School board agenda for Tuesday, September 13

Some of the items on this week’s board agenda:

1. The board will discuss (and probably resolve) the issue of secondary boundaries, which has been pending since the process was interrupted by the resignation of board member Tom Yates in May. I’m guessing that there will now be a majority for reinstating the previous board’s secondary boundary plan that would send Kirkwood-area students to Liberty and Alexander-area students to Northwest Junior High and West High. (I don’t support that plan, for reasons I wrote about here, here, here, and here.)

2. We’ll consider two busing appeals from parents who argue that their kids should receive a bus to West High because they live just beyond the three-mile mark.

3. We’ll hear an update on the district’s response to the State Department of Education’s audit of our special education practices. Info here.

4. At the work session after the meeting, we’ll discuss our request to our demographer to get updated enrollment projections. Info here.

5. We’ll discuss a proposed process to get community input on possible changes to the district’s facilities master plan. Editorial comment: I have a lot of doubts about the ability of our ThoughtExchange platform to provide a representative sample of community sentiment, and I wish it did not advertise itself in that way. (See this post.) But what I’m most interested in is hearing all the arguments and counterarguments on any proposed changes, and ThoughtExchange is one way of gathering those, as are emails, community comment at board meetings, etc.

6. We’ll discuss our voluntary transfer process and whether we should change it or make any exceptions to it as we transition to new boundaries and the opening of a new high school. Long, boring post on this topic here.

7. We’ll review a proposed timeline for preparing for a bond proposal to appear on the September 2017 school board election ballot, to fund projects in the district’s facilities master plan.

8. We’ll discuss the district’s weighted resource allocation model, under which schools that have higher rates of free-and-reduced-price lunch (FRL) (which is the district’s proxy for low-income status) receive additional resources. The district has already begun phasing in this model—by, for example, trying to tilt teacher allocation toward high-FRL elementary schools. I asked for some further discussion of just how this model would function at the secondary school level.

9. We’ll get a quarterly report on the board’s strategic goal to “annually improve the educational experiences for all children through culturally inclusive and responsive school environments and classroom instruction, as measured by various student assessments including the Biennial Youth Survey, with a focus on equitable outcomes for students in protected classes.”

All that and more. The full agendas are here and here; chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

Superintendent evaluation, contract extension, and pay

This is just a quick post in response to questions I’ve gotten about the process for superintendent evaluation, contract extension, and pay.

The superintendent evaluation process is a personnel process that legally has to happen in closed session if the superintendent so requests (which, quite reasonably, he has). [Correction: The law permits, but does not require, the board to conduct the evaluation in closed session, but only if the superintendent so requests.]  It leads to an evaluation that the superintendent receives which is designed to identify both strengths and areas for improvement. The evaluation is not a public document. The board has had several closed session meetings as part of that annual process.

The contract extension process is a separate process. The previous board approved a three-year contract for our superintendent in July 2015. Ordinarily, when there are less than two years remaining in the contract, the board considers extending it back out to three years. The board can discuss that issue in an exempt (non-public) session, but any vote to extend the contract would have to occur in a public board meeting. The board has an exempt session for “superintendent contract” scheduled for this Tuesday.

As part of the contract approval process, the board must also determine the superintendent’s salary. That decision is separate from the salary approvals for other administrators and staff. The board can discuss that issue in an exempt session, though any salary decision would have to be approved at a public board meeting.

Voluntary transfers and transition rules

UPDATE 9/18/16The board made some headway discussing this issue at last week’s work session. Follow-up discussion here.

One of the topics the board will be discussing in this week’s work session is the district’s voluntary transfer process. Earlier this year, I proposed that the board consider making some changes and clarifications to that process as we transition to new boundaries and to the opening of Liberty High. This post is to update and summarize that proposal and ask readers for input. (Warning: prepare for a long post.)

School board agenda for August 23

Some of the items on this week’s board agenda:

We’ll consider whether to change our policy on open enrollment and voluntary transfers at our secondary schools. Our current policy prohibits voluntary transfers into Southeast Junior High, City High, or West High, because of capacity concerns. The opening of Liberty High in 2017 will relieve some of those concerns and so is an occasion for reconsidering the policy. More info here.

We’ll also hear a “Start of School Update,” and we’ll review the board’s work session decision to ask an administrative committee to examine the issue of activity buses at the high schools once Liberty opens.

We have an exempt (non-public) session before the regular board meeting to consider whether to extend the superintendent’s contract for an additional year. (As I understand it, the standard practice is give the superintendent a three-year contract. When there are only two years left in the contract term, the board can choose to extend the contract back out to three years.) After the regular board meeting, we have a closed (also non-public) session to continue the superintendent evaluation process.

The full meeting agenda is here. Feel free to chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

District buys news elementary school site in North Liberty

New school site is outlined in orange; click to enlarge.

The big news at the board meeting tonight was that the board gave a unanimous go-ahead to the purchase of land in northern North Liberty to use as the site for an elementary school. (We could not talk about the purchase in advance, for fear of derailing the purchase negotiations.)

Though the board did not make any decision about how the site would fit in with its long-term facilities plan, my own strong preference (and, I think, the likely outcome, though I can’t speak for the board) is to open Grant Elementary School on this newly purchased site in 2019, instead of on the site in northern Coralville (the “Scanlon site”) that the board initially identified.

There are several reasons why it makes sense to alter our plans in that way. Under our most recent information, there are currently 10 elementary school students within a mile of the Scanlon site. Go out two miles and you’ll find over 200, but many of those are very close to our existing elementary schools. The area around Scanlon is being developed, but the growth won’t happen overnight. So to fill that school in 2019, we would have to run many buses to it, which would require scarce general fund money. Alternatively, we could run fewer buses but open the school at significantly less than full capacity, which means it would not serve its intended function of alleviating overcrowding at the other North Corridor schools.

By contrast, the North Liberty location would enable us to fill Grant largely with kids who live within two miles and so minimize busing costs. (The Cedar Springs and Fox Run neighborhoods alone contain hundreds of students.) Unlike at the Scanlon location, the developments (and thus the kids) near the new site are already there, not just anticipated in the future. That means that the new site will enable Grant to have the greatest possible impact in alleviating overcrowding at the other North Corridor schools.

And by opening Grant at the North Liberty location, we avoid having to move the Cedar Springs neighborhood twice. Under the elementary boundaries the board adopted earlier this year, Cedar Springs, which currently attends Garner Elementary, was reassigned to Penn Elementary as of 2019. But it would make no sense to move Cedar Springs to Penn if we anticipate eventually opening a school near Cedar Springs and having to move those families a second time.

Another advantage of the North Liberty site is that it already has utility infrastructure in place, while there is some uncertainty about whether the Scanlon site will have infrastructure in place to enable construction to start on schedule.

Finally, opening Grant at the North Liberty location would make it easier to persuade people to vote for the bond that will be necessary to pay for the construction of a new school. It will be hard enough to persuade people to vote for a bond that will close and demolish an existing elementary school (which I will continue to advocate against). It will be that much harder if we tell people that we’re doing it because we’re building a new elementary school in an area of very high-end development where there are currently ten kids within a mile, and where the cost of the busing that would be required to fill that school when it opens could be nearly what it would cost to keep Hoover open. It would be much easier to convince people to build a school in a neighborhood where hundreds of kids will be within walking distance and where many are currently attending a school (Garner) that is projected to be three hundred kids overcrowded by 2018.

What should become of the Scanlon location? The district will still own the land there. It makes a lot of sense to consider that the location of the *next* North Corridor elementary school, after Grant. There is a lot of growth expected in the North Corridor, and our enrollment projections may justify another elementary school there in the not-too-distant future. But by then, the developments will be further along and we will be able to fill more of the seats with walkers.

Changing the location of Grant would have domino effects, however. For example, in my view, the board would have to reconsider the wisdom of adding 175 seats to Garner and would have to think about whether we should add capacity elsewhere instead.

Opening Grant at the North Liberty location would also require that we change the 2019 elementary boundaries that the board adopted earlier this year. It would not make sense to send Cedar Springs and Fox Run to Penn, since Grant would now be their walkable neighborhood school. In my view, it would also not make sense to send the North Lincoln area to Grant, and the same may be true of the northern part of the Wickham zone that was slated to become part of Grant.

I remain mystified by the board’s decision to approve those elementary boundaries. Not only did we do so over three years in advance of the opening of the new schools and without updated enrollment projections, we did so just hours after the closed session at which we agreed to pursue the North Liberty purchase. I still don’t understand why the board majority chose, on that very same night, to tell hundreds of people that they would be zoned for Grant Elementary—or why, as recently as six weeks ago, board members were saying that the elementary boundaries were “final”—when we all knew that we were pursuing a significant change. We were bound to keep the property negotiations confidential, but nobody forced us to rush elementary boundaries through in a way that would mislead so many people.

But this property purchase is great news, and I hope it will demonstrate that yes, the facilities master plan can be changed without the sky falling. In my view, we should continue to look for ways to improve the facilities plan as we head into the 2017 vote on the bond proposal (which is now estimated to be for approximately $190 million, unless the state approves an extension of the SAVE tax).

Please chime in with any comments about the property acquisition. Are there counterarguments to moving the location of Grant to the new site? If the location is moved, what changes would you suggest to other aspects of the facilities plan and to the elementary boundaries?

School board agenda for Tuesday, July 26

At tonight’s meeting, we’ll swear in newly elected board member Paul Roesler, and we’ll discuss our legislative priorities for the coming year. At the work session afterward, we’ll start our discussion of activity buses, and we’ll be joined by staff of the Grant Wood Area Education Agency to discuss our district’s relationship with the agency and our recent interactions with the agency that led up to the state’s report about our special education practices.

The full agendas are here and here; feel free to chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

School board agenda for Tuesday, June 12

I’m afraid I got too busy to post about the agenda before our last meeting, and I have time for only a brief post about tonight’s meeting, which has a relatively short agenda. It does include a discussion of the state Department of Education’s accreditation report on our district’s special education practices. (On that subject: there is also a candidate forum on special ed issues tonight; details here.)

The full agenda is here; feel free to chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

A response to Chris Lynch’s guest opinion

My fellow board member Chris Lynch has a guest opinion in today’s Press-Citizen on the subject of secondary boundaries. As anyone who reads this blog knows, this is a topic that the board is divided on. Disagreement among the board members can be a healthy thing, especially if it means that people get to hear both arguments and counterarguments on important issues. In that spirit, here’s my take on the arguments Director Lynch raises in his article.

• The first thing I noticed about the article is that it says nothing about the primary objection raised to Director Lynch’s proposal: the busing of kids from two of our most high-poverty neighborhoods, Kirkwood and Alexander, to more distant schools for the sake of pursuing greater socioeconomic parity at the high schools. The article does not even try to persuade the reader that the plan’s benefits outweigh its burdens for Kirkwood and Alexander families. I take the article to be implying that whatever burdens those families have to bear are justified by the other benefits of the proposal, but I would have liked to hear the main counterargument to the proposal more explicitly addressed.

• Much of the article is arguing with a straw man: Director Lynch compares his favored proposal with a plan that would assign both Kirkwood and Alexander to West High. But in fact, neither side of this debate wants to leave both Kirkwood and Alexander assigned to West. The real alternative proposal is to assign Kirkwood to West and all or most of Alexander to City High. As a result, many of Director Lynch’s arguments falter. For example, he argues that his proposal—to remove Kirkwood from West—will keep West from becoming overcrowded, but the alternative proposal—removing Alexander from West—will also keep it from becoming overcrowded. Basically, West with Alexander looks a lot like West with Kirkwood, so it’s hard to distinguish the two proposals based on their effect on West.

• Director Lynch’s main argument is that his proposal is the only way to prevent “programming inequity” at the high schools. I’m not surprised at this focus. Despite all the talk about the need for diversity, much of this debate has been driven by a desire for uniformity in course offerings at the three high schools—which explains why the focus on “balance” has been exclusively at the secondary level, even though the socioeconomic disparities at the elementary level are far larger. (Many of the people arguing against having fifteen- or twenty-point FRL (rate of free- and reduced-price lunch) differences at the high schools were supportive of the board’s adoption of elementary boundaries that had FRL differences of over seventy percentage points.)
  
  What are the programming differences that will result if we keep Kirkwood and Alexander at their nearest high schools? Director Lynch does not say. He says only that “Liberty will not have programming equity with City/West due to low/lower student enrollment.” But it has always been the plan for Liberty to start with lower enrollment, because its initial capacity will be lower. (It will be a 1000-seat school until 2022.) The district’s curricular goal for Liberty is to have at least 200 kids per class, with the understanding that juniors and seniors will not be required to attend in its initial year. On the high end, it would be unwise to have more than about 250 kids per class, since that would push the building over capacity as soon as there are four full classes there. Based on what we know about how many students are in the pipeline, keeping Kirkwood at West is the plan that puts Liberty at between 200 and 250 students per class in its initial years—thus meeting its curricular goals while avoiding overcrowding.
  
  Director Lynch’s proposal, on the other hand, would result in enrollment at Liberty being significantly over capacity by 2019 (the first year it will have four full classes), even without considering likely population growth in the North Corridor. And the overcrowding would get much worse before Liberty gets its addition (scheduled for 2022).

• Director Lynch asserts that unless his proposal is adopted, “The barriers to learning will be 2-4 times higher at City/West than Liberty.” I had to stop and read that sentence multiple times, since at first I had no idea what it meant. I’m assuming that the article is equating the rate of free- and reduced-price lunch or English language instruction with a school having “higher barriers to learning.” This strikes me as an odd way to talk about the presence of poor kids or second-language English speakers in our schools. It is also inherently alarmist language; “4 times higher” may mean that one high school would have 8% of its kids in English-language instruction while another high school would have 2%—but it sounds scarier to say that “barriers to learning will be four times higher” at the former.
  
  Certainly some kids do face greater barriers, but the article avoids any discussion of how those kids will be better off if they are bused to different schools. That would require a discussion of whether the likely FRL rate at any school is high enough to raise educational red flags, and whether the benefit of moving kids to a different, more distant school will outweigh the burdens. The article doesn’t attempt to make those arguments.

• Director Lynch suggests that only under his proposal can a bond be passed that will fund the remaining projects in the district’s facilities plan. It’s true that no one is under any obligation to vote for a bond, and some people may choose to express their unhappiness with the board’s policies by voting “no” on any bond. But this kind of argument is circular: everyone likes to think that their plan is the one the community likes best. Director Lynch says that the community and the board “collectively spent thousands of hours” developing his proposal, but in fact there was a great deal of opposition to busing-for-balance at the district’s listening posts. What’s especially noticeable about the argument on bond passage, though, is the absence of any acknowledgement that Kirkwood and Alexander residents will also play a role in whether a bond passes. In the discussion of bond passage, those voters don’t seem to exist.

• Director Lynch argues that “anything that looks like segregation” has “no place in the Iowa City Community School District.” There is no doubt that the housing patterns that make it harder to diversify some of our schools are the result of a history of discrimination. Whether our high schools need to have nearly equal socioeconomic profiles to avoid “looking like segregation,” however, is another question, especially if that goal requires treating low-income families worse than other families, by putting greater burdens on them and by being more willing to disregard their input. How best to improve the lives of kids from low-income families is a hard question that can’t be reduced to simply equalizing numbers—as Director Lynch has essentially acknowledged by supporting elementary boundaries that have enormous disparities in socioeconomic and racial diversity and that look much more like segregation than anything proposed at the high school level.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want socioeconomic balance at the secondary schools. Unfortunately, though, that balance cannot be achieved—at least not through traditional attendance zones—without busing hundreds of kids from low-income families every year to more distant schools. I remain unconvinced that those kids will be made better off through that kind of plan, and I do not see the likely socioeconomic differences at the high schools as being large enough to justify burdening those kids in that way.

Related posts here, here, and here.

School board agenda for June 14

Some of the items on tonight’s board agenda:

We’ll discuss the state Department of Education’s accreditation report on our district’s Special Education practices. You can read the report here.

We’ll vote on approval of the proposed 2016-17 school calendar.

We’ll hear an update from the district’s sustainability committee.

We have a work session scheduled to continue our discussion of secondary boundaries. My guess is that we will probably have to wait until the election of a new board member to settle the question of what our secondary school boundaries will be. I submitted a letter to the board listing some “grandfathering” issues that we could discuss. It’s hard to do any kind of extensive grandfathering in conjunction with our boundary changes, especially since we need to make sure we populate the new schools we are opening, but there are some limited circumstances where I think some exceptions to our usual rules would make sense.

The full agendas are here and here. Please chime in with a comment on anything that catches your attention.

Uncertainty about the length of a school board appointment

UPDATE #2, 6/7/16: The board voted unanimously not to appoint anyone to the vacant board seat. As a result, we will have a special election in July—most likely on July 19.


UPDATE 6/7/16: According to guidance issued by the Iowa Secretary of State’s office today, if we make an appointment tonight to fill the vacant seat on the board, that seat would have to go up for election this November 8 (that is, at the same time as the Presidential election). Unofficially, we’re hearing from the Auditor’s office that the cost of a general election is ordinarily shared by the entities that have offices on the ballot. Because the November election uses more polling places and requires more poll workers, the cost is relatively high, so the school district could expect to spend about $75,000 if the seat is on the November ballot (as compared to about $16,000 on a July special election), unless there is a departure from past practice.

Whatever we make of this information, we’re lucky to have gotten it in advance of our decision tonight. A number of districts elsewhere in Iowa have already made appointments to vacancies—and quite possibly did so in order to save the expense of holding a special election—and are only now learning that they will have to fill those seats this November at an even higher cost.

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At this coming Tuesday’s meeting, the school board will decide whether to appoint someone to the board vacancy created by Tom Yates’s resignation. If the board does not appoint someone, there will be a special election in July to fill the spot. Seven people have applied for the appointment.

One question that has turned out to be unexpectedly difficult is how long an appointed board member would serve. The governing statute says that the appointee “shall hold office until a successor is elected and qualified pursuant to section 69.12.” Section 69.12 governs vacancies that occur “in any nonpartisan elective office of a political subdivision of this state,” and says, in relevant part:

A vacancy shall be filled at the next pending election if it occurs:

(1) Seventy-four or more days before the election, if it is a general election.

(2) Fifty-two or more days before the election, if it is a regularly scheduled or special city election. . . .

(3) Forty-five or more days before the election, if it is a regularly scheduled school election.

The statute defines “pending election” as:

any election at which there will be on the ballot either the office in which the vacancy exists, or any other office to be filled or any public question to be decided by the voters of the same political subdivision in which the vacancy exists.

(Emphasis mine.) One interpretation of the italicized language is that the vacancy would be filled at the next school district election, which would mean in November 2017 (or sooner if there were a school bond vote in the meantime). That’s how I read it, and that was the district’s working interpretation.

However, a 2011 Iowa Court of Appeals opinion interpreted it differently. The case arose when a vacancy occurred on the Bettendorf City Council in January 2010. The Council appointed a replacement, and then a dispute arose about when the seat would come up for election. One side argued that the “next pending election” was the next City Council election, which would have been in November 2011. The other side argued that the “next pending election” was the state legislative and gubernatorial election in November 2010.

The Court decided that the statute required the seat to be up for election in November 2010, even though that was not a City Council election. Otherwise, the Court wrote, the language in paragraph (1) above would be superfluous.

The Court’s decision is the authoritative interpretation of the statute that lower courts are required to apply to newly arising cases, unless there is a principled distinction that would justify a different outcome.

Further complicating the matter, this year’s legislature passed an amendment to the governing statute. The amendment essentially reverses the Court of Appeals’ interpretation and requires that a vacancy like ours would be filled at the next school district election. Governor Branstad signed the amendment into law last week. But its effective date is July 1, 2016. Since our appointment would be made on June 7, the amended approach probably does not apply—though there is at least room for argument on that point as well.

The upshot is that we can’t be entirely sure how long our appointee would serve. It’s a legal issue that could be settled with finality only by the courts. It’s quite possible—even probable—that if someone litigated the issue, a court would decide that the seat would have to go up for election this November.

It is interesting to imagine a school board seat being filled on the same ballot as the presidential election, and we would certainly set a school election record for turnout. On the other hand, I’m concerned about making an appointment without knowing how long the appointed term would be, especially if there’s any likelihood that litigation will result.

On balance, I see this legal uncertainty as one more reason to allow the seat to go to a special election rather than fill it by appointment. If the seat is filled at a special election in July, the law is clear that the winner of the election will fill out the remainder of Yates’s term, which expires in September 2019.

Update on Liberty High enrollment projections

As I wrote about here, the board has been debating whether to assign the Kirkwood Elementary area to the Liberty High zone or the West High zone. The board recently voted 4-3 to assign Kirkwood to West High. One question that arose was what effect that assignment would have on enrollment at Liberty. Some were concerned that without Kirkwood, Liberty would not have the two hundred kids per class that the district saw as its initial goal. Others (including me) were concerned that sending Kirkwood to Liberty would cause Liberty’s enrollment to exceed its capacity as early as 2019, the first year it will have four full classes in the building.

(During Liberty’s first year of operation, the district is allowing juniors and seniors in the Liberty zone the option of staying at their previous high school; the same is true for seniors during Liberty’s second year. So it will not have four full classes until its third year, which is 2019-20.)

Projecting the enrollment at Liberty is not a straightforward task. The district’s most recent set of enrollment projections is of limited usefulness, since it makes projections based on our old set of elementary boundaries, which will not be the boundaries when Liberty opens. So the board asked the administration to make projections for Liberty based simply on moving forward the current cohorts of kids who are in the Liberty zone. For example, the kids who will be Liberty freshman in 2019 are this past year’s fifth-graders, so we can simply count the outgoing fifth-graders in Liberty’s zone and use that as an estimate of the 2019 freshman class.

Notice that that kind of projection is incomplete and inherently conservative, because it does not account for the expected population growth in the North Corridor. It also does not account for voluntary transfers into the Liberty zone, which could boost its attendance in the early years. (Under our current rules, voluntary transfers are not permitted once a building’s enrollment exceeds its capacity.) It also does not account for the possible decrease in open enrollment out to other districts (such as Clear Creek Amana) once Liberty is open.

This weekend, the administration provided those projections. The first one shows Liberty without Kirkwood included (click to enlarge):

The next one shows Liberty if Kirkwood is included (click to enlarge):

The projections show that Liberty will meet and exceed its goal of having two hundred kids per class as soon as it opens, even without Kirkwood being assigned there. (Any Liberty projection, however, is subject to the fact that there is no way to predict the junior and senior class enrollment in Liberty’s first year, or the senior class enrollment in its second year, because students in those years have the option of remaining at their previous school.)

The projections also show that if Kirkwood is assigned to Liberty, Liberty will be over capacity as soon as it has four full classes (in 2019). (Liberty's initial capacity will be 1000 students.) By 2021-22, the year before Liberty gets its 500-seat addition, the school would be at least 21% over capacity if Kirkwood is assigned there, plus whatever additional enrollment is attributable to population growth in the Corridor.

That said, the projected overcrowding is not as bad as I had anticipated in my previous post. My fellow board member Brian Kirschling argued that I had not accounted for the fact that enrollment in the North Corridor schools is currently disproportionately in the early grades, and you can definitely see that effect in these projections. Nonetheless, Kirkwood does put Liberty over capacity for three of its first five years—and again, these are conservative estimates.

The projections also give some idea of how much Liberty’s free-and-reduced-price lunch (FRL) rate would go up if Kirkwood is assigned there. (FRL is the district’s proxy for low-income status.) FRL status is hard to project into the future because it can vary with the economy and with housing patterns, and because it can change from year to year even as to any particular student, but it’s safe to say that when Liberty opens, its FRL would be closer to the district average, though still probably several percentage points below that of City High, if Kirkwood is assigned there.

Do these projections mean that Kirkwood cannot possibly be assigned to Liberty? No. The facilities master plan has always assumed that we can’t eliminate overcrowding overnight and that short-term overcrowding is a necessary evil—though it may be particularly hard to justify overcrowding when capacity is available elsewhere. What the projections do highlight is a tension between the goal of FRL balance and the goal of bringing enrollment in line with capacity. I continue to think that the main argument against assigning Kirkwood to Liberty is that we shouldn’t burden kids from low-income households with additional transportation barriers, as I wrote about here. But the capacity issue at Liberty is one more factor tilting against assigning Kirkwood there.

School board agenda for May 24

Some of the items on this week’s board agenda:

We’ll discuss the process for filling the vacancy on the board created by the departure of board member Tom Yates. More information here; see also this post.

We’ll vote on approval of an amended certified budget, receive our annual asset protection review, and hear an update on the district’s Wellness Policy.

At our work session after the board meeting, we’ll continue our discussion of secondary attendance areas. Information here.

The full agendas are here and here; feel free to chime in with a comment on anything that catches your attention.

How does the school board fill a vacancy?

UPDATE 5/25/16: Last night, the board voted to move ahead with an appointment process to fill the vacancy. I supported the motion, simply because the state statutes appear to require us to at least begin such a process, and because there is no harm in talking about an appointment. I’m still inclined, however, to think that an election makes a lot of sense. Some other board members also recognized the potential value of filling the seat through an election.

We scheduled a special board meeting for June 7 to decide whether to make an appointment. Applications for the appointment are due by 4 p.m. on June 1; the application form is here. See the timeline here. Again, applicants should understand that the board may end up letting the seat go to election rather than appoint someone. Failure to submit an application for the appointment will not affect your eligibility to run as a candidate if there is a special election; that is a separate process.

As I mentioned below, it is also possible that people could file a petition to skip the appointment process and go straight to an election. That petition would have to be filed by June 2. If such a petition is filed and validated, we would cancel our June 7 special meeting.

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Because of the resignation of one of our board members, Tom Yates, the school board now has a vacancy to fill. As I understand it, this is how the law handles school board vacancies.

State law says that the school board “shall” fill a vacancy by appointment. However, there are two potentially applicable situations under which the vacancy may be filled through an election. First, if the board does not agree on an appointment within thirty days of the vacancy, then there has to be a special election to fill the vacancy. The vacancy occurred on May 13. That means that if the board does not fill it by June 12, there will have to be a special election. Our only scheduled meeting before that date is on May 24.

Second, even if the board intends to appoint someone, there will be a special election if voters petition for one. The petition would have to be signed by eligible voters totaling thirty percent of the votes cast in the last school election—which, in this case, means 2,190 signatures. (As I understand it, “eligible” voters means anyone who is eligible to register to vote, even if they are not actually registered.) The petition would have to be filed with the board secretary within two weeks after the board notified the public of its intention to fill the vacancy with an appointment. The board published that notice on May 19, so any petition to trigger an election would have to be filed by June 2.

Any special election to fill the seat would have to be held between sixty and seventy days after the vacancy occurred—which means Election Day would be either July 12 or July 19.

An election would fill the seat for the remainder of the term, which expires in September 2019. An appointment would fill it until the next school election, which is in September 2017 (unless the district schedules any bond vote sooner). [This is a correction from the initial version of this post; see the comment, below.]

Again, this post reflects my understanding of how the process works, based on my reading of the statutes. Please do not take it as the official word of the district, the school board, or the Auditor’s Office.

The board plans to discuss how to fill the vacancy at its meeting tonight (May 24). My initial inclination, especially given that the election would fill the seat for over three years, is that an election makes more sense than an appointment, for the reasons I wrote about here in 2014.

Update on elementary attendance areas, May 17

Information about the new elementary boundaries is now available on the district website.