Welcome, parents!

Our district is about to implement the Raptor Visitor Management System in all its schools. The system, which cost the district $40,000, is designed to enable schools to “keep unwanted visitors out and track those they allow in.” If you want to go into a school, you’ll have to present a government-issued photo ID. The staff will then use the Raptor system to run a background check on you. If you pass the background check, you’ll be issued a badge with your name, photo, and destination on it. If you’re a “potential threat,” though, “the Raptor system sends instant alerts to designated officials, including administrators and law enforcement, via email, text messaging and/or page.”

The Raptor system is part of our district’s many recent “safety” upgrades. I wish I understood how it will make my kids’ schools safer. I can see how it will deter convicted sex offenders from checking in at the front desk, but I don’t see how it will accomplish much else. My guess is that it will be widely ignored, like the current sign-in and sign-out procedure. If not, waiting in a long line of parents undergoing background checks will certainly change the experience of attending school concerts, book fairs, and holiday parties.

A reader writes:

For some parents of our most vulnerable and marginalized children, this seems like it would be a massive disincentive for the kind of parental involvement that could make their school a more welcoming place. If I’m an illegal immigrant, for example, will I be joining my child for lunch, or coming to their school play, if I have to scan a gov’t issued ID? What if I’m a convicted felon (I’m not, by the way!), and don’t want to go through the shame of having the school secretary, and my child’s teacher, know that fact?

The company advertises that the system can “screen for individuals with restraining orders, custody issues, suspended or expelled students, known gang members, or for any custom alert,” though the district tells me it will be used to screen only for sex offenders. Nonetheless, I agree with this reader that Raptor can only be a deterrent to parental involvement. Judging from the company’s website, that’s practically the system’s goal, since all outsiders are potential threats. From one post on the site:

From front door vestibules to visitor management, any adult trying to enter that school would have no doubt that they are being watched and deterred from doing harm on campus. Delays are key, according to security consultant Paul Timm. . . .

Visitor Management is simple and costs a few hundred dollars. It’s a security measure that most kids never notice, but adults will find invasive. And let me tell you- if you’re attempting to get near my kids while they are sitting in a classroom or cafeteria, you had better count on being stopped, watched and recorded every step of the way.

Why are the most authoritarian social trends so quick to find expression in the school system? All security measures are worth whatever they cost and whatever must be sacrificed, regardless of whether they are likely to be effective, because otherwise DANGER! I’d offer to sell the district some magic amulets to ward off evil spirits, but I guess that wouldn’t be very Twenty-First Century of me.

Related post here.
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Closing Hoover will delay and endanger other facilities projects

Closing Hoover Elementary will delay other needed projects in the district’s long-term plan, and may prevent some of them from happening at all, for two reasons.

First, it’s very expensive. If you tear down over three hundred seats of capacity while enrollment is growing, you have to rebuild them elsewhere. At the same time the district is planning to tear down Hoover, it’s planning to spend over fifteen million dollars to add roughly the same number of seats to Mann and Longfellow. If Hoover stays open, that’s fifteen million dollars that could go toward other projects, improving other schools. (Granted, some of it may have to go toward improving Hoover – but at most a third of it, and many of those improvements are supposed to occur even if Hoover eventually closes.)

Keep in mind that the district does not have enough money to do all the projects in its plan. It would have to get voter approval for about $100 million in bonds to do them all. Moreover, school boards come and go, and plans can change. Any project that gets put off may never happen at all.

Second, by tying the Mann and Longfellow improvements (such as air conditioning and multi-purpose rooms) to large capacity additions, the plan almost guarantees that those schools will have to wait much longer for the improvements. This is partly because the price tag is so much higher; the district can afford only so many big-ticket items, and can’t do all of them at once. But it’s also because the capacity additions can’t happen until there is a place to put the kids during the year that it takes to do the renovations. We’re already overcrowded, so there won’t be any place to put those kids until a lot more additional capacity is up and running elsewhere.

Without the capacity additions, Mann and Longfellow could have their air conditioning relatively soon. With them, they’ll have to wait for years, and they’ll have to wonder if the money and political support will still be there when their turn arrives – all so they can make their school populations dramatically larger, which is not something I’ve heard any families from those schools clamoring for. And other schools may have to wait longer for improvements, too, because the Hoover closure will be crowding out the funding.

Prioritizing the projects in the plan is going to be a hard, controversial process. Closing Hoover just makes it that much harder.
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Neighborhood’s dilemma

I’ve now posted twice to question the proposed additions to Mann and Longfellow schools. I want to reiterate that I’m not trying to pit Hoover against Mann and Longfellow, or to deprive Mann and Longfellow of the renovations – such as air conditioning and multi-purpose rooms – that I completely agree they ought to receive. Just the opposite: I’m objecting to the way the school board’s plan pits those schools (not to mention Shimek, Lincoln, and Hills) against one another.

The plan, in effect, coerces Mann and Longfellow families into accepting dramatic increases in the number of kids at their schools, out of fear that otherwise it will be their school that gets closed.

There is no reason any schools should be put to that choice. Ours is a thriving, growing district. The board can afford to keep its existing schools open and full, especially if it builds only as much new capacity as it needs. It should not force a fewer/bigger/farther-away elementary school model on a public that doesn’t want it. The board should be the community’s advocate, not its adversary. To quote Phil Hemingway at the Hills candidate forum (again): “District actions can fill or empty any school. The board should stop this constant threat.”
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An addition is not always an improvement

As our school board makes decisions about how to proceed with its facilities plan, I hope it will recognize the difference between improvements and capacity additions.

By “improvement,” I mean installing air conditioning, doing overdue maintenance, building multi-purpose rooms in schools that need more common space, and upgrading for accessibility. By “capacity additions,” I mean building or expanding classrooms so a school can hold more students.

Improvements are, on their face, improvements. Some might be more urgent than others, but they all indisputably make the buildings better. Adding capacity to a school, though, does not necessarily make it better. A capacity addition needs a justification other than “bigger is better.” Many people, in fact, prefer to have their elementary-age kids in smaller institutions, where the adults are more likely to know each kid.

I’m not saying additions are never a good idea, just that they need a reason. For example, if the board wants to make Twain Elementary into a magnet school that would draw students from other parts of town, it might make sense to add capacity there.

But what, for example, is the rationale for adding capacity to Mann and Longfellow schools? How do those proposed additions make those schools better? Even though Mann has a particularly small lot and borrows a nearby park for a field, the board’s plan is to expand the building to hold 76% more kids. Is that an improvement? Do the current Mann families and neighbors even want that? (See this post.)

Of course, some capacity has to be built somewhere as enrollment increases. But that, standing alone, can’t justify additions to Mann and Longfellow, because the plan is simultaneously subtracting almost the same number of seats by closing Hoover. The additions aren’t increasing capacity; in effect, they’re just consolidating three schools into two big ones. The only apparent justification is the cost savings of a shift toward having fewer, bigger, farther-away elementary schools. Whether the benefits of that shift outweigh the costs is a value judgment. Isn’t that exactly the shift that people rejected, by an almost two-to-one margin, at the community workshops?
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Update on Save Hoover

Now that the school board election is over, where does the Save Hoover effort stand?

The short answer is: full speed ahead. It would have been great to elect our chosen candidates, but, from the perspective of revisiting the Hoover decision, there are a lot of positive signs coming out of the election. First, the mere fact that six of the nine candidates supported keeping Hoover open is a good sign, and is evidence that nobody really thinks that the public is on board for closing a school on such a flimsy rationale. Two of those six, Tuyet Dorau and Chris Lynch, were the top vote-getters in the election. Moreover, there are signs that two of the remaining three candidates – including Brian Kirschling, who was elected – may be having second thoughts about the closure. The one incumbent candidate who voted for the closure, Karla Cook, came in fifth place and was defeated, only two years after winning by a large margin. All of that has to play a role in the new board’s assessment of whether the public supports the closure.

As the board moves forward on facilities issues, it will be forced to make decisions in which the potential closure plays a role. Every time that happens, we’ll be there to remind them why it makes sense not to close Hoover. In particular, the board will soon have to confront the fact that it has only so much money to work with, and that it has to prioritize the projects in the long-term plan. In that context, I think it will become clear that closing Hoover (and rebuilding that capacity elsewhere) is at best a very expensive luxury. Will the board really choose to spend ten to fifteen million dollars on that project, at the expense of other projects in the plan?

I’m hopeful that if we keep making good arguments and reminding the board of public opposition to the closure, we can get the board to reverse the decision. But we have to think of it as a continuing project and keep advocating as strongly as we can.

I can’t thank people enough for all the support they’ve given and continue to give to the Save Hoover effort. If you’d like to be on the Save Hoover contact list, please email SaveHooverIC [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com. I’m hoping people will be willing to keep the Save Hoover yard signs up, though I understand that not everyone wants a sign in their yard forever. If you’ve lost your sign and would like another, let us know. If you’re ready to take yours down and are willing to donate it back to the cause, please let us know that, too.

I’ve also added a “Follow by E-mail” link in the sidebar to the Save Hoover website; if you fill it out, you’ll get notices by email of new posts to that site. (I have one on this site, too. I’ve subscribed to other blogspot sites this way and it has not caused me to receive any unwanted spam.)

One more project: A lot of people have written to me to say why they support keeping Hoover open, and many have forwarded me the letters that they’ve written to the school board. I would like to collect letters like that and post them on the Save Hoover site. If you’d like to add to that collection, please send your letter to the email address above.

Thanks again!
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Live-blogging the election results

Consider this your source for nerdy commentary on the school board election returns as they come in tonight. Last time around, the numbers came in so fast that I could barely keep up with them; maybe the high turnout will slow things down a bit this time. You can see the results faster here, but then you’d miss all the commentary!

I’ll be posting updates (below) about individual precinct results when I find the time. The precinct map is here; you can compare it with the elementary school attendance area map here.

The top three candidates will be elected. The final results are:

Candidate	Votes	Percentage*
√ Dorau	3738	43%
√ Lynch	3121	36%
√ Kirschling	3041	35%
Hemingway	2936	34%
Cook	2671	31%
Barron	2563	29%
Lewis	2392	27%
Geerdes	2019	23%
Tate	659	8%

*The third column won’t add up to 100% because every voter can cast up to three votes.

Kirschling on Hoover

Over the past few days, a handful of people have criticized this blog and the Save Hoover group for suggesting that school board Brian Kirschling is in favor of closing Hoover School. Notably, this group does not include Brian Kirschling, who at any time could have left a comment disputing that characterization.

So, just as a reminder, here is how we reached the outlandish conclusion that Kirschling supports closing Hoover. In late July, I asked him “If you were on the board right now, would you vote to close any elementary schools as part of a long-term facilities plan?” His response:

The short, honest answer to this question is yes.

He then said that “looking ahead,” he would apply a set of seven criteria to any school closure. He never said he would apply them to schools that the board had already decided to close.

Three weeks ago, the North Corridor Parents group asked him, “Do you support closing Hoover? Why or why not?” His response:

This decision has been made, and I was not on the board. I question whether it is good practice to overturn decisions of past boards.

He then said that “looking ahead,” he would apply his seven criteria to any school closure. He never said he would apply them to schools that the board had already decided to close.

On August 25, he spoke at the meeting of board candidates with Hoover parents. He said:

I was not part of making the decision, but the decision has been made.

I think that one of the ways we can restore trust, because it’s sorely lacking, is to actually work to follow through on a plan that has been passed and to take the opportunity to move forward and commit to the future of our district.

He again talked about his seven criteria, and again did not say that he would apply them to schools the board had already voted to close.

Ten days ago, the Save Hoover group recommended voting for Phil Hemingway, Gregg Geerdes, and Sara Barron as the best way to maximize the chance of keeping Hoover open. Based on the statements above, its endorsement stated that “Candidates Karla Cook, Brian Kirschling, and Jason Lewis all favor closing Hoover.” It distributed its recommendation widely, including at board candidate forums. Never once did Brian Kirschling dispute the group’s statement about him, as he easily could have done.

For what it’s worth, Kirschling is supported financially by many of the same people supporting Karla Cook, who voted to close Hoover as a board member, several of whom have vocally favored closing Hoover.

Draw your own conclusions.
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Polling place information

Polls are open from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. tomorrow (Tuesday, September 10).

This is a good time to check on your polling place. Polling places for some people have changed this year. You can find yours here; be sure to go to your “school precinct,” not your “regular precinct.” If you live in the Hoover attendance area, you can also find your polling place using this map (click to enlarge):

UPDATE: As commenter S Marie points out, people who vote at City High will have to go to the auditorium this year, not the space between the gyms as they have done in the past. Also, many people who have voted at City High in years past now vote at Mercer Park (see the map above).
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Why I’m voting for Phil Hemingway

I’m voting for Phil Hemingway because not voting for Phil Hemingway was one of the mistakes I made in the last board election. Instead, I voted for candidates who seemed more amicable and politic, who Played Well With Others. What I’ve learned in two years is that people who appear to play well with others are quite capable of producing terrible policy. In fact, I think they’re even more capable of it, since “team players” are often the people least likely to ask the uncomfortable questions that sometimes need to be asked. Our current board is great at policing the “respectfulness” of members of the public (such as Hemingway) who speak at the public comment periods, and the board majority is a tremendously collegial team. As a result, they passed a long-term facilities plan that closed an elementary school in the face of clear public opposition, that allocated a hundred million dollars more than the district has access to, that probably will result in overbuilding and possibly further school closures, and that alienated a big chunk of the public whose votes would be needed to pass the bonds the plan depends on. Playing well with others is overrated.

If Hemingway had gotten ninety more votes last time, it would have been him, rather than Patti Fields, deliberating on the facilities plan, and I believe we would have seen a different, better result – even if a few people might have had their sensitivities offended by that blue-collar-ish guy who uses colorful language at board meetings. The “respectful” atmosphere that the current board has cultivated has served only to shield it from the disaffection and anger that people feel toward the board and the district. Even the alarmingly low approval rate of the Revenue Purpose Statement – 56%, less than what it would take to pass a bond – didn’t stop the board from further alienating the public by proposing a school closure that was never mentioned during the RPS campaign and that was opposed in all the public input that the board gathered. What does it take to pierce this bubble?

So yes, I’m no longer interested in electing candidates whose strength is that they seem diplomatic and collegial. I want board members who will scrutinize the information they receive, ask challenging questions, and break up the groupthink. I want board members who will push back against the administration. I want board members who can see beyond the small group that happens to have their ear. I want board members who think that fifteen million dollars is actually a lot of money. I want board members who value, and not just tolerate, public input.

Hemingway has now spent years as a board watchdog, and has accomplished as much in that role as some people have as board members. Yes, he will give people a hard time when he thinks he needs to. Sometimes he’ll be wrong, and sometimes he’ll get outvoted. A person like that is much more valuable than another nodding head. In the end, vigorous dissent and disagreement result in better policy, even if it gets a little hot in the kitchen.

It’s time to put this guy on the board.
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Why I’m voting for Gregg Geerdes

I’m voting for Gregg Geerdes for the simple reason that so much of what he says makes sense to me. He says, for example, that the board should have based its long-term facilities plan on the money it actually has access to, rather than an additional hundred million dollars that it can get only through bond approvals. He says that the district should not have asked the voters to approve the Revenue Purpose Statement (RPS) before developing its long-term plan (he’s right; I was wrong), and that having done so, it should not have approved a plan that included school closures that were never discussed during the RPS campaign. He says that the district should prioritize its funding needs in light of its limited money, and that tearing down a school while enrollment is expanding, only to rebuild that capacity at great cost elsewhere, is a luxury we can’t afford. He says that the district should start building the new high school and one east-side elementary school (near Windsor Ridge) right away, and that the opening of the new high school may make it unnecessary to build a 300-student addition to City High. He says that Hoover should remain open, and that as a result there is no immediate need to build a second new elementary on the east side. He supports the diversity goals and believes (and I agree) that the redistricting that will accompany the opening of a new elementary school will enable the district to make substantial progress toward those goals without doing anything outrageous with school boundaries. He believes that closing Hoover and opening a new 500-student elementary school on the southeast side would naturally create pressure to close Hills Elementary. He is the only candidate to emphasize that the board can’t just do whatever it wants, regardless of whether there’s public support for it, if it ever hopes to get the 60% approval needed for new bonds. He says that the district needs to regain the public’s trust, and that to do so, it needs to be more honest and fair with people.

These are sensible positions, and they are also disarmingly candid. Not everyone likes being told that they might not get the new construction that they wanted in the long-term plan. None of the other candidates have identified any items in the plan (other than the Hoover closure) that they would de-prioritize or eliminate. But prioritizing does make sense and will be necessary, and it’s only fair to tell the voters how you would do it. The long-term plan that Geerdes describes makes much more sense than the plan that the board approved, and his candor about it is a good sign for his ability to reestablish people’s trust in the board. I wish all the candidates spoke as clearly and as sensibly about the district’s future.
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Why I’m voting for Sara Barron

One of the qualities I want most in a school board candidate is a willingness to push back against the administration and its consultants and against the groupthink that too often takes hold on the board. Sara Barron has it. The entire 250-million-dollar facilities plan, including the closure of Hoover, is based on capacity numbers so unrealistic as to be fictitious. Yet the current board members (and several of the board candidates) have swallowed them whole without any skepticism whatsoever. Barron, more than any of the candidates, has pointed out the flaws in the consultants’ capacity determinations and said that the one of the first things the board should do is revisit them. That alone is enough to set her apart.

She has pushed back against other outside pressures as well. Opposing the Hoover closure put her at odds with an influential group of east-siders who want that property for City High; looking at the campaign contribution reports, it looks likely that that stance cost her thousands of dollars in funding. She lives in southeast Iowa City, sends her kids to a school with a free- and reduced-price lunch rate of 70%, and has made intra-district equity a major theme of her campaign. Yet she criticized the district’s diversity policy when it was being debated, rather than just signing on to anything with the word “diversity” in the title. Even at the meeting between Hoover families and board candidates in late August – a naturally friendly audience for her – she ended up in an extended disagreement with some of the Hoover supporters on the question of whether other candidates should have opposed the Revenue Purpose Statement. (She supported it.)

I’m not going to agree with everything Barron (or anyone else) does if she’s elected. But I like that she thinks for herself and can’t be pushed around. I like that she has her focus on the broader public, not just the loudest voices (yes, including me) or the most popular clique (not me!). I like that she recognizes and values the role schools play in a neighborhood, and understands that the board should be more than just an efficiency-maximizer. She is doing, as well as I think someone can, the things that a decent candidate ought to do: confronting difficult issues; taking sensible, meaningful positions; and treating people courteously to boot. I wish we had more board members like that.
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Election night blogging alert

Make this your destination for nerdy commentary on the election results Tuesday evening (unless you prefer nerdy tweeting, which will be here, but which you can also follow in the sidebar of this blog). If it’s anything like last time around, the results will all be in by about 8:30.
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Imaginary data

Karla Cook on the Hoover closure:

Yes, I was one of the people who voted to close Hoover . . . . One of the things that struck me was that Hoover has two-hundred-and-some students living in their district right around the area and that would be like one grade per building, and as a teacher I think that’s kind of tough to do, to have all thirty students and you have no other ways to deal with that, to just have one class in first and one class in second, one class in third.

What is she talking about? Last year, Hoover had 361 general education students. There were two classes per grade, and the average class size was 26. Even without the 71 transfers from “schools in need of assistance,” Hoover would have had 290 students, not to mention the approximately 30 kids in special ed and preschool classrooms. There are enough students in the area that the long-term plan – which Cook voted for – would add 330 seats of capacity to nearby Longfellow and Mann, not to mention that it would build two additional east side elementary schools. Yet somehow Cook has decided that Hoover is on the verge of being a ghost town.

For an antidote, here is Phil Hemingway at the last candidate forum:

District actions can fill or empty any school. The board should stop this constant threat.

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What is leadership?

I’m sometimes surprised by how people use the word “leadership.” During the facilities planning process, there were people who urged the board to “stand up and lead,” which, translated, was usually a fancy way of saying that the board should do what that speaker wanted instead of what most people wanted. Similarly, this week, we hear members of Congress urged to “show courage,” which, translated, means that they should disregard the clear will of the public about whether to start a war.

I don’t think a leader is someone who obtains public office and then imposes his or her own preferences on an unwilling public. I think it’s a person who successfully persuades the public of the wisdom of a particular policy, using reasoned arguments.

Look at the sea change that occurred in public attitudes toward gay marriage. Who were the leaders? Not the politicians who climbed on board only after it seemed too politically risky not to. The leaders were the people who worked to change public opinion on the issue, and succeeded. Most of them were not public officeholders.

What I most want for the school system is for it to reflect this community’s values as much as it can. I would trade all of my other policy preferences for that one. (I wonder how many of our school board candidates share that view.) I’m sure I would still be unhappy with some of the community’s choices, but I can live with being outvoted in a democracy, and I can always keep trying to persuade people.

What bothers me most about the Hoover closure is the way it has been forced on an unwilling public by “leaders” who did not succeed in persuading people of its wisdom. To me, that’s not only wrong, it’s unwise, because big changes that aren’t supported by the public are likely to be unsustainable. As candidate Gregg Geerdes has repeatedly pointed out, the school district cannot alienate its constituency and then expect to get sixty percent approval for a bond.

I know of no evidence whatsoever that this community wants to move toward closing elementary schools and having fewer, larger schools that are farther, on average, from where people live. I see lots of evidence to the contrary. A commenter here wrote, “I do not believe that small schools are the way of the future in our district.” If that commenter can persuade the public of that view, more power to him or her. Otherwise, I see no reason that the “way of the future in our district” should be anything other than what the community wants it to be. Are there school board candidates who disagree with that?
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Five reasons to care about the Hoover closure

[This post also appears in the Press-Citizen today.]

Hoover Elementary is just one of many schools in our district, but its closure would have implications for everyone. Here are five reasons everyone should care about the proposed closure:

1. Responsiveness to public input. At the district’s community workshops and in responses to the district’s survey questions, the public repeatedly made its opposition to school closings clear – by a roughly two-to-one margin. If the board is willing to stray that far from public input on this issue, what will it do on the other difficult issues, such as redistricting, that it will face over the next four years? And without the public’s trust, how does the board expect to get the 60% approval it needs to pass the bonds that will be necessary to fund its plans?

2. Transparency. The district sold the Revenue Purpose Statement to the voters by saying that it would result in improvements to older schools and the construction of new schools to reduce overcrowding. Nobody mentioned closing schools. Only after the voters had authorized new spending did the board propose to close Hoover. To make matters worse, the board has refused to identify how the Hoover property will be used, and how much that use will cost. (There is wide agreement that the proposed addition to City High will not go on the Hoover property, because it is too far from City’s other classroom areas.) Isn’t the public entitled to answers to those questions before a school closing is approved?

3. Cost. Tearing down a school when enrollment is expanding is very expensive, because you have to rebuild that capacity elsewhere, at great cost. The district plans to spend between ten and fifteen million dollars to replace Hoover’s capacity elsewhere, just to annex its approximately five acres of land to City High, for a use that no one can identify. That’s between two and three million dollars per acre, at a time when the district is already $100 million short of what it needs to fulfill its other plans. The district can’t afford to spend that much to gain so little.

4. Independence. The board’s willingness to uncritically accept the consultants’ interpretations of capacity and enrollment data led to a plan that will cost $100 million more than the board has at its disposal. We need board members who scrutinize the data, ask hard questions, and push back against the administration, its consultants, and the groupthink that too often sets in on the board.

5. Precedent. The same efficiency rationale that is being used to justify closing Hoover would apply equally (or more forcefully) to several other schools that are smaller than Hoover and serve fewer kids. A policy of consolidating smaller neighborhood schools into fewer, larger schools could justify closing Hills, Lincoln, Mann, Longfellow, or Shimek, just as it justified closing Roosevelt four years ago. Why shouldn’t we expect the district to treat other schools the same way it’s treated Roosevelt and Hoover?

No matter which part of the district you live in, the Hoover closure affects you. You can find out more about where the candidates stand on this issue at SaveHoover.blogspot.com.
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Dominoes

If the district closes Hoover, adds 330 seats to Longfellow and Mann, and follows through on the other parts of its long-term facilities plan, here is what the capacities of the elementary schools will be:

Look at the lower end. Three schools will be outliers: Shimek, Hills, and Lincoln. (Twain has apparently been slated for an expansion of its capacity.) If this plan comes to pass, I have to believe that the pressure to close Hills, Shimek, and Lincoln will be unstoppable.

This is especially true if we overbuild and end up with lots of empty, brand-new capacity – which the plan is practically designed to do, given that it’s based on unrealistically low capacity determinations and high-end enrollment projections.

If we have lots of empty capacity, who better to fill those new seats at Longfellow and Mann than the kids at Lincoln and Shimek? Who better to fill a southeast-side elementary than the kids at Hills? How can the district justify keeping old, small schools open if there is shiny new capacity sitting empty?

City High’s advocates, including its principal, have repeatedly expressed a desire to ensure that City not lose the wealthier areas in Lincoln and Shimek during any redistricting. That desire would create added momentum for closing those schools and sending the kids to Mann and Longfellow, putting those areas at City High once and for all.

If the community wants to move toward having fewer, newer, bigger elementary schools – farther, on average, from where people live – that would be one way to do it. But that idea hasn’t come from any public demand. In fact, at every opportunity, the public has rejected that approach and affirmed its desire to keep its existing schools open.

Yet school closures appeared in almost all of the planning scenarios. Board candidate Sara Barron, who served as a member of the facilities steering committee, said that the continual inclusion of school closures in the scenarios – an idea she opposed – seemed “pre-ordained.” By whom?

The public gets only one opportunity every two years to reclaim ownership of the school system and demand fidelity to the community’s values. One of them is coming this Tuesday. This may be the last chance to stop the fewer/newer/bigger train from leaving the station. The candidates who are on board for the facilities plan, including the closure of Hoover, are Karla Cook, Brian Kirschling, and Jason Lewis. The candidates who present the best opportunity to reverse the school closing momentum are Phil Hemingway, Gregg Geerdes, and Sara Barron. Please vote.
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Overreaching doesn’t help City High

The justifications for the Hoover closure have shifted so frequently that it’s hard not to wonder: what’s really going on? If efficiency and fiscal concerns were really the issue, Hoover would never have been the school chosen for closure. If insufficient enrollment were really the issue, Hoover would never have been chosen. If insufficient diversity were the issue, Hoover would never have been chosen. There’s only one reason Hoover was chosen: because some City High advocates have always wanted that property for City.

City has a tenacious set of advocates, which is good. A certain subset of its most ardent advocates, though, have become so accustomed to defending City that they are ready to justify any sacrifice in City’s name and vilify anyone who departs from the most extreme pro-City stance. One City High partisan, for example, recently accused school board member Tuyet Dorau of wanting to “weaken City High at any cost.” Candidate Sara Barron, a south-east-sider who has made intra-district equity a centerpiece of her campaign, has nevertheless gotten the cold shoulder from many in the City-über-alles crowd, because she had the nerve not to toe the line on the Hoover closure. Hoover parents – City’s immediate neighbors – who have questioned the rationale for the closure have been presumptively accused of being “anti-City-High.” Some City High supporters even gave each other high-fives at the meeting when the school board voted to close Hoover, as Hoover parents looked on. Treating people this way does not help City High; it just breeds resentment and ill will among the people who should naturally be City High’s allies.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to ensure that City High is a strong high school. But there comes a point when the constant anxiety about West High leads to overreaching that hurts City more than it helps it. Yes, West has a bigger property, and will always have a bigger property, than City, and that will likely be true of the new high school, too. It has a bigger front lawn and more parking spaces. Its athletic fields are all on site. But you need a better reason than that to close an elementary school (and to spend ten to fifteen million dollars doing it).

City’s advocates have raised other concerns as well: for example, about the relative number of AP course sections offered at the two high schools. (For some people, the main purpose of the district’s diversity policy is apparently to ensure that there are as many AP course sections for their kids at City as there are for the kids at West. Never mind how diverse those classrooms are.) It’s not clear how bringing City’s enrollment up to 1500 (which is only 86 more students than it already has) will appreciably increase its AP offerings. More importantly, no one has been able to articulate any connection between those concerns and the acquisition of the Hoover property. There is wide agreement that the proposed City High addition cannot go on the Hoover property, because Hoover is too far from the other classroom areas of City. So how will taking Hoover facilitate the addition? (No one wants to say publicly that Hoover will become a big parking lot, but it’s hard to see how else it can facilitate the addition.) No one will answer the question.

One City advocate laid out the argument to me this way: We may all know that City can hold 1400 or 1500 students, but the consultants say that it can hold only 1293. We need to build that addition – even if we don’t really need the space – because otherwise City’s on-paper capacity will be smaller than the other high schools’, so in the distant future City could end up the smallest of the three, and it might lose the attendance areas that provide the kind of kids who take a lot of AP courses. So, for the sake of making City’s on-paper capacity numbers equal to the other high schools’, we should spend ten million dollars to build an addition and another ten or fifteen million to tear down an elementary school. Even in this nutty rationale, there was no connection between the addition and the acquisition of Hoover.

I live next door to City High. All of my kids will attend City. The three candidates I’m voting for – Phil Hemingway, Gregg Geerdes, and Sara Barron – are from City High households. None of us are hostile to City High. We all want City to be a great school. But no one has shown that City needs the Hoover property. No one has even identified how the property will be used. For those reasons, many City High supporters, both in the Hoover attendance area and beyond, have recognized that the case for closing Hoover is unconvincing.

The best way to help City is to build and maintain a broad coalition founded on the people who are City’s natural base of support and extending beyond them, too. That kind of coalition has helped City be, by all accounts, one of the best high schools in the state. But rather than foster that coalition, City’s most zealous partisans have sacrificed it for the sake of ramming through a school closure that hurts City’s own neighbors, based on tortured rationales and without popular support. It will take years to re-establish the trust and unity among City’s supporters that existed only a few months ago. Even the ability to get bond approvals – once taken for granted in this district – is now in doubt. With friends like these, City doesn’t need enemies.
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Why add 330 seats to Longfellow and Mann?

I’ve posted before about how expensive it is to tear down a school while enrollment is expanding. If the district closes Hoover, it will have to rebuild its entire capacity somewhere else, spending between ten and fifteen million dollars in the process. I’m not particularly bothered by the candidates who support all of the new construction in the long-term plan, because it’s easy enough to modify those plans if the projected enrollment doesn’t materialize. But once you tear down a school, there’s no looking back.

The new construction that seems most questionable to me is the planned capacity expansions of Mann and Longfellow schools. I’m all in favor of updating those buildings with multi-purpose rooms, air conditioning, and other overdue maintenance. But why add capacity to them? The board’s plan calls for adding 180 seats of capacity onto Mann, and 150 onto Longfellow. This makes the plan over fifteen million dollars more expensive than earlier scenarios that upgraded the schools without adding capacity. That’s over fifteen million dollars to replace capacity that the district already has at Hoover, just a mile or two away.

But even regardless of the expense, why would the district want to add 330 seats to those schools? Mann sits on an especially small lot, has a smaller-than-average playground, and borrows a nearby park for field space. Talk about a “land-locked” school. (Compare Mann’s lot with Hoover’s.) Where will these 180 units of capacity go?

Longfellow has more space, but is reachable only by driving through several narrow, residential streets. How many more cars (and buses?) will come into that neighborhood when there are 150 more seats in the building?

All to get the five acres of land at Hoover for City High, for a use that no one can identify. Why is the district tying itself in knots to close Hoover School?
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Thoughts on Jim Tate and Chris Lynch

Having posted Saturday about school board candidate Tuyet Dorau, I wanted to chime in here on two other good candidates, Jim Tate and Chris Lynch.

I like Jim Tate. He seems like a forthright guy with a reasonable take on the issues facing the district. He’s right that the board could benefit at this moment from someone with a knowledge of the construction trades, and he displays some of the same watchdog tendencies that Phil Hemingway does in his determination to hold the district’s contractors accountable for the quality of their work. I like his ideas about expanding the district’s use of geothermal energy and looking into the possibilities of solar. He says that there are ways to give City High an addition without closing Hoover and that the district can keep Hoover open, though he has been less adamant on the issue than some. The main thing preventing me from voting for him is just that there are so many good candidates running and only three open spots. Also, I do believe in voting strategically (though I don’t enjoy it), and Tate’s last-place finish two years ago makes me a little reluctant to spend one of my votes on him.

When I first read some of Chris Lynch’s campaign literature and written statements, I thought they were non-committal and didn’t say very much. When I spoke to him in person, though, I came away with a much better impression. What came across as caginess in writing I now think is just a genuine absence of ego. He seems more focused on the quality of the board’s decision-making process, and on ensuring that whatever the board does has public buy-in, than on imposing his own ideas on everyone. I find that approach to governance very appealing; though I have no shortage of opinions on school policy, I’d happily settle for schools that truly reflected this community’s values and preferences. Many of my own strongest objections to the Hoover closure have to do with the board’s disregard for the public input that it repeatedly sought; a board that cared about process and public buy-in would never have voted to close Hoover. (Lynch has made it clear that he supports keeping Hoover open.)

If anything, Tate and Lynch might be too affable and agreeable; I wonder how effectively they would push back against the administration or against board groupthink when the occasion demands it (which is often). But I like them both, and I won’t be upset if either one wins.

UPDATE: Chris Lynch sent this note in response to this post, and agreed that I could post it here:

Chris:
Thanks for the very nice blog.

I would point out one thing: I am the one candidate uniquely skilled to hold administration accountable. With 21 years as a leader at P&G, I sure do understand expectations and accountability. Expectations and accountability will go up day one with myself on the board.

Chris Lynch
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Blogathon update

I’ve been taking a short breather from the un-blogathon, but Karen W. has been more than making up for it. Check out her posts on “The Proper Role of the School Board,” and “Thinking Beyond Buildings: ‘It’s the Curriculum, Stupid,’” and all of her recent posts. Also check out Jack Hostager’s ongoing thoughts about the technology gap between schools and their students.

More here soon.
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Some thoughts on Tuyet Dorau

As I posted yesterday, the Save Hoover group (which I’m a part of) has endorsed Phil Hemingway, Gregg Geerdes, and Sara Barron for school board. The endorsement was the closest we could come to a consensus, and I know it doesn’t speak for every Hoover supporter. I hope people will take it as one piece of information and make their own decisions.

I found it very hard to decide which candidates to support, because six of the nine have supported keeping Hoover open: Hemingway, Geerdes, Barron, Tuyet Dorau, Jim Tate, and Chris Lynch. (And of course there are other issues besides the Hoover closure – though many of them, such as responsiveness to public input, transparency, and fiscal sense, are implicated by the closure decision.)

It was particularly hard in the case of Tuyet Dorau. Dorau is an incumbent board member who voted against the plan to close Hoover. At the board meeting where the plan was approved, she was the only member who asked hard questions about the data on which the plan was based, rather than uncritically accepting the consultants’ interpretations. She was the only board member who acknowledged the public’s clear opposition to closing schools without a compelling purpose.

I haven’t always agreed with Dorau, which doesn’t distinguish her from any school board member in history. But she did vote against the indoctrination policy I described here. She also voted against the ill-advised attempt to regulate the public’s expression at board meetings that I described here. When I complained about PBIS, the district’s reward-based behavior modification program, she engaged in a public discussion of it with me, while none of the other members of the board so much as acknowledged my letter.

The consensus wasn’t there for a Dorau endorsement, in part because she has, in the past, spoken in favor of moving toward larger elementaries at the expense of closing smaller ones. She has also said that preserving the viability of a town or neighborhood should not be a factor in the board’s decisions. Both of those views, in my opinion, are too narrowly focused on dollars and cents to the exclusion of intangible costs, and too narrowly define the board’s mission.

Given her previously expressed views, some have criticized Dorau’s vote on Hoover as inconsistent or insincere. The two stances are not, in fact, inconsistent, since even someone who wants to close smaller schools might think differently about Hoover, which held almost 400 students last year, and is located in an economically diverse area with no shortage of kids. But even if they were, there is no shame in declining to push one’s personal preferences on an unwilling public. This particular criticism of Dorau tends to come from supporters of candidates who are fully on board for closing Hoover, which makes it that much less persuasive.

Say what you want about Tuyet Dorau. One thing is undeniable: she’s not the reason Hoover School might close. Neither is any west-side hostility to the east side. Neither are fiscal considerations or enrollment trends. If Hoover closes, it will be because of the over-reaching of a particular group of activists who are narrowly focused on City High, and who have decided that the fate of City desperately depends on using the Hoover property for, um, . . . something.

I’m voting for Hemingway, Geerdes, and Barron. There are great reasons to vote for those three, which I’ll be posting about over the next week, and I do think it’s important to try to concentrate the votes of Hoover supporters as much as possible on only three candidates. Moreover, although I’m a terrible predictor, I suspect that Hemingway, Geerdes, and Barron need help more than Dorau does, and I want to put my votes where they’ll have the greatest impact. But I know that many Hoover families and neighbors are grateful to Dorau for her vote against the closure, and that many of them will be voting for her. I won’t be trying very hard to talk them out of it.

UPDATE: After I put this post up, Tuyet Dorau and I engaged in an email exchange that she agreed I could include here:

Save Hoover endorses Hemingway, Geerdes, and Barron

The Save Hoover Committee has endorsed Phil Hemingway, Gregg Geerdes, and Sara Barron as the board candidates that provide the best chance of reversing the decision to close Hoover School. I had one vote in that recommendation, and it was a tough choice, since six of the nine candidates – Hemingway, Geerdes, Barron, Tuyet Dorau, Jim Tate, and Chris Lynch – have voiced support for keeping Hoover open. More on my own decision process in my next post. Here is the text of the endorsement:

SAVE HOOVER.

VOTE ON SEPTEMBER 10.

The Save Hoover group has been working to pursue a reversal of the school board’s vote to close Hoover School. Many people have asked us which candidates in the upcoming board election support keeping Hoover open. After meeting with the candidates and reading their statements on the issue, we believe a vote for these three candidates will help maximize the chance that Hoover will stay open:

PHIL HEMINGWAY. A Hoover neighborhood resident, Hemingway is a longtime supporter of neighborhood schools. Hemingway wants the school board to follow through on the promises made to renovate and improve schools, not close them. He wants to restore the public’s faith in the board.

GREGG GEERDES. Geerdes opposes the closure of Hoover because it doesn’t make economic sense to close a vibrant, successful school at a time when enrollment is growing. Geerdes understands that closing a school only to rebuild the capacity elsewhere is short-sighted and unaffordable.

SARA BARRON. As a member of the Facilities Steering Committee, Barron voted against the proposal to close Hoover. Barron has a keen understanding of the capacity issues the district faces, thinks critically about the data, and is willing to challenge the administration when necessary.

Incumbent board member Tuyet Dorau deserves credit for voting against the closure. Candidates Chris Lynch and Jim Tate also support keeping Hoover open. But we believe that voting for Hemingway, Geerdes, and Barron offers the best chance of saving Hoover.

Candidates Karla Cook, Brian Kirschling, and Jason Lewis all favor closing Hoover. Cook voted for the closure as a board member.

Your polling place may have changed. To find your polling place, contact the Johnson County Auditor’s Office at 356-6004, or visit www.johnson-county.com. You can vote early at the Auditor’s Office instead of waiting until September 10.

You are allowed to vote for three candidates. We strongly urge you to use all three of your votes. Thank you for your interest in this issue.

Paid for by the Save Hoover Committee, Chris Liebig, chair.

For more information, visit SaveHoover.blogspot.com.

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Transparency check, part 3

Our school district (commendably) puts its meetings on video and makes them available through its website. They are very up-to-date, and even have the most recent meeting, held on August 13, available for viewing. Yet there is one conspicuous gap in the list of available videos: the school board meeting held on July 23, when five board members – including current board candidate Karla Cook – voted to approve the plan to close Hoover School. What possible reason could there be for not having that video available, over a month later?
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Deafening silences

City High parent Mary Anne Berg writes in support of the Hoover closure in today’s Press-Citizen. It’s the first and only opinion piece in favor of the closure that I’ve seen. See how persuasive you think the argument is.

Berg mentions that necessary renovations to Hoover would cost five million dollars, but she conspicuously fails to mention that tearing the school down and rebuilding its capacity elsewhere will cost fifteen million dollars. Berg then argues that “As an additional benefit, the City High campus will have room to expand to better meet needs.” Like every other closure supporter that I have heard, including the school board members who approved the plan, Berg will not say how the Hoover property will be used to benefit City High. Instead, Berg concludes that “I am confident that the district will use the Hoover property in a way that respects its neighbors and that helps meet the needs of City.” She’s confident, so don’t worry. But please don’t ask what that use will be.
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Recess is not just a carrot

Just a reminder as the school years starts back up: It is against district policy to withhold recess as a form of punishment except in “in extreme circumstances where all other methods have been exhausted or for continued unacceptable behavior exhibited during recess.” Recess isn’t a frill or a tool for behavioral manipulation; it has important educational value – you might as well punish kids by withholding math – and it is just basic decency to give kids some downtime during the day. This policy, enacted by our elected school board, seems to have made no impression at all on our schools. More commentary here..

Transparency check, part 2

One of the board candidates, Chris Lynch, helpfully pointed me to this chart from the 2013 enrollment report, which shows that Hoover had 71 transfer students from Twain and Wood elementaries last year. Even if you were to subtract that entire number from the total enrollment, you’d end up with 295 students, just short of the consultants’ 304-student capacity number for Hoover – and that’s not even counting the approximately 30 special ed and preschool students in the building. It’s those (unrealistic) capacity numbers that have justified all the additional construction in the board’s plan, but they are conveniently ignored when it’s time to rationalize the closure of Hoover. If the pro-closure candidates were consistent, they’d have to be concerned about Hoover being overcrowded, not about it being half-empty.

Notice also that the chart uses a different total enrollment number (366) than the district used elsewhere in the facilities discussion (361). Yet last week the district refused to disclose the first-day enrollment numbers for this school year, because of an internal rule that “we use the official state counts for all public discussion.” Uh-oh – the confusion is too much for me!

Part 1 here.
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Transparency check

I’ve come to realize that blogging effectively is sometimes a matter of repeating oneself over and over to combat misinformation that will not die. One such piece of false information is that Hoover School currently has 129 transfer students from “schools in need of assistance” (SINAs). When we finally get a waiver from No Child Left Behind, the argument goes, the loss of those 129 kids will mean that we can no longer fill the school.

The argument would be bad enough even if the statistic were true, for reasons I’ve already talked about. There is no shortage of students to fill Hoover’s seats in this densely populated area, which is one reason the board’s plan builds 330 seats of new capacity onto two nearby schools Mann and Longfellow. So maybe I shouldn’t get riled up about that one statistic. But the statistic is blatantly false. There were 129 transfer students at Hoover last year, but only a fraction of them were SINA transfers. Most of the schools have 50 or 60 ordinary intra-district transfers – kids who want to stay at a certain school after the family moves out of the attendance area, for example. Those transfers will still happen even if we get a No Child waiver, and even if some SINA students are redistricted into newly built schools. The actual number of SINA transfers must be significantly lower than 129.

So I emailed the school district to get the correct information:

Hi – I’m wondering if you can tell me how many of the 129 transfers into Hoover last year were from SINA schools. People keep throwing that 129 number around as if all of the transfers will disappear if we ever get a waiver of NCLB (or if some are redistricted into a new school), but I assume that some portion of those transfers were ordinary open enrollment transfers. I’d like to clear up that piece of information if possible.

Thanks for any information.

The district’s chief operating officer replied:

Hi, Chris. I don’t believe the district keeps data on who is attending a different school on a SINA transfer versus any other sort of transfer.

Really? Surely the district knows the addresses of the students who attend Hoover. Moreover, the intra-district transfer form even asks the parents to fill in the following information:

If this is a SINA transfer request, do you want the district to assign your child to another school if your desired school(s) is not available for transfers? __YES __ NO

School Your Child Currently Attends (or School where you reside, if your child is not yet in school: ________________

So it’s hard for me to believe that the district doesn’t know the accurate number of SINA transfers at Hoover, or couldn’t easily determine it. But instead, the question goes unanswered, and the false statistic takes on a life of its own in the facilities debate.

UPDATE: Part 2 here.
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How big will that parking lot be?

Though nobody is saying what will be done with the Hoover School property if the school is closed, we have some pretty strong hints from the facilities planning process. The rationale given was that the closing was necessary to permit the construction of a 300-student addition onto City High. Everyone seems to agree that the addition itself cannot go on the Hoover property, though, because Hoover is so far (and on a different elevation) from the other classroom parts of City. So how does taking Hoover make the addition possible?

We were repeatedly told, by the consultants and by school board member Jeff McGinness, that any plan to keep Hoover open and also build the addition would require the construction of a two-story, 750-stall parking ramp. Yet, in the scenarios that close Hoover, the ramp disappears. Once City takes Hoover, apparently, there is room for a surface lot instead of a ramp.

Let’s start by imagining the ramp, and let’s give the plan the benefit of the doubt. First, maybe the two-story ramp would go on top of an existing lot, thus adding only about 375 spaces. (There is no existing lot that size, so it seems likely that it would go somewhere else and add far more spaces, but I’m trying to make this a conservative estimate.) Second, maybe the new addition would also displace some existing parking. Here’s a map of City, with the number of spaces in each parking lot marked:

Even if they took the entire northwest lot for the new addition, they would lose only 151 spaces. (Although the Google map is outdated because it doesn’t show the new performing arts addition, I went over to City and counted the spaces myself. I included the approximately 35 unmarked spaces that are used for parking on the east side of the property.)

That means that the plan would add 375 spaces while losing 151, for a net addition of 224 spaces. City starts with about 590 spaces, so the plan would increase that number, at the very least, to a total of 814.

West High, which currently has 1,956 students, has a total of about 750 parking spaces. Yet the plan that brings City up to a capacity of 1,593 somehow requires 814 spaces.

If the two-story ramp is out of the question, then City would have to reach that total some other way – by adding those 375 spaces somewhere else. Without the ramp, we’re told, the only way to do it is by taking Hoover. So let’s imagine what 375 parking spaces on the Hoover land would look like. Here’s what Hoover looks like now:

The north parking lot at West High has 372 spaces, so it’s a good comparison. Here’s what that lot looks like, at the same scale:

So here’s what the Hoover property looks like with a 372-space lot on top of it:

So much for athletic fields.

If there is some other conclusion to draw about how Hoover would be used under the board’s plan, I’d sure like to know what it is.
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Thoughts on the Hoover candidate meeting

People concerned about the potential closure of Hoover School met today with all nine school board candidates, and I just wanted to post some quick thoughts about the meeting here.

The meeting pretty much confirmed the impressions that we already had. Of the nine candidates, there are five or six who express varying degrees of doubt about whether it makes sense to close Hoover. Phil Hemingway, Gregg Geerdes, Sara Barron, and Tuyet Dorau all spoke persuasively about why the case for closing Hoover is so unconvincing. Chris Lynch was also supportive of keeping Hoover open, and Jim Tate expressed his own doubts about the decision.

Three candidates supported going forward with the closure: Karla Cook, Brian Kirschling, and Jason Lewis.

It was striking to see how unpersuasive the pro-closure arguments sounded when they had to share the stage with arguments that made sense. Karla Cook repeated all the flawed reasoning that I’ve been responding to here, arguing that there are simply not enough kids in Hoover’s attendance area to fill its capacity. She seems to think that the school, which last year had two temporaries and held almost 400 kids (including general education, special ed, and preschool), will suddenly sit half-empty if it loses the kids who transfer in from SINA schools. (Though the district hasn’t specified, there are probably about 70 or 80 such kids; the rest being ordinary open-enrollment transfers that every school has – another fact that is constantly misstated.) Cook even said that Hoover would have only enough students to fill one classroom in each grade, which is preposterous, even without the inevitable redrawing of boundaries. Iowa City isn’t Hills.

Lewis’s argument was, in effect: now that we’ve already decided to build all this new capacity, we have to close a school or it will all be too expensive. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. It’s a good thing Lewis hadn’t already decided to build six new elementaries; then we’d have close three more older schools — to save money! It doesn’t seem to occur to him that it would be simpler and cheaper to build only as much new capacity as we need above and beyond what our existing schools provide.

Lewis also distributed a map showing the overlapping radiuses of the schools in the central Iowa City area. We have a lot of schools in central Iowa City, the argument seemed to go, therefore we have to close one. Of course, we also have a lot of kids in central Iowa City. Without a discussion of whether there are too few kids relative to the capacity of those schools, the map is meaningless. Though Lewis thinks we won’t be able to fill Hoover’s capacity, he simultaneously favors adding 330 seats of capacity to two other nearby schools (Mann and Longfellow). If there aren’t enough kids to fill those central east-side schools, why are we adding capacity to two of them, to the tune of about fifteen million dollars? But for Lewis, building new capacity comes first; then the need to tear down a school follows. You might as well light your money on fire.

I couldn’t understand what Kirschling’s argument was, other than that “the decision has been made,” and so the board should go ahead with it. So much for elections.

None of the candidates who support the closure made any attempt to explain how the land would be used for City High. They acted like they would close Hoover even if it weren’t right next to City, which is disingenuous. Neither enrollment nor cost considerations are actually motivating the closure. It is all about getting that land for City, probably to put a parking lot on it.

At some point, I expect the Save Hoover organizers to make some recommendations about which candidates to choose to maximize the chances of reversing the closure. In the meantime, it’s nice to see so many of the candidates expressing opposition or doubts. (Interestingly, two-thirds of the candidates questioned the closure, which is very close to the percentage of the public who opposed the closure at the community workshops.) Each voter can cast only three votes, and it’s going to be hard to narrow those good choices down to three. I’ll be talking out my own thought process here over the next week or so.
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We’re rich!

Karen W. points out that by tearing Hoover down and rebuilding that capacity elsewhere, the district is spending fifteen million dollars to annex five acres of property to City High. That’s three million per acre – about a hundred times the going rate for undeveloped property.

My house happens to sit on about three-eighths of an acre directly bordering City High. I was very pleased to learn that my property must be worth $1,125,000 to the district.

The small neighborhood just south of Hoover, on 3rd Avenue and Dunlap Court, is almost exactly the same size as the Hoover property. The sum total of the assessed house values there is $3,628,520. Just wait until they learn that their houses are worth over four times what they thought.

But hey, I’m not greedy. I’ll sell for an even million. That’s an eleven percent discount! The district has enough financial sense not to turn down an offer like that, right?
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Dense

In the discussion of our district’s facilities plan, the idea that “there aren’t that many kids who live in the Hoover attendance area” has been the zombie factoid that will not die. As I’ve pointed out ad nauseum, the population of the Hoover area is not projected to grow significantly because it is a densely populated area that is already filled with houses. Yes, Hoover currently serves a number of students from farther away who have chosen to transfer out of “schools in need of assistance” under No Child Left Behind. But Hoover also currently has two temporary classrooms; shouldn’t we want its enrollment to shrink some?

Hoover serves more kids in its own enrollment area (232) than Lincoln (201), Mann (190), Shimek (147), or Hills (80), and those schools have much more far-flung attendance areas. Hoover has 129 transfers, but all the schools have transfer students; the district average is 60 per school. Finally, the boundaries will certainly be redrawn anyway; the point is that Hoover is a relatively big school in a densely populated, economically diverse area and can easily be filled in any redistricting scheme.

But a picture is worth a thousand statistics. Here is an overhead view of the area around Hoover (click to enlarge). See if you can estimate the number of houses.

By contrast, here is a same-scale overhead view of Borlaug Elementary, which opened when the district closed another school in a densely populated area (Roosevelt Elementary) four years ago. See if you can – oh, never mind.

Ninety-two percent of the students at Borlaug take a bus to school. Six buses go there every day. How many teachers would that pay for? But somehow keeping Hoover open is too expensive; fiscal responsibility demands that we tear it down and rebuild its entire capacity elsewhere.
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Space is not the real constraint on class size

The Press-Citizen reports today on the school board’s proposed new caps on class size. Both the article and the quotes from the superintendent leave the reader with the impression that the only thing preventing the district from implementing the caps is lack of space. In fact, lack of money to pay additional teachers is the real constraint.

I applied the proposed caps to last year’s elementary school enrollment numbers, school by school, and grade by grade (using the data here). To meet the caps, the district would have needed 333 general education classes. The district actually had about 319 gen-ed classes. So, to meet the caps, it would have needed about 14 more classroom teachers – and that’s just at the elementary level. There were schools that did not meet the caps but had available classrooms (for example, Borlaug). The only thing that stopped the district from having smaller classes in those schools was lack of money to pay the teachers.

By contrast, space constraints currently play a more limited role. The district would have needed 333 gen-ed classrooms to meet the caps. The district currently has 405 total elementary school classrooms, not counting temporaries. Even reserving four rooms in each building for art, music, and other uses, the district had 329 classrooms to work with. The bigger problem was that the classrooms weren’t necessarily in the schools where the students were, because it’s been so long since some attendance areas were adjusted.

The number of classrooms needed in each building under the caps would vary each year with even minor changes in enrollment, so additional wiggle room would be nice. And of course, enrollment will grow, so eventually we’ll need even more space (though whether that adds up to three new elementaries is another question). But all the additional classrooms in the world won’t create money to hire fourteen new teachers (and more at the secondary level). It’s constraints on hiring, not constraints on space, that make the class size caps challenging.

At the high school level, constraints on space are more of a factor. (The same data about number of classrooms just isn’t available, so it’s hard to assess in as much detail.) But again, additional space won’t create the money to hire additional teachers.

And, again, even under the caps, the existing classrooms can (and will) hold more students than the consultants’ new capacity determinations would permit.
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You can’t handle the enrollment numbers

I emailed the school district last night to ask if anyone could tell me how many students are now enrolled. School has been in session for three days, and all the students have been assigned to classrooms, so they must know how many there are, right?

I received a message back telling me that the official counts don’t occur until October 1. I replied:

Thanks -- I know the official count comes in October, but would it be possible to say how many kids there were on opening day (and to compare that to last year’s opening day)? I would think the district must know, since all the kids had to be assigned to particular classrooms.

It’s our first opportunity to get an (admittedly limited) sense of whether the consultants’ capacity projections are borne out by actual enrollment figures. Since the facilities plan is a big topic of discussion in the board election, I’d hate to have to wait until October if there is even preliminary information available before September 10.

The superintendent replied:

In order to ensure that conversations about enrollment are consistent we use the official state counts for all public discussion. As with past years, our numbers will continue to fluctuate between now and the official count as new students arrive and students who have left are unenrolled. Releasing information prior to the official count has generated significant confusion in past years. To address that confusion we adopted a practice of using the official state enrollment count for all public discussion. We will release those numbers, disaggregated by school, when they are finalized. Prior to that date we will contain our conversations about enrollment numbers to estimated changes in the aggregate (District and/ or school grade range including elementary, junior high school, and high school).

So they have the information, but won’t tell us, because they’re afraid we’ll be confused? I’m not saying the district has something to hide, but this kind of paternalism drives me crazy. They need to stop treating the voters like children who have to be constantly managed for their own good. (They need to stop treating the children that way, too.) People are capable of understanding if counts are “preliminary” or “as of a certain date.” If “people might be confused” were a sufficient reason to withhold information, think how much could be withheld.

I also understand that the count would shed only limited light on the accuracy of the consultants’ projections (which is true of the October numbers, too). Still, you would think that the one-year-out projection would, if anything, be more accurate than those for later years. The enrollment numbers are important because the consultants’ high-end projection was part of the justification for all the district’s planned spending and construction, and for the closure of Hoover School as well. The opening-day count, especially as compared to last year’s, is a piece of information that would be useful to the public in the discussion of issues leading up to the election of school board members. It’s particularly unseemly for the district to withhold information at a time when people are exercising their right to oversee the very people who are withholding the information.

Enough with the paternalism.
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The easiest way to meet the diversity goals

One of the issues in our school board election is how to address the disparities in free- and reduced-price lunch (FRL) rates at different schools. FRL status is what the district uses as a proxy for low-income status. Some of our elementary schools have very high FRL rates – as high, in one case, as 70% – which indicates challenges for those schools that other schools don’t have to deal with. The district recently passed a diversity policy aimed, in part, at reducing those disparities between schools.

There has been a lot of brainstorming about how to meet the diversity goals. Redistricting, which will have to occur when new schools are built, can help to some extent, though too much gerrymandering would not have public support. Many candidates have suggested exploring the possibility of creating magnet schools to lure a mix of incomes to schools that would otherwise be high-FRL. I agree that we should explore magnet schools, but they do raise some logistical questions. The redistricting will almost certainly have to occur before we know whether a magnet school will have enough appeal to work. We’d also have to decide whether to devote an existing school building to the project. If we do, we’re either forcing a “theme school” on people in that attendance area whether they want it or not, or we’re eliminating an attendance area altogether and relying entirely on transfers in. One alternative is to have some kids in a school be part of the magnet program, while others are not, though then the non-magnet part might still have a very high FRL.

Board candidate Brian Kirschling has promoted an idea based on a system used in Champaign, Illinois. As I understand it, the system would essentially abolish attendance areas altogether. Instead, the district would ask each family for its list of preferred schools, then assign each to a school based partly on the stated preferences and partly on factors such as diversity, proximity, siblings, and capacity.

The appeal of the idea is that the district would no longer have to draw boundaries lines and then agonize over adjusting them when they become outdated. But the idea raises several questions. If, for example, everyone in Manville wants to attend Lincoln Elementary, but not all of them can, who would make the decision about who goes and who doesn’t? I don’t think people would be comfortable giving that kind of discretion to our school administrators. It could be done purely by computer algorithm, but the algorithm would have to be so complex that it would be opaque to almost everyone. (Would we bring in consultants to create it?) And presumably it would have to give some weight to proximity, which in effect brings back the concept of attendance areas, at least as a factor. Properties closest to an elementary school would still be especially sought after – good news for Manville and Windsor Ridge, bad news for the low-to-moderate-income neighborhood across Court Street from Hoover, if it closes. Will the rich just get richer?

Moreover, the expense of buses would put limits on whether kids in any one area could attend different schools. The more you think about it, the more it starts to sound like old-fashioned attendance areas, but with fuzzy boundaries that the administrators can adjust as they see fit. In that respect, it’s similar to the idea that Nick Johnson has advocated: Firm attendance areas in a certain radius around the schools, but administratively-assigned schools for the remaining areas. Under either system, families who live farther from the schools bear the “burden” (if it is one) of not knowing in advance where they will attend, so there is still an incentive to buy in some areas rather than another, which ultimately privileges those with the money to buy in those areas.

There’s no perfect system, and all of those ideas are worth exploring and developing. Still, I keep coming back to this idea: When the new schools are built, use the accompanying redistricting to mix populations to some extent within reason. Then, if there are still disparities to be addressed, keep diverting resources into high-FRL schools until they become so appealing that people choose to transfer into them, and FRL rates fall of their own accord. In particular, bring down the class sizes in those schools until people are banging on the doors to get in. (Bad metaphor: with our new security measures, everyone has to bang on the door to get in.)

In the last election, the candidates’ common refrain was “Redistrict resources, not kids” – an indication that the basic concept is palatable to voters. But notice that I’m not arguing that we should tolerate large FRL disparities as long as those schools have a lot of resources (though some would make that argument). I’m arguing that we should make those schools so appealing that the FRL rates in fact come down via voluntary transfers.

Think of it as essentially creating a Small Class-Size Magnet School. But it has an advantage over other theme-based magnet schools, because the class sizes can be adjusted from one year to the next until you zero in on the desired diversity goal. A curricular theme, on the other hand – such as a science- or arts-focused school, either works or it doesn’t. Re-adjusting class sizes every year is a lot easier than re-adjusting boundaries or re-adjusting themes, and anyone who wants to send their kids to the school in their attendance area will still have the option to do so.

It’s true that diverting resources to one school necessarily means taking them from others, but that cost would at least be spread over many schools, and wouldn’t fall on any one group or neighborhood. (Presumably any magnet school would require diverted resources.)

Thoughts?

Fellow blogathoner Karen W. chimes in on a different aspect of the diversity discussion here.
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