A laptop in every backpack: do the benefits outweigh the costs?

Our district has been moving forward with a plan to provide every secondary student with a Chromebook laptop for use in the classroom and at home (and to provide more devices in elementary schools as well). At this week’s meeting, the board will be asked to approve a $2.4 million technology purchase and lease, much of which will go toward funding this 1:1 laptop initiative. That money represents the tip of the iceberg of what will become a continuing expense, since the laptops are expected to have a three-year lifespan.

I’m not yet persuaded that the benefits of this initiative outweigh the costs. Our administrators have conceded that there is no hard data to show that providing every student with a laptop will increase student achievement (however defined). One the one hand, I’m glad to see anyone recognizing that test scores don’t capture the full effect of any educational practices; I’d be more persuaded, though, if this stance weren’t so selectively deployed. During our discussion of it at a recent work session, the initiative sounded less like the result of a careful consideration of costs and benefits and more like we are simply following a trend among districts elsewhere.

(To hear the response to the question, “Can we expect a measurable increase [in test scores] from this?”, and to hear some of the arguments in favor of the initiative from board members and administrators, listen for a few minutes here. See also Karen W.’s post here.)

As is too often the case at our meetings, the board made little or no attempt to grapple with counterarguments or to consider opportunity costs. It is not hard to find arguments that the proliferation of screens in school (and at home) does not promote and may even undermine learning. See here, here, here, and here, for just a few quick examples. I’m not endorsing those conclusions, but the board is not doing its job if it considers only arguments in favor and not arguments against. (See this post.)

There are also unresolved questions about the effect of the 1:1 initiative on the privacy of student data and on the district’s selection of textbooks. Will the district shift toward e-books and online-only materials instead of textbooks? If so, how will that affect curriculum and instruction?

There is also the fact that the money to fund the 1:1 initiative comes from SAVE, which is also a source of money for our facilities plan. If the pending bond proposal does not pass, we may wish that we had not spent those SAVE funds on student laptops, especially since the dollar figure here is actually larger than some of the smaller projects in the facilities plan.

There is, of course, enormous money to be made by selling technology to school districts, which ought to make the board give particular scrutiny to a large, ongoing expense like this one. Read about Los Angeles’ disastrous 1:1 iPad experience here.

Readers, what are your thoughts? Am I being too skeptical? Is it futile even to consider holding back the tide on school-provided devices?

Latest version of bond proposal language

This Tuesday, the board will vote on the bond proposal language that will appear on the ballot this September. Here is the draft language that appears on the meeting agenda:

Shall the Board of Directors of the Iowa City Community School District in the County of Johnson, State of Iowa, be authorized to contract indebtedness and issue General Obligation Bonds in an amount not to exceed $191,525,000 to provide funds to address health, safety, and accessibility issues in all school buildings, including air conditioning all school buildings, reducing the use of temporary classroom structures in the District, addressing classroom, lunchroom, and gymnasium overcrowding, and dedicating rooms to art, music, prekindergarten, and science by constructing, furnishing and equipping a new building, constructing additions to and/or remodeling, repairing, and improving the school buildings remaining in the District’s Facilities Master Plan, as follows: Mann and Lincoln renovations, Liberty High athletic facilities construction and site improvements, new elementary school construction in North Liberty and site improvements, West High renovation, South East and North Central Junior High additions, Shimek renovation, City High addition and upgrades, Wood addition, Wickham upgrades, Garner and Northwest additions, Liberty High addition, Horn renovation, Kirkwood addition, Borlaug, Alexander, and Lemme additions, and Tate High addition and upgrades?

It’s possible that the board could still make changes to the language, our administration has told us that we cannot wait any longer to settle the language, so significant changes are probably unlikely.

Here is a red-lined version showing changes from the previous draft (underlined portions represent new language):

Shall the Board of Directors of the Iowa City Community School District in the County of Johnson, State of Iowa, be authorized to contract indebtedness and issue General Obligation Bonds in an amount not to exceed $191,525,000 to provide funds to address health, safety, and accessibility issues in all school buildings, including air conditioning all school buildings, reducing the use of temporary classroom structures in the District, addressing classroom, lunchroom, and gymnasium overcrowding, and dedicating rooms to science, music and art, music, prekindergarten, and science by constructing, furnishing and equipping a new building, constructing additions to and/or remodeling, repairing, and improving the school buildings remaining in the District’s Facilities Master Plan, as follows: Mann and Lincoln renovations, Liberty High athletic facilities construction and site improvements, new elementary school construction in North Liberty and site improvements, West High renovation, South East and North Central Junior High additions, Shimek renovation, City High addition and upgrades, Wood addition, Wickham upgrades, Garner and Northwest additions, Liberty High addition, Horn renovation, Kirkwood addition, Borlaug, Alexander, and Lemme additions, and Tate High addition and upgrades?

I don’t know what motivated the change in the order of science, music, and art. The one word that has been added is “prekindergarten,” apparently to address the objections of those who want some attention to expanding preschool space in the district. I’m not sure how much weight to put on the addition of that word, however, since it is not tied to any particular building, and is unaccompanied by any change in the bottom-line dollar figure. Is it just lip-service to the preschool idea without any associated funding? Is it there to enable a future board to change the facilities master plan to direct some of the bond funding toward preschool rooms and away from its currently designated uses? Or is there another possible meaning?

Many people have asked about whether passage of the bond referendum locks the district in to doing the projects listed in the bond language or in the district’s facilities plan. That turns out to be a complicated legal question to which the answer is not entirely certain; I’ll be posting more about that issue.

Please chime in with comments about the draft language.

Ballot language for the bond proposal

This afternoon, the district’s administration released the following proposal for language to use on the ballot for the district’s bond proposal:

Shall the Board of Directors of the Iowa City Community School District in the County of Johnson, State of Iowa, be authorized to contract indebtedness and issue General Obligation Bonds in an amount not to exceed $191,525,000 to provide funds to address health, safety, and accessibility issues in all school buildings, including air conditioning all school buildings, reducing the use of temporary classroom structures in the District, addressing classroom, lunchroom, and gymnasium overcrowding, and dedicating rooms to science, music, and art by constructing, furnishing and equipping a new building, constructing additions to and/or remodeling, repairing, and improving the school buildings remaining in the District’s Facilities Master Plan, as follows: Mann and Lincoln renovations, Liberty High athletic facilities construction and site improvements, new elementary school construction in North Liberty and site improvements, West High renovation, South East and North Central Junior High additions, Shimek renovation, City High addition and upgrades, Wood addition, Wickham upgrades, Garner and Northwest additions, Liberty High addition, Horn renovation, Kirkwood addition, Borlaug, Alexander, and Lemme additions, and Tate High addition and upgrades?

The new language was added to tonight’s board meeting agenda, which means the board could vote to approve it tonight—though, since it will have been public for less than six hours before the meeting, the board could choose to postpone approval until our April 25 meeting.

School board agenda for April 11

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

We’ll start the meeting by holding “public hearings” on the proposed certified budget for fiscal year 2018 and the Shimek playground renovation proposal. (At our last meeting, the board approved the purchase of the playground equipment; this hearing is about the renovation work itself.) Members of the public will have the opportunity to speak and to ask questions about those topics. I posted about the Shimek playground proposal here.

We’ll vote on adopting the certified budget, which we have to submit to the state by April 15. (More detailed information here.) At our last meeting, I pointed out that it didn’t make much sense to schedule the public hearing on the certified budget on the same night that we have to vote on it, since we’d have no time to incorporate any feedback we receive at the hearing. In other words, the board seems to treat these public hearings (and arguably the entire budget-setting process) as perfunctory. In the future, I’d like to see the board take a meaningful look at how it’s allocating the district’s resources and whether it reflects our real priorities; that should involve consideration of community input, too—all well in advance of the state deadline for budget certification.

We may vote on bond proposal language to appear on the ballot in September; it’s not clear whether the final proposal will be ready this week, or whether we’ll continue to discuss the proposal at our work session and then schedule a vote for the next board meeting.

We’ll hear updates on special education and on the legislative session.

We’ll review proposed amendments to our board ends policies (here and here), to some of our policies directed at students, and to the charter for our Education Committee board committees. (UPDATE: The item about the committee charters has been removed from the agenda and sent back to committee for further consideration.)

At our work session, we’ll discuss the facilities master plan, the bond proposal, and our future use of the ThoughtExchange platform. Previous post on ThoughtExchange here.

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

Information on tonight’s meeting about the renovations to Horace Mann Elementary

The school board will meet with the Iowa City City Council tonight (at 5 p.m. at the Educational Services Center) to discuss options for the renovations to Horace Mann Elementary School. The project is part of the district’s facilities master plan, but the details of the renovation project are still unsettled. Board members and council members just last night received a PowerPoint document showing several options for how to proceed with those renovations. There is no public comment period on tonight’s agenda; I’m assuming (hoping?) that tonight’s meeting will be just the first step in presenting options to the community for discussion. Feel free to chime in with a comment below!

Rubber stampism

Shimek Elementary School playground, 2017

Should elected board members automatically approve decisions that are recommended by district committees?

At last week’s meeting, the board considered a proposal to replace the play structure at Shimek Elementary School. The proposal was recommended by the district’s central administration and endorsed by a Shimek PTO committee, but some Shimek parents raised objections. They argued that the proposed play structure was not sufficiently accessible to disabled students—one of the speakers was accompanied by her son, who was in a wheelchair—and that the district had, in short, given them the runaround in the way it handled the proposal.

Board members didn’t receive the parents’ objections (which were lengthy) until less than twenty-four hours before the meeting, which was fairly understandable, since the item didn’t appear on the agenda until a few days before that. So I suggested that we table the issue for two weeks to give us more time to consider the objections that parents had raised.

During the discussion, my fellow board member, Brian Kirschling, argued that when there is an internal process in place for developing a proposal, the board should defer to that process and accept its outcome. Though I’ve seldom heard this argument made so explicitly, there’s little question that some version of it seems to drive many board decisions. Once an administrative recommendation has been made, it often seems as if some board members are hunting for ways to justify it and reject other possibilities.

I very much disagree with this philosophy. There’s no question that board members do rely on administrative recommendations all the time—as a practical matter, we have to. Moreover, committees and task forces play a valuable role in evaluating the options for addressing a given issue. But when someone raises plausible objections to a recommendation, the board should not just rubber-stamp the recommendation without exercising independent judgment. It’s the board’s job to provide oversight and to be a conduit for community input, not to simply let the institution run itself.

Many of our committees, for example, are composed mostly of district staff, and even when they aren’t, they often have to rely on staff for the information they need. It certainly makes sense to draw on the insights and knowledge of staff in any kind of decision-making, but it would be unrealistic to ignore the fact that staff members have to worry about pleasing their supervisors—especially in a district with a reputation for having a retaliatory culture where dissent is often unwelcome.

And many times it’s the our administrators who determine committee membership in the first place—which can certainly have a big effect on what a committee ends up recommending. Even when all of the committee members are working in good faith and bringing valuable knowledge to bear, this kind of process can end up being used to give a veneer of community input to what are actually predetermined outcomes.

The hands-off approach seems particularly unwise on an issue involving the needs of disabled students, who make up a small fraction of our student population. The mere fact that a proposal wins majority support of a committee does not mean that the needs of a small minority have been fairly considered.

None of this means that the Shimek playground proposal was a bad one or that the process leading to it was faulty. But the board owed it to the public to take a closer look than it did.

School board election preview

Karen W. at the Education in Iowa blog has a new post up previewing this September’s 2017 school board election (and bond vote) in our district. Check it out.

School board agenda for March 28

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

We’ll vote on resolutions supporting students and families impacted by immigration enforcement and creating a task force to plan additional supports.

We’ll hear a legislative update.

We’ll get an update from the committee that is considering transportation issues (such as the provision of activities buses at the secondary schools).

We’ll consider the superintendent’s recommended fiscal year 2018 budget and 2018 physical plan and equipment levy (PPEL) life cycle budget.

We’ll get an update from the committee addressing the issue of the district’s use of seclusion enclosures (see these two posts).

We’ll examine the draft ballot language for the district’s $191 million bond proposal.

There are several other items of potential interest as well. The full agendas are here and here. Please chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

Plan B

Some people have asked what the district’s “Plan B” is if its facilities bond proposal fails. When that topic came up in one of the board’s work sessions, our board chair made it clear that he was against any attempt to specify a Plan B, and the board followed suit.

It’s understandable that voters would like to know Plan B, but I agree that the board should not try to state one. We can each advocate for what we think the back-up plan should be, but it would be misleading for the board to say what it will be, for three reasons.

First, this board simply doesn’t have the right to decide Plan B. That decision can only be made by the next board, which will include three members to be elected this September (at the same time the bond vote occurs). If the bond does fail, why would anyone think that the same board that created the failed proposal should get to tell the next board what the back-up proposal must be?

Second, if the proposal fails, any revisions to it will have to depend on an assessment of why it failed. The board can’t possibly assess that until after the bond vote occurs.

Third, a board that wants to pass a bond has an incentive to make Plan B sound as awful as possible—otherwise, voters might decide they like Plan B better than Plan A! Be prepared to hear lots of arguments about the disastrous consequences that will follow a “No” vote, and be equally prepared to scrutinize all of them with a critical eye. What we know is that a bond defeat means a one-year delay in the facilities plan as the next board revises the proposal for another try at passage. That one-year delay and the resulting uncertainty do have real costs and disadvantages, but so does passage of the proposal, which in my view significantly overcommits the district. How to weigh those costs and benefits is ultimately what the voters have to decide.

What if the bond proposal fails?

In January, the school board voted to move forward with putting a roughly $188 million bond proposal on the September ballot. The proposal would authorize bonding to fund six years of projects in the district’s facilities plan. Under state law, it will need 60% voter approval to pass.

What happens if the bond proposal fails? Our board chair has said that if the proposal fails, the facilities plan will come to a virtual “full stop,” with projects going forward only on a much, much slower basis. This is something of an exaggeration. It’s true that if the proposal fails, the district could not go forward as planned with the projects that are scheduled to occur after 2017-18. But the board would almost certainly come back to the voters at the first opportunity with a revised proposal. By law, the district would have to wait at least six months to put another bond proposal before the voters. Since the facilities projects are scheduled around academic years, even a six-month delay probably means a one-year delay for the remaining projects in the plan.

If the bond fails, it’s possible that the district could rely on SAVE tax revenues to fund projects in the plan. But that can happen only if the legislature extends the SAVE tax, and even then the district may have to get voter approval to use the SAVE revenues. (More on this in an upcoming post.) Moreover, if the voters reject the bond proposal, the next board may feel compelled to revise the long-term plan in light of that feedback.

In sum, if the bond fails, you can expect a one-year delay in the facilities plan as the board comes back to the public with a revised plan designed to win passage.

This is a community that values education and has often supported school bond proposals and levies in the past. My guess is that if the bond fails, it won’t be because of outright “No” votes, but because of people (like me) who want to see a better plan. When the board finally presents a compelling proposal, I don’t doubt that it will pass. I just wish the board had tried harder to come up with a sound and supportable initial proposal.

Update: North Corridor elementary boundary decision postponed

In January, when the school board voted to approve the bond proposal, it also decided that the new North Corridor elementary school would be built on a different site than originally planned. The new site is about two and a half miles northwest of the original site. (See this post.)

Because of the site change, the board will have to adjust the elementary boundaries that it adopted last May. At this week’s work session, we discussed whether the board should redraw those boundaries now or wait until after this September’s board election and bond vote. The board decided to postpone that decision until after the election.

Two neighborhoods are particularly likely to be affected. Under the current boundary plan, the neighborhoods nearest the new site are zoned to go to Penn, but some of them will almost certainly be rezoned to attend the new school. (One of the advantages of the site change is that the new site has many more kids within walking distance than the old one does.)

The other area that seems most likely to be affected is the “North Lincoln” neighborhood. That area, which currently goes to Lincoln, was supposed to attend the new elementary school. But most North Lincoln residents are four or five miles from the new site. If the neighborhoods around the new site are added to the new school’s attendance area, some neighborhoods will have to be subtracted, and the North Lincoln neighborhoods are the farthest away.

Other areas could also be affected. For example, because the new school’s site was relocated, the board shrunk the addition that was planned for Garner (which is relatively close to the new site). That may mean that Garner’s new boundaries will have to be adjusted. Until the board gets right down to working out the details, it’s hard to know exactly who will be affected.

The district still owns the land that it had originally designated to be the site of the new elementary (just south of the new high school). There is a lot of development under way in that area, so there is a lot of potential for enrollment growth there. In a document summarizing “future needs,” the administration included a second new North Corridor elementary school, which would go on that site. But the board chose not to include that elementary school in its bond proposal, which covers the facilities plan through 2023-24. So, under the plan being presented to the voters, a school on that location would not be considered until some time after 2023-24.

I supported this week’s decision to wait until after the 2017 election to redraw the North Corridor elementary boundaries. During the elementary boundary discussion last year, I argued that it made sense to wait until after the election and the bond vote to draw new boundaries, rather than draw them three and half years in advance without updated enrollment projections. I still feel the same way. If the bond passes, there will still be two years before the new elementary opens, so the board can settle boundaries well in advance of opening the school. If the bond fails, the board will have to come back to the public with a different bond proposal, which could mean changing boundaries yet again. It just makes sense to wait until we know more before settling boundaries.

At the time, we heard a lot of arguments about how irresponsible it would be to put the 2019 elementary boundary decision off until after the 2017 election—it was even compared to not confirming Judge Garland!—but the rest of the board now seems to have come around to the idea. I still think we did the public a disservice by announcing boundaries that we knew would probably have to change before they took effect. It was particularly wrong to announce to North Lincoln families that they would attend the new elementary school when two hour earlier, on the very same night, in closed session, the board had decided to pursue the option of relocating the school site. In a democracy, all decisions are subject to change, but there was no reason to raise expectations that far in advance with so many possible changes on the horizon.

School board agenda for February 28

Some of the topics on the board’s agenda for this week:

We’ll review a draft of the certified budget for fiscal year 2017-18. More information here.

At the work session, we’ll discuss a possible resolution to express support for students from undocumented and immigrant families, and we’ll review how the district currently handles immigration-related issues.

We’ll also continue to discuss the district’s bond proposal, and we’ll review the recent history of the district’s attempts to determine the capacity of its school buildings. (There is quite a set of charts here (link fixed).)

We’ll also discuss the possibility of changing the elementary attendance zones in the North Corridor area, which will be necessary if the board chooses to build the new North Corridor elementary school in a different location that originally planned. (See this post.)

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

Board agenda for February 14

My very quick summary of topics on tonight’s board agenda: A legislative update; a report on post-secondary readiness (see also this post); a quarterly financial report; and an update from the Integrated Pest Management task force. At the work session, we’ll talk more about the bond proposal; we’ll hear about the district’s planned 1:1 computer policy; we’ll discuss the district’s policies about student use of cell phones. We'll also consider a resolution supporting the existing collective bargaining laws. And more! Full agendas here, here, and here.

Update on the bond proposal

The board tonight voted 5-2 to ask the voters for roughly $188 million in borrowing to fund its facilities plan through 2023. It also approved some changes to the plan. The list of projects is in the bottom (greenish) portion of the fourth column of this chart. I voted against the proposal, for the reasons I discussed here. Board member Phil Hemingway also voted against the proposal.

I’ll be posting more about the bond issue as time goes on. The one striking feature of tonight’s discussion was that the board’s proposal was based on a substantially revised set of building capacity numbers. From the time the district adopted the facilities plan in 2013 until this evening, the plan had been based on capacity numbers calculated by a consultant, BLDD, which were supposed to have been the result of careful measurements of all aspects of the buildings, rather than simply multiplying the number of rooms by a number of kids (as the district had done in the past). Tonight, we were presented with a new, very different set of building capacity numbers, also supposed to have been calculated on the basis of careful measurements and on the buildings’ intended use.

I agree that the BLDD numbers were flawed. But this new set of numbers—the final version of which we received less than twenty-four hours before tonight’s meeting—has not been vetted sufficiently to make it the basis of a $188 million dollar proposal. For one thing, we received unclear answers about whether the new numbers reflect our anticipated ability to staff the classrooms, whether they reflect the weighted resource allocation model, and whether they reflect a building’s current use. And the numbers themselves raise questions:

• Under the plan as it existed until tonight, the district told the public that Alexander Elementary had a capacity of 500. In fact, as soon as the enrollment rose into the 400s, the school added two temporaries and converted three non-classroom spaces into classrooms. So the new numbers will recognize that the old numbers seriously overstated Alexander’s capacity, right? But actually they say that the addition of four classrooms will result in a 575-student capacity.

• Under the plan as it existed until tonight, the district had been telling people for years that Garner Elementary had a capacity of 445 and needed a 175-seat addition to bring its capacity up to 620. The new plan deletes the seven-classroom addition and simply adds a music room and an art room—yet Garner’s “new” capacity will be 633.

• Under the plan as it existed until tonight, the district told the public that South East Junior High could hold 764 students, and that it needed an addition so it could hold 854. Under the new plan, South East still gets two new classrooms, but its “new” capacity will be 750—lower than we told people it was before any addition. Now the district can justify the addition that was already in the plan before this justification was created.

• Under the plan as it existed until tonight, the district told the public that Wickham Elementary’s capacity was 428. Under the new plan, Wickham gets a new art room and a new music room—and its “new” capacity will be 575.

• Under the plan as it existed until tonight, the district told the public that Kirkwood Elementary’s capacity was 306, and that it needed six new classrooms so it could hold 456 students. Under the new plan, Kirkwood receives only two new classrooms, plus an art room and a music room. Yet its “new” capacity is 468—even higher than we said it would be with six new classrooms.

• Under the new capacity calculations, planned elementary capacity in the North Corridor exceeds projected enrollment by almost 400 seats—a bad sign for convincing voters that we need to spend $19 million to build a new elementary school there. I think the new elementary school is necessary—but if we ignore our capacity numbers and enrollment projections whenever we think we know better, why should voters trust them at all?

• District-wide, under the new capacity calculations, the planned elementary capacity exceeds projected enrollment by over 1600 students. But don’t worry, the administration would never propose more school closings.

Maybe the district finally has the capacity numbers right this time. But I came out of tonight’s discussion even more convinced that it’s a mistake to rely on our capacity numbers and enrollment projections to commit to additions (as opposed to renovations) too far in advance of seeing whether we actually need them.