Compounding the harm

As I wrote about here, this year our district’s central administration told the teachers at Hoover school, which is scheduled to close in 2019, that they would not be moved as a group to the new East Elementary School or given hiring preference there. Many of Hoover’s teachers want to stay at Hoover for as long as there is a Hoover, but they can’t possibly stay if they don’t know whether there will be any job for them after the closure. As a result, the teachers have no choice but to start looking for other jobs and taking whatever they can find. This is a recipe for the slow death of Hoover, as its teachers will be drained away even though it is still the elementary school for hundreds of kids for the next four years.

This was a major topic of discussion at the Hoover listening post this past June, but there’s no indication that the board or the administration have done anything to address the concern. Teachers are already talking about leaving (and some have left, though I don’t know if this is why).

From what I’ve heard, this is not at all what happened when Roosevelt closed and Borlaug opened. (Maybe readers can chime in with more information about how Roosevelt teachers were treated?) How can the administration not have seen this problem coming, especially if it went out of its way to tell teachers that they would not be given any hiring preference?

The district needs to address this problem now, before the harm to our kids’ elementary school experience is irreversible.
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Candidates' positions on the closure of Hoover School

Save Hoover has posted the school board candidates' responses to the question of whether it makes sense to close Hoover. The issue is important in and of itself, but it's also a great proxy for which candidates are willing to think critically about administration proposals and push back against them when necessary.

Read them all here.
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Murley, McGinness: Hoover must close

Outgoing school board member Jeff McGinness is warning voters, in an opinion piece and in mass emails like this one, that the entire facilities plan will become impossible unless Hoover school is closed.

I’m happy to have McGinness contributing to the discussion. But where exactly is the argument? His entire piece hinges on the statement that “the administration team has said repeatedly that the district cannot afford to operate both the existing Hoover and the New Hoover.”

Does McGinness subject the superintendent’s assertions to even minimal scrutiny? How can it be true, for example, that the only possible way to find money in the budget is by closing an elementary school? If that is true, what will happen the next time the superintendent needs to find money in the budget? Will more schools have to close? Doesn’t closing an elementary school—and pitting one neighborhood against another—in fact endanger passage of the bond that will be necessary to follow through on the facilities plan? McGinness doesn’t ask.

McGinness also accepts at face value the superintendent’s analysis of how much it would cost to keep Hoover open, even though that analysis doesn’t even pretend to use actual costs.

When we want to know why they need the Hoover property, all we get are evasions. When we want to know what it costs to keep Hoover open, we get obfuscation. When we want to how much more we’ll have to borrow to replace the capacity lost by tearing Hoover down, we get nothing, because the district has never asked.

If the school board is to have any purpose at all, it can’t simply defer to administrators’ preferences, no questions asked.
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There is no plan to use Hoover as a swing school

More than once over the past week or so I have heard people (including at least one board candidate) defend the Hoover closure partly on the grounds that it would throw off the facilities plan if Hoover could no longer be used as a “swing school”—that is, as the building that will temporarily house kids whose schools are being renovated.

But the facilities plan does not include any use of Hoover as a swing school. The school board rejected that option early on. Hoover is scheduled to serve its own attendance area until 2019, and then to be torn down (unless people like me succeed in getting the plan changed to keep Hoover open).

The facilities plan has a lot of parts to keep track of, so it’s understandable if people have some misimpressions, but that’s one that we should lay to rest.
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Why I’m running for the school board

Yesterday I filed to become a candidate for the school board vacancy created by the resignation of Tuyet Baruah. The filing included over a hundred petition signatures, and although it wasn’t required, I made sure that I included at least four signatures from each of the twenty elementary school attendance zones in the district.

The vacancy that I am running to fill occurred only a week ago; it’s going to take me a couple of weeks to get a campaign fully in gear. In the meantime, for those of you who don’t already know me:

My name is Chris Liebig, and I have lived in Iowa City for nineteen years. This year, my wife Carolyn and I will have one child at Hoover Elementary, one at Southeast Junior High, and one at City High. I have been writing regularly here about local and national education policy for almost six years. In my day job, I teach legal analysis, writing, and research to first-year law students at the University of Iowa. (The opinions I express here are, of course, my own.) In addition to my law degree, I have an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Why I’m running:

• Our district needs to be more responsive to what the community wants. Too often district policies—for example, the new school day schedule, or the dismayingly short elementary school lunch periods, or the continual talk of school closures—seem to descend from on high, without any regard to community input.

• I want to keep all of our schools open. Closing schools when enrollment is expanding makes no sense and is needlessly divisive and expensive.

• We should pay special attention to the needs of disadvantaged students and their families. In my view, those families are the best judges of what those needs are. We should seek out their advice and bring it to bear on district policy.

• We need the voters to pass a bond to complete the renovations and new facilities in the district’s long-term plan. Passing a bond requires not cheerleading or groupthink but transparency, candor, inclusiveness, and critical thinking. Asking the voters to approve a bond that pits some neighborhoods against others, for example, would put the entire plan at risk.

• The district should make it a priority to protect kids as much as possible from harmful policies that are imposed on us by the federal and state governments. For example, if new state standards are developmentally inappropriate for the youngest kids, we should do everything within our power to blunt their negative effects and to lobby for change.

• Teachers and school staff have invaluable knowledge about what is happening in our schools and what might need to change. They should not feel inhibited for any reason from speaking publicly about the district’s policies and practices. I’d like to develop an employee free speech policy to ensure that school staff will feel free—and encouraged—to contribute publicly to the discussions about our schools.

• We need sound, capable management from our administrators, but on policy issues the board should lead, not follow, the administration. The board is the only democratically accountable element in what would otherwise be an insulated and self-reinforcing system. It needs to speak up for the community and push back against proposals that don’t have the support of the public.

Having blogged here for so long, I’m a pretty open book. If you browse through old posts, you’ll get a sense of where I’m coming from. But I’m not interested in running for the board so I can impose all my idiosyncratic preferences on the district regardless of whether anyone wants them. Our best hope is a school system that reflects the ambitions and values of this community. I believe in the great potential of community-based, democratically accountable public schools.
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For what?

Supporters of the Hoover closure have argued that “City High needs the land.”

“For what?” people asked.

And asked, and asked, and kept asking, even two years after the closure vote.

Several Hoover parents at the listening post last month said that they could support the closure if they thought the benefit to City High justified it. But what was the benefit?

So at last night’s board meeting, one of the items on the agenda was how the Hoover land would be used after the closure. Here was the opportunity for the board to finally answer the question—“for what?”—and maybe even win some Hoover people over. So the district was ready with a persuasive response, right? Wrong.

The only way to answer the question, the administration said, would be to create the schematic design of what will go on the Hoover property, and to do that would cost as much as $484,000. And to do it before the bond vote, the money would have to come out of another source—probably the playground rejuvenation funds! So do people really want to know that badly?

When board member Tuyet Baruah asked why the board decided to close the school without knowing what it needed the property for, the administrators and her fellow board members fumbled for an answer. The other high schools have lots of land, board member Marla Swesey said. There was “the feeling of needing the space,” the district’s Chief Operating Officer said. No specifics.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think you have to spend $484,000 to identify the needs that led you to close an elementary school and take its 5.7 acres for another use. If all you can do is cite projects that add up to less than half an acre, then you haven’t explained why you need to close the school—whether you pay for a schematic design of it or not.

You’ve got to feel for the administration and board. If they don’t answer the question, people will be upset. But if they do answer it, people will also be upset—because the answer is so lame. What’s a district to do?
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The City High addition can’t explain the Hoover closure

Tonight’s board meeting includes a discussion of the plans for City High and how the Hoover land will be used after the closure.

This is a good moment to point out that there is a difference between the City High addition—which is mainly about classroom space—and athletics improvements. Some closure proponents would like you to think that Hoover needs to close so City can have more classrooms, but in fact the addition cannot explain the closure. Here’s why.

First, everyone agrees that the addition will not be built on the Hoover land.

At most, the addition might displace something (parking, tennis courts) that would then have to be relocated. But the addition will not displace much. The first phase of the addition is being built on top of the building and will displace nothing. The second phase includes six classrooms and cafeteria and library expansions. Six classrooms, plus accompanying corridors, takes up about .2 acres. Suppose the cafeteria and library expansions take another .2. That’s less than half an acre displaced.

Hoover’s property is 5.7 acres. Displacing four-tenths of an acre does not explain taking 5.7 acres and tearing down an elementary school. If the district really needed to take 7% of Hoover’s land for City, it could do that without closing the school.

So what will happen to other 93% of Hoover’s land? The most likely uses are an expansion (not just displacement) of City’s parking lot (at a time when its enrollment will be significantly decreasing because of the new high school) or a baseball field or stadium so the baseball team doesn’t have to keep playing at Mercer Park (oh the horror!) or both.

Parking and baseball, not classrooms. Is that a good enough reason to close and tear down a three-hundred-kid neighborhood elementary school?
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Using math like this, how many more schools should close?

Still shaking my head at the superintendent’s analysis I quoted here. By using district-wide average costs, instead of the actual cost of running Hoover, and by pretending that relocating over three hundred students won’t cause any increase at all in non-teaching expenses at their new buildings, the superintendent concluded that it would cost $675,000 annually to keep Hoover open. The real figure is probably much closer to $200,000. (I say “probably” because I live in a district where information often has to be pieced together imperfectly by bloggers or on Facebook, rather than provided with any accuracy or transparency by our paid administrators.)

By substituting the average cost for the actual cost, the administration not only inflates the cost of running Hoover, it also understates the cost of running the new, much bigger schools that it has already committed itself to building. In my view, there’s no looking back on opening the new elementaries; the district should open them at less-than-full capacity and allow them to grow as neighborhoods are built around them. But the administration should be candid about how much it’s going to cost to run those schools.

Given the superintendent’s math, it’s little wonder that the administration keeps talking about closing more schools. Two great questions for school board candidates: Do you agree with the superintendent that we can save $675,000 annually by closing a school? If we can reap that kind of savings by closing schools, how many more schools should close?
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Is our district run by used car salesmen?

Since the school board voted to close Hoover two years ago, people have debated just how much it would cost in annual operating expenses to keep Hoover open. The most well-supported analysis I’ve seen is from Michael Tilley, who estimated in 2013 that the annual cost of keeping Hoover open would be just under $200,000. But no one knows with certainty, because the board never sought the information and the district never provided it to the public.

Recently, enough people have been raising the question that the superintendent felt compelled to respond. He sent the following message to a school board member:

Good morning.

I have been approached recently by several members of the community regarding the base line cost to operate an elementary building. They have asked this in relation to keeping Hoover Elementary open and opening the new east-side elementary school. After asking clarifying questions, I think I have the information that they are seeking and I wanted to share it with you first.

All buildings require the following staff: Principal, Teacher Librarian, Guidance Counselor, Building Secretary, Media Secretary, Custodian(s), and Maintenance. Averaging these costs from all elementary buildings throughout the District, the combined costs for these staff are approximately $475,000.

All buildings also require Regular Education Teachers, Special Education Teachers, and Specials Teachers. These numbers are dependent on the number of students in the building and therefore are not included in the above cost total.

All buildings have utility and supply costs. Again, averaging these costs from all elementary buildings throughout the District, the cost for utilities and supplies are approximately $175,000.

The combined total is $675,000. Please keep in mind that these figures are in 2014-15 dollars and will go up for next year bring the total for next year to @$700,000.

The bottom line in response to the questions asked is for the District to keep Hoover Elementary School open AND open the new east-side elementary would require a minimum of $700,000 in additional general fund expenditures every year.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Steve

The superintendent does not seem to care much about the district’s credibility. Here are all the reasons to question his analysis.

• First, 475,000 plus 175,000 does not equal 675,000. The superintendent later corrected the arithmetic and revised his cost figure downward by $25,000. An excusable error, maybe, but funny how all the errors in his message tend toward inflating the cost estimate.

• The superintendent’s reasoning is: The average cost of operating an elementary school is $675,000. Therefore it costs $675,000 to keep Hoover open. I would hope that most ICCSD students could spot the logical flaw.
  

• Of course, the use of an average obscures the fact that bigger schools cost significantly more to run than smaller schools. For example, “All buildings require . . . a Guidance Counselor.” Except Hoover gets only 60% of a guidance counselor, since it shares its counselor with other schools. The superintendent makes no adjustment for that fact. How many of the other staff members that he identifies have less than a full-time equivalent at Hoover, and a significantly larger expense at bigger schools? You won’t find the answer in the superintendent’s message, which acts as if all elementary schools have the same number of non-teaching staff.

• Is it really possible that the district would move over three hundred students to other schools without increasing the assignment of guidance counselors, custodians, support staff, etc., at those schools? That’s the implication of the superintendent’s analysis. It’s almost certainly not true, but it helps make Hoover look more expensive, so in it goes.

• In fact, the district certainly knows what it spent on staff and other expenses at Hoover last year. It could easily produce that figure. There is no better basis for estimating what Hoover would cost in the future. That the superintendent chose not to disclose that figure, and to use a district-wide average instead, speaks volumes.
  

• The superintendent includes $175,000 for “utilities and supplies.” Yet if Hoover closes, the students won’t disappear. Wherever they go, they will require additional heat, air conditioning, plumbing, and electricity. The need for “supplies,” whatever they might mean—cleaning supplies? paper goods for the bathrooms? books?—will also follow the students.
  
  The district is not planning to simply cram all the ex-Hoover students into existing spaces and make them share existing supplies; it is building new buildings to accommodate the district’s growing capacity. The new buildings include not only the new schools, but also the planned additions to existing schools, such as the planned 125-seat Lemme addition, which will be entirely unnecessary if Hoover stays open. Those new buildings will cost millions of dollars to build, which is a whole separate issue from operating expenses. But they will also, of course, require ongoing utilities and supplies.
  
  Maybe there will be efficiencies, or maybe not. (New construction, believe it or not, is not always superior to old construction.) But the superintendent doesn’t inquire. He simply counts the entire cost of utilities and supplies as if it will disappear if Hoover closes and the kids go someplace else.

• Even the superintendent’s average cost figures are in the form of assertions; we’re supposed to trust him that they are accurate. But given how hard he is striving to inflate the cost of keeping Hoover open, how willing should we be to trust even those numbers?

• Look at this document from 2011. It shows the operating cost of Hoover that year, minus the amount spent on teachers, to be $306,878. Again, only a portion of that figure can be saved by closing the school, so Tilley’s $190,000 figure still looks pretty reasonable. But the superintendent tells us we can save $675,000 annually by closing the school.

• Look at this document from 2013-14, just three years later, right after the board voted to close Hoover. It shows the operating cost of Hoover that year, minus the amount spent on teachers, to be $420,152—a full 36% increase over the 2011 figure, right when it became in the administration’s interest to make Hoover look expensive. The lack of any consistency in how the numbers are broken down does not inspire confidence. In any event, if you only have $420,152 to work with, how are you going to find savings of $675,000?

The level of hucksterism in the superintendent’s message is just embarrassing. Does this administration care about providing accurate information so the board can make good policy decisions? Or does it just care about selling its own agenda, complete with Madison-Avenue-style puffery?
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Report from the Hoover listening post

There was a listening-post-ish meeting tonight about the future of Hoover Elementary School, with school board members Chris Lynch and Orville Townsend responding to questions and comments from people concerned about the issues around the planned closure of Hoover. I counted about 70 attendees, including four school board candidates. I thought it was a good meeting. Here are some of the things I think the board members can take from it:

1. A lot of people are dismayed and upset by the Hoover closure and by the process that led to it, and continue to find the explanation of it incomplete and unconvincing. Lynch did his best to state some kind of rationale for the closure, but he also noted that he wasn’t on the board when the decision was made, so there was a sense in which he was trying to explain some other group’s decision. The audience reacted to each of the points he made with well-reasoned rejoinders, which was important for Lynch and Townsend to see. I know how strongly Lynch supports the larger facilities plan, and I have to believe that he wishes he had better answers to these questions.

2. People aren’t buying the district’s line that the elementary-age population of the Hoover area is declining. If there’s a decline in enrollment, it will be because of the closure, and it can be prevented by simply reversing the closure. Many speakers said that there has actually been an influx of young kids into their neighborhoods; that’s certainly true in mine, and Hoover’s pre-registrations for kindergarten next year are up significantly from this year. If the school stays open, there will be ample kids to fill it, no matter how the attendance zones are redrawn. (See this post.)

3. Several people (including me) spoke about how the district needs to recognize the effects of a school closure on the surrounding neighborhood and on the city of Iowa City. As one person said to me after the meeting, not every university town has the kind of thriving central neighborhoods that Iowa City has, and we can’t take them for granted. The school district should be proactive in supporting the neighborhoods in the core of Iowa City, the health of which has an effect on all of the surrounding areas.

4. Several speakers raised the teacher transition issue. Recently the administration told the teachers at Hoover that they would not be moved as a group to the new East Elementary School (a/k/a “Hoover East”) or given hiring preference there. This means that even the teachers who want to stay at Hoover until it closes will feel a lot of pressure to start looking for positions elsewhere sooner rather than later, since they can’t know whether anything will be available for them if they wait. This is a recipe for slow decline and death for Hoover, which, even if it closes, is still the elementary school for hundreds of kids for the next four years. The board members seemed relatively unaware of this issue and said that they would bring it back to the full board for discussion.

5. Some speakers raised the issue of the bond. To follow through on its facilities plan, the district needs to pass a $100+ million-dollar bond just a couple of years from now. It was clear that some people at the meeting were inclined not to vote for the bond if the plan included the Hoover closure—if not because of the closure itself, because they see the closure as part of a broader pattern by the district of dismissiveness toward community input. It was also clear that others at the meeting thought it was terrible that anyone would vote against the bond for that reason.

I don’t speak for the Save Hoover Committee, but I feel strongly that the group should be focused on the coming board election and should not take the stance of threatening a bond proposal that hasn’t even been drawn up yet. That said, however: You don’t have to be Nate Silver to know that the bond is less likely to pass if it includes a school closure. Please read that again: I didn’t say it shouldn’t pass, I said it’s less likely to pass. Some number of voters will be alienated by a school closure, and no amount of disapproving head-shaking will change that fact. Passing a bond is about putting together a coalition that will get you to 60% of the vote. It’s a negotiation with the community, and any clear-eyed supporter of the bond would approach it that way. Keeping Hoover open makes sense as good policy, but it’s also just smart politics for a district that needs to build that kind of coalition.

What can the attendees take from the meeting? I thought there were good reasons to be encouraged about the future of Hoover. Lynch, the chair of the school board, acknowledged that although the closure is part of the current plan, plans can change as circumstances change. He emphasized in particular that if the enrollment projections change, the board will need to reassess the plan. Although I think the board needs to scrutinize the enrollment projections more closely and needs to be proactive and not just reactive about sustaining its existing schools, I see Lynch’s statements as an opportunity, and I think there is good reason to believe that, over the next year or two, the district will realize that it needs to keep Hoover School open.
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Putting the schools where the students are

In my last post, I wrote about why it makes sense to open the two new east side elementary schools below capacity and allow them to grow as their neighborhoods become more developed. One of the main reasons to do so is that it those schools cannot be filled immediately without using very disruptive rezoning contortions.

One way to see why that’s true is to look at the district’s student density map. It’s worth clicking on that link and perusing the whole thing. But here are a few highlights. First, here is an overhead view of the area around newly-built Alexander Elementary:

On the density map, it looks like this:

(The numbers represent number of elementary schoolers in each square; the more students, the darker red the squares are.)

Here is the area around the future site of the East Elementary:

On the density map, it looks like this:

Here, by contrast, is the area around Hoover Elementary (shown at the same scale):

On the density map, it looks like this:

Not all of that area goes to Hoover, of course; it couldn’t possibly fit. But the maps give you a good idea of why there are so many schools on the central east side: because that’s where the students are. Zoom out the see the broader east side:

You can see that it won’t be hard to draw attendance zones to fill the existing schools (which I’ve marked with green squares). What would be hard is finding 500 kids to put at each of the new elementary schools (the purple squares), which would take some serious gerrymandering. The solution is to keep the existing schools open and allow the new schools to start medium-sized and grow into their capacities.

School board members have said that their goal is to “put the schools where the students are.” It’s hard to take that literally, given where they’re building the new schools; it makes more sense to see those schools as an investment in the future. In the meantime, the student density remains concentrated around the existing schools. The district will need to keep them—including Hoover—open.
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The district will need Hoover even after the new schools open

Word has it that some of the families in and near Windsor Ridge are concerned that keeping Hoover open will prevent the district from opening Hoover East (which I’ll refer to here as the East Elementary School, to avoid confusion). It’s understandable that those parents would not want the rug pulled out from under them after being told that the new school will open in 2019 (though I would hope that they would sympathize with Hoover families who are threatened with the closure of their school, too). But they should not be concerned about keeping Hoover open. First, the East Elementary ship has sailed: realistically, it is too late to cancel that building even the district wanted to. Second, the district will continue to need Hoover even after the new school is open.

Some people have argued that the district can’t support Hoover and the new school, too. Financially, that is simply untrue, as I wrote here. But will there be enough enrollment to support that many schools? The answer is yes, for these reasons:

On paper, the planned 2019-20 east side capacity looks sufficient to handle the projected enrollment, even if Hoover is closed. But, as the district has repeatedly experienced, redistricting is not so simple. The two new schools each have a capacity of 500, but it is very unlikely that the district will be able even to come close to filling those schools at that time. Alexander, for example, is likely to remain underfilled for a good long while: it is simply going to be very hard to create districts that will put anywhere near 500 east side kids at that site, because the presence of several schools immediately north of it make the logistics so challenging. (And the district is even planning to add 100 seats of capacity to Grant Wood school, which is immediately to Alexander’s north!)

A similar problem is likely to arise at the East Elementary. There simply aren’t enough students in its immediate vicinity to fill it when it opens. The bulk of the student density is in the more central east side, in the established neighborhoods. It is easy to say “just rezone everyone,” but given the geographical distribution of students, the real-life logistics will be very hard.

But these are not terrible problems. It actually makes sense for those schools to open at fewer than 500 students and then grow over time. The whole rationale of building Alexander and the East Elementary was to remedy overcrowding in existing schools and to accommodate and spur expected development. If the district were to fill those schools to capacity at the outset, what would happen when the hoped-for development appears? With Hoover gone, the district would have no way to accommodate it, and would have to build more schools and additions—needlessly spending millions. It makes much more to sense to start those schools with enrollment under capacity and then grow into them.

If it’s true that Alexander and the East Elementary will open significantly below full capacity, then the overcrowding in the existing east side schools will continue, unless Hoover is kept open. Suppose the district puts only 325 kids at each of the new schools in 2019 (which is probably optimistic). Under the current enrollment projections, that would leave 2,635 kids to enroll at the remaining east side schools. But the capacity of those schools will be only 2,338. The most sensible solution to that overcrowding is to keep Hoover open.

And there’s another factor: the district’s projected enrollment figures do not include the kids in its preschool programs. That’s probably because preschoolers don’t have “attendance zones,” and can be shifted from one building to another if necessary. But they won’t just disappear, and it’s not feasible to send all preschoolers to the west side, even if there were space there. And (ironically!) preschoolers actually take up more space, because class sizes have to be smaller. So the actual expected east side enrollment is significantly larger than the district’s estimates make it appear.

Ultimately, a close look at projected enrollment should give Hoover families hope. It’s only a matter of time before the district realizes that life is much easier with Hoover open than with it closed.
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Cause and effect (or How to rationalize a school closure)

The Hoover closure continues to be the decision in search of a rationale. The few attempts to articulate one have a distinctly post-hoc feel to them. One of them is the idea that “there are too many schools close together without enough enrollment to support them.” To back up this assertion, closure proponents cite the district’s latest enrollment projections. Those projections show a precipitous thirty-four percent drop in the projected enrollment at Hoover, which would have, at one point, as few as 199 students!

Looking at those projections, you would think that a big chunk of Iowa City’s east side—an area filled with residential homes—was on its way to becoming a ghost town. Or is there another explanation?

Take a look at what Hoover’s enrollment projection looked like right before school board voted to close it (click to enlarge):

Yes, just two years ago, the district projected that Hoover’s enrollment would remain well above its capacity for the foreseeable future.

This year, almost two years after the closure vote, the district’s new enrollment projections for Hoover look like this:

That year when the district says that enrollment would be only 199? Right before the closure vote, that same projection was 376.

So you be the judge: Did the declining enrollment projection cause the closure decision, or did the closure decision cause the declining enrollment projection?
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What is the future of these schools?

On the topic of this post, I think a lot of people have lost sight of just how much bigger Hoover is than some of the district’s other schools. Take a look at the capacity figures:

The district no longer has any plans to expand the capacity of any of those schools.

If the district is willing to close Hoover, there is every reason for people in those other attendance areas to be worried about the future of their schools.

I think the district should recognize that its existing schools are worth preserving, that it makes sense to use existing capacity before building expensive additions elsewhere, and that not all schools should be the kind of 600-kid mega-schools that the district is building farther out.
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Hoover school closure not an isolated issue

[This post appears as a guest opinion in the Press-Citizen today. I’ve added some links here.]

Last month, our school district’s administrators released several possible “updates” to the district’s facilities plan. All of the updates continued to close Hoover Elementary, and two of the three updates would have closed additional elementary schools as well.

District officials were taken aback by the coverage of the updates, which emphasized the possibility of more school closings. The “recommended” update closed only Hoover, they argued, not the other schools. The other updates were just “thought exercises,” the superintendent said.

But no one had to look very far for evidence that the administration is inclined to close more schools. During the facilities planning process two years ago, many of the scenarios included school closures, and some would have closed multiple schools—even though district enrollment is projected to grow. And, of course, the school board did vote to close a school, Hoover, even though the wide majority of the public feedback favored keeping all our existing schools open.

As the school board election approaches, the people who support the Hoover closure will try to convince you that Hoover is somehow unique. “We want to close Hoover,” the argument will go, “but don’t worry, we’d never want to close your school.”

But a candidate’s support for closing Hoover tells you something: it shows a willingness to close a school for less-than-compelling reasons. For there have never been convincing reasons to close Hoover. We were told that we can save money by having fewer, larger schools—but any savings is dwarfed by the millions it will cost to replace Hoover’s lost capacity. We were also told that City High needs the Hoover property for—well, for something, someday. (Don’t ask what.)

Anyone who finds those reasons convincing will have no trouble finding reasons to close additional schools, such as Horace Mann, Lincoln, Hills, Longfellow, and Shimek—all of which are significantly smaller than Hoover and thus cheaper to replace elsewhere.

The administration’s “updates” made it clear that the issue of school closings is not going away. If you think we should value our existing elementary schools, rather than close some and super-size others, you should ask this year’s board candidates where they stand on the issue.

And if the answer is, “I support closing Hoover but I’m against school closures,” you’d be smart to look for another candidate.
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How’s that again?

Last month, the school district decided to cancel the planned 180-student addition at Horace Mann school. Still, it’s worth remembering that many people told us we had to close Hoover if we wanted to add six classrooms here:

but were perfectly comfortable with the idea of adding seven classrooms here:

(The pictures are on the same scale.)
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Elephant in the room

The eight writers of the letter described here are upset that the school board has cancelled the additions that it had planned to build on Longfellow, Mann, Lincoln, and Shimek schools, arguing that the decision shows a lack of commitment to the central core of Iowa City. “If we continue on the current course,” the letter argues, “we risk losing more of our core elementary schools, which would have devastating effects on our goal to strengthen the core of the city.”

I agree that the district shouldn’t reduce elementary school capacity in central Iowa City. But it would be easier to agree with this letter if the writers objected to the one school closure that the district is actually planning—Hoover. (My apologies if they do, but there is no mention of it in the coverage.) What do the writers have to say about supporting central Iowa City neighborhoods in that instance?

If these writers don’t oppose the Hoover closing, they are not only being inconsistent, they are undermining their own cause. There is no logical way to wall off Mann, Lincoln, Shimek, and Longfellow from the rationale for the Hoover closure. Even the idea of closing Hoover to benefit City High can apply to other schools, too, since any savings in operational costs could always be redirected to the high school. If Hoover should be closed for the greater good, why shouldn’t other, even smaller schools be closed, too?

Supporting the central core of Iowa City should mean keeping its schools open, not closing some and supersizing the others. If the district were to close Horace Mann but make up for it with large additions to Longfellow and Shimek, would these writers feel that central Iowa City was being supported?

By the way, a neighbor called me when this article appeared. “Eight people?” he said. “Almost nine hundred people signed the petition to keep Hoover open!”
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Why would Iowa City voters support this?

ICCSD making big mistake on Mann & Longfellow. It was BIG piece of "grand bargain" struck for facilities. Why would IC voters support this?

— Rod Sullivan (@rodsullivan111) April 16, 2015

This tweet was County Supervisor Rod Sullivan’s reaction to the school board’s recent decision to cancel the planned additions that would have added 150 seats to Longfellow School and 180 seats to Horace Mann School. The additions would have increased the number of kids you could put at Longfellow by 58 per cent and at Mann by 76 per cent.

As I wrote last week, I disagreed with Sullivan’s support for the closure of Hoover School, which is about as far from a “bargain,” grand or otherwise, as you can imagine. But I agree with Sullivan that voters should be very concerned about the district’s treatment of central Iowa City.

I do disagree, though, about what supporting central Iowa City should mean. For example, I don’t think putting a 417-kid school at the busy corner of Dodge and Church Streets, on the smallest lot by far in the district, is a way of supporting the Horace Mann neighborhood.

To me, supporting the central core of Iowa City means standing up to administrators who want elementary schools to either be super-sized or be closed. It means recognizing that what is possible in outlying areas is not always possible or desirable in areas that are more densely populated or have smaller lot sizes. It means investing in all our existing elementary schools, not pitting some of them against others.

Sullivan is right that under the latest version of its facilities plan, the district is removing elementary capacity from the densely populated central core of Iowa City and building it instead on the outskirts. It’s as if the district is simply lifting Hoover School out of its affordable, close-in neighborhood and plunking it down in a pricier neighborhood on the edge of town. To drive the point home, they’re even naming the new school Hoover, and acting like that’s a gift to the people whose school they are taking. I have no idea why voters would support that and no reason to think they will.

I have no problem with planning for anticipated growth, but there is no reason to do it by closing schools in areas that are already densely populated. If you want to support central Iowa City, you can start by not closing its elementary schools.
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“In actuality, it probably WILL become a parking lot”

“Part of the ‘They’re going to use Hoover as a parking lot’ strikes me as quite disingenuous. In actuality, it probably WILL become a parking lot... but the current City parking lot will probably become some type of building. You are just trading spaces. It gets presented as ‘they just want to add parking,’ which I’ve never heard from any Board member or Administrator.”

                           —County Supervisor Rod Sullivan, who voted to close
                               Hoover as a member of the district’s facilities planning
                               committee, on social media (ellipse in original)

I’m actually a fan of Rod Sullivan’s, though I think he made a very bad call on closing Hoover. Anyway, he’s not the only person to make a statement like this one, and the statement deserves some scrutiny.

The statement assumes that people in the Hoover neighborhood are being unreasonable—even “disingenuous”—when they say that they do not want to see a parking lot in the space where their elementary school currently is. If only they could understand that it’s not an increase in parking, but just “trading spaces,” that will cause them to suddenly have a parking lot where their school now stands, then they’d feel much better, so it’s really not legitimate for them to focus on the parking lot.

Needless to say, this is not a fair treatment of people’s genuine concerns. Many people in the Hoover neighborhood are rightly upset that they will not only be losing their school, but also “probably” gaining an eyesore and a potential traffic nightmare. To suggest that they just don’t understand or are being disingenuous is a way of dismissing these very real effects on the neighborhood without addressing them.

And what about the assertion that City won’t be adding parking, but just “trading spaces”? In fact, City’s advocates have repeatedly argued that City needs more parking, not just relocated parking. As Sullivan must remember, one of the scenarios presented to the facilities committee included a 750-car parking garage at City, which administrators and at least one board member explicitly argued would be necessary if the City addition were built without closing Hoover. Since City currently has 590 spaces total, it’s very reasonable for people to conclude that a substantial part of the reason for taking Hoover is to add parking to City High.

Finally, do you know how much the City High classroom addition will add to City’s footprint? About 8,400 square feet. That’s about one-half of one percent of City’s land. It would represent about 3% of the Hoover property. There will also be a cafeteria expansion, a wrestling room addition, and additional gym space, so revise that number upward accordingly, and you get -- what, maybe 6% of the Hoover property? So it’s very reasonable for people to conclude that the addition—or whatever it displaces—cannot fully explain the taking of Hoover and its five acres.

I won’t call Sullivan disingenuous, because I think he’s acting in good faith. But he should have more respect for the very reasonable concerns that people have about the Hoover closure.

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Numbers: Half of the City High addition will go on top of the existing building, so it’s only the remaining six classrooms that will add to the footprint. I used the six classrooms on the northeast side of the building (which are relatively new construction) to gauge how big the classroom addition would be. Each room is about 26 by 34 feet, and the hallways are 13 feet across. I erred on the generous side by assuming there would be hallways on three sides of the six classrooms. Round everything upwards and you’re at about 8,400 square feet. To get the approximate square footage of the City High and Hoover properties, I used this tool; try it yourself.

(This post was updated to add information about the gym, cafeteria, and wrestling room additions.)
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Use existing space instead of building expensive additions

Guess which lot the district plans to build a 180-student addition on.

The district’s recently released possible “updates” to the facilities plan contain a lot of bad ideas—for example, one would close three more elementary schools—but one good idea: cancel the planned additions to Mann and Longfellow schools.

Horace Mann Elementary needs a thorough renovation, air conditioning, and a multi-purpose room, but it makes no sense to build a 180-student addition—increasing the school’s capacity by 76%—on the smallest lot (by far) in the district. As it is, there is barely room for a playground and parking on the Mann property. Adding 180 seats there—and another 180 kids getting dropped off in the morning—is madness.

It makes even less sense when the district is simultaneously planning to close a much bigger school on a much bigger lot less than two miles away. The point of the Mann addition isn’t to accommodate growing enrollment; it’s to absorb the loss of capacity caused by closing Hoover, and to move toward a vision of fewer, larger elementaries, farther away from where the students live. (Longfellow, too, needs renovation and improvements, but not the 150-student addition that’s currently planned and which is necessary only because of the Hoover closure.)

Yes, there’s a park next to Horace Mann. There has been some talk of taking the park for the school district, but it’s not at all clear that the district will be able to do that. (Would the neighborhood want that? Would the City agree? Would the park then be fenced in?) In any event, even with the entire park, the lot would still be very small, the drop-off and pick-up would still be a nightmare, and Hoover’s lot would still be almost twice as large.

Unfortunately, the district’s latest “updates” don’t keep Hoover Elementary open. They would cancel the Mann and Longfellow additions, but just to replace them with different additions onto other schools. One way or another, the district will have to build over 300 new seats of capacity if it displaces over 300 kids from Hoover. That’s a lot of money wasted.

At some point, the district is going to ask voters to approve a bond to pay for the projects in the facilities plan. Most of the projects are worthy, good investments. But people are naturally going to think twice about spending millions of dollars just to tear down one school and then rebuild the lost capacity onto other schools. The sooner the district comes to its senses about Hoover, the better for all the worthy projects in the plan.
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