a department invests its money tells you where their priorities lie.
Since DPI seems to invest in obfuscating Wisconsin children’s testing results, rather than in their ability to investigate sexual misconduct in schools, it makes sense that we see these results.
In light of this information, the natural next question is what is being done about it. While DPI oversees licensure and administrative investigations, lawmakers are now attempting to address misconduct through criminal statute.
On Wednesday, February 11, a bill authored by Rep. Amanda Nedweski (R-Pleasant Prairie) and Sen. Jesse James (R-Thorp) to define and criminalize grooming behaviors was passed by the Senate. The bill is on its way to the Governor’s desk, waiting to be signed.
The bill defines grooming as “a course of conduct, pattern of behavior, or series of acts with the intention to condition, seduce, solicit, lure, or entice a child for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity or for the purpose of producing, distributing, or possessing depictions of the child engaged in sexually explicit conduct.”
In this bill, cases involving a person in a position of authority, such as a teacher, would carry a higher-level felony charge. Child groomers would also be required to register as sex offenders.
Combating the issue of child-predators in schools isn’t a partisan issue. Underly and DPI both issued their support for the anti-grooming bill and the creation of a transparency database to include information on why teaching licenses were revoked. The anti-grooming bill passed with flying colors, with the exception of six Democrats in the Assembly.
The larger question is not whether individual scandals will continue to surface––they will. The question is why a system charged with protecting children has allowed structural weaknesses to persist for so long. When an agency partitions only minimal resources toward investigating sexual misconduct, allows educators to forfeit their licenses rather than face full review, and fails to publicly disclose the reasons behind revocations, it creates blind spots that predators can exploit.
It is a matter of priorities. Where money is directed reflects what leadership considers important. If standards revisions are funded while misconduct investigations remain understaffed, parents are left to draw their own conclusions about what DPI values most.
The forthcoming audit will likely answer some of the procedural questions: how long investigations take, whether policies are followed, and whether resources align with statutory responsibilities. But the deeper issue is one of institutional will. Whether the forthcoming audit results in meaningful reform will depend not only on what it finds, but on whether agency leadership and lawmakers are willing to act on them.
Ultimately, safeguarding students requires more than new criminal statutes. It requires a Department of Public Instruction that prioritizes protecting children.
Rebecca Draeger is a senior at UW-Madison and an intern at the MacIver Institute. She previously served as an editorial intern at The American Conservative through the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Collegiate Network, and her work has been featured in RealClearDefense and The College Fix.