The mayoral’s office inside Waukesha City Hall will be empty for a few weeks.
That’s because Mayor Jeff Scrima will be returning to the classroom, as he has been accepted into the “Senior Executives in State and Local Government” program at Harvard in Cambridge, Mass.
The three-week program is from June 4 to 22 and $3,677 of the $11,450 fee will be covered by the mayor’s office conference and training budget. The rest will be covered by Scrima and includes tuition, housing, curricular materials and most meals.
While he is gone, the mayor will be available via email and cell phone, and newly-appointed Council President Joe Pieper will chair the two Common Council meetings that Scrima will miss (June 7 and June 19). Interim City Administrator Steve Crandell will handle other day-to-day mayoral duties.
The program is designed to help public officials meet the changing needs of their constituents and communities, with a curriculum focused on leadership, negotiations, public/ private partnerships, cooperative governance, behavioral decision making and microeconomics.
According to the program's website, the program - which takes place at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government - provides a balance of traditional and hands-on learning experiences.
In particular, this program enables participants to become more effective public managers by challenging assumptions about how to exercise leadership in the public sector, developing new conceptual frameworks for addressing policy issues, examining innovative partnerships and new models of collaborative governance, exploring the relationship between citizens and their government, understanding the behavioral dimensions of decision-making, exchanging ideas with experienced faculty and a diverse group of colleagues.
It operates as an interactive classroom, where faculty and participants work together on real-life case studies and learn from each other.
Through interactive exercises in the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, participants will also gain a deeper understanding of their own biases and attitudes as well as personal insights that can sharpen decision making.