Some things you should know about Karen Woltman

At some point I’ll try to write more about the candidate field in the school board election. But before early voting gets any further, I want people to know some things about Karen Woltman that they may not be aware of.

I am very pleased that Karen is running for the board. Karen first came to my attention through her blog, Education in Iowa, which she’s been writing since 2010. It has been an excellent resource for information and intelligent commentary on education policy issues, and in particular on education-related Iowa legislation. Her extensive writing on educational issues will give you a great sense of who she is; her campaign website identifies several posts in particular that are relevant to school board membership. She has consistently maintained a thoughtful, conscientious, and well-documented commentary on state and local education issues. Moreover, she demonstrates that it’s possible to advocate and to be persistent while also maintaining a measured, reasonable discourse—always focusing on issues and reasoned arguments, not personalities.

Karen also played a remarkable role in one particular educational issue. Karen was a member of the State Assessment Task Force in 2014-15. When the task force recommended that the state require all school districts to use the very expensive and time-consuming Smarter Balanced Assessments, Karen was the sole dissenter. She was concerned about whether the cost of the tests would reduce funding for educational programming, asking whether the tests would cause cuts to music, art, and world languages of the kind we’ve already seen here in our district. She also asked hard questions about whether Iowa school districts had the tech readiness to implement the tests—noting that several states had experienced serious problems with implementation.

Karen’s willingness to dissent from the committee’s otherwise unanimous recommendation is a great indicator of her independence and ability to resist institutional pressure and groupthink. Moreover, her dissent was persuasive enough that it helped derail the state’s movement toward adopting the Smarter Balanced tests. The legislature did not accept the committee’s recommendation, and it looks increasingly likely that the state will end up adopting a less expensive testing regimen instead. The word “single-handedly” is probably never appropriate in politics, but in my view Karen’s dissent was quite possibly the single most influential factor in changing the course of those events.

Karen’s not against standardized testing; in fact, she’s very concerned about addressing the district’s achievement gaps in reading, math, and science proficiency. But she knows that everything has a cost and that the usefulness of any testing has to be weighed against what’s being sacrificed to pay for it—and that ultimately teaching has to have primacy over testing. (Her involvement on this issue makes an interesting counterpoint to the candidacy of Janet Godwin, who is the chief operating officer of ACT.)

In her school board campaign, Karen is arguing for prioritizing issues of curriculum, instruction, and school climate. “Facilities are important, but whether our children are learning, and whether they feel safe and supported at school, is more important than the size of their gymnasiums,” she writes. “Our children need a school board that can work on improving facilities and, at the same time, work on improving the programs that take place in those facilities.” You can read more about her priorities and positions here and here.

Karen is not as widely known as some candidates, and lately some have taken advantage of that fact to try to portray her negatively and in my view unfairly. This has taken the oh-so-progressive form of defining her an as extension of her husband. (Karen is a lifelong active Democrat married to a Republican.) People have also criticized her choice to home-school her younger children through the district’s home-school assistance program. (Her oldest child is a student at North Central Junior High.) In fact, Karen’s decision to home-school her younger children is driven by her longstanding interest in educational practice and not by any extremism, parochialism, or desire to withdraw from society. She has been more active in public education than most of us, to its benefit. Again, if you want an accurate understanding of who she is, all you have to do is look at her seven years of public writing about education issues.

Karen also has a law degree and if elected would be the only board member with that background. I believe it is a very useful qualification and one that has served me well on the board.

Please elect this sensible, smart, capable person. If you’re interested, you can help Karen become better known by hosting a yard sign; contact her campaign at KLWoltman@gmail.com.

School board candidate questionnaire responses

In my view, one of the best local developments in recent years has been the proliferation of candidate questionnaires leading up to elections. (I say that even though, as a candidate, responding to them all was a pretty grueling task.) The most comprehensive questionnaire has been that of the North Corridor Parents group. That group has now posted the questionnaire responses of all seven school board candidates in the upcoming September 12 election. You can read them here.

One of the candidates, Karen Woltman, will be posting links to other questionnaire responses on her blog here, where she has collected many other links to information about the election.

Is the district honest about community input?

“Keep it simple” because “the details get complicated.” In its bond presentation, the district presents that idea as summing up the feedback that we received at our community listening posts on the facilities plan and the bond. In fact, listen to the recordings: the district cherry-picked one person’s comment and presented it as the summary of feedback at three listening posts.

According to bond proponents (example here), those same listening posts showed “unified support” for putting seven years’ worth of projects into the bond proposal, resulting in the very high $191 million price tag. But take a look at the minutes of those listening posts (here, here, and here). Listen to the recordings. Is that assertion even remotely true? In fact, at two of the three listening posts, the tables weren’t even surveyed about how much of the plan should go into the bond. And to the extent there was discussion of the issue, the feedback was mixed, as even the minutes show. Or listen, for example, to what this man had to say. Somehow that wasn’t the comment cherry-picked for the PowerPoint slide. Unified support?

“Stick to the plan”? “We have a great plan”? “Just do it”? Read the minutes.

The district appears unable to resist the temptation to promote its desired conclusions by distorting the public input it receives. In 2013, for example, the district held community workshops on the development of the facilities master plan. At the final workshop—attended by hundreds of people—seventy-four percent of attendees supported plans that did not close Hoover Elementary School. (See also charts here and here.) Yet when the facilities committee presented its proposal to the school board, it stated that closing Hoover was a “common theme” of the feedback it received.

Proponents of the bond have repeatedly argued that the plan is the result of input from countless members of the public. But it’s easy to assert that the community input supports your point of view; after all, who’s going to go to the trouble of verifying the assertion? Given the examples above, though, I recommend you start asking for evidence.

Inflation and “keep it simple”

One of the themes we’ve heard from the district in its presentation of materials on the bond is “keep it simple,” because “the details get complicated.” (That particular slide attributes this sentiment to the listening posts we held earlier this year, but I attended all of those listening posts, and the only person who I remember saying “keep it simple” was the school board chair.) The “keep it simple” spirit is reflected in the district’s discussion of the issue of inflation. The district’s bond FAQ says:

To delay the remaining projects in the Facilities Master Plan will be expensive.
- Construction inflation is running at 3-5%. A one-year delay would increase the total plan costs as much as $5.6M - $9.4M dollars!
- Borrowing interest rates continue to rise. A one-half percent increase in the interest rate will increase borrowing costs in excess of $11M dollars.

To get the inflation “cost,” the district has apparently just multiplied the bottom line total ($191.5 million) by possible inflation rates. Is this an accurate way to discuss the cost of inflation?

No, because inflation affects both revenues and expenditures. That’s why we don’t all sit around kicking ourselves for not having bought all our possessions in 1971—I mean, look at how much cheaper everything was!  But of course, our paychecks were much smaller, too.

The district emphasizes the risk of inflation on the expenditure side, but conveniently ignores it on the revenue side. In that same FAQ, the district asserts that the effect of the bond on the tax rate “could decrease over time as the property tax base in the District continues to grow.” At our work sessions, it was emphasized that we should feel reassured about the tax rate because our tax base will grow at a rate of 4 or 5% annually. But not all of the growth in that number is attributable to growth in the amount of taxable property; some portion of it is simply inflation at work over time.

It’s a bit disingenuous to tell residents, “Don’t worry, the tax rate won’t be as high as it looks,” without adding, “Of course, that’s partly because your home’s assessment will go up.” It’s even more disingenuous to do that while simultaneously warning them about the effect of inflation on project costs.

And will interest rates rise? I don’t pretend to know, but I know that since 2008 many dire predictions about inflation and increasing interest rates have not been borne out (though they have often served people’s political purposes). For a counterpoint on interest rates, see here, here, and here.

Will local construction inflation outpace inflation in home values to an extent that will cost us money? Will inflation be offset by possible cost savings of scaling back projects that may not be necessary? The details get complicated! Does the district’s presentation of these issues show sufficient respect for the complexity of the issue and for the voters’ intelligence? Judge for yourself.

A few quick thoughts on the Horace Mann design

(Click to enlarge)

At tonight’s meeting, the board will consider an initial schematic design proposal for the renovation of Horace Mann Elementary. I was a little surprised to see the proposal, which you can view more fully here. In the proposal, the addition to Mann is 17,440 square feet—much larger than the roughly 10,000 square-foot addition we had talked about earlier this year when we solicited public input. As a result, its placement on the site and its effect on outdoor playground space and traffic flow seems very different from what I would have expected, given my perception of the public feedback we received. Our administrators may have good explanations for these differences tonight, but I’m inclined to think we need to hear more from the public on this design before approving it. Readers—what are your initial thoughts?

School board agenda for August 22

Relatively light agenda this week. Two notable items: A special education update and a design proposal for the renovation of Horace Mann Elementary. The full agenda is here; feel free to chime in with a comment about anything that catches your attention.

School board agenda for August 15

Last week’s meeting was delayed because too many board members were out of town. Here are some of the items on this week’s agenda:

We’ll hear a report about the annual staff climate survey. More information here. (Editorial comment: Does this look like an objective report to you, or like an advertisement?)

We’ll hear a report about lead testing in the district’s school. More information here.

We’ll hear the quarterly financial report.

We’ll once again consider a proposal to create two new classrooms in the existing Penn Elementary School building. I voted against this proposal at our last board meeting, for the reasons I described in a comment on this post. It’s not yet clear to me whether the administration is still proposing to change the listed capacity of Penn if this proposal is adopted.

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

The future of Hills Elementary (continued)

What should people make of the board’s omission of Hills Elementary from the bond proposal? A look back at the process can shed some light on that.

At our October work session, our facilities director told the board:

If we’re going to finish Hills, let’s finish Hills, okay? I mean, it’s an unfinished building. The board made that conscious decision in 2013, in December of 2013, to just do the mandatory code updates, and that’s what we’ve done, but they’re in need of more classrooms, we just set two temporaries, or actually two, two duplexes, there’s four temporary classrooms there, their gym is totally inadequate, there are a lot of things that need to be done at Hills, so I put it on there for discussion. If we’re going to do it, it’s going to take three million to finish it and do it right.

So the materials presented for discussion that night showed a $3.2 million Hills project scheduled for completion in 2022. It included a new gym and four new classrooms.

At the same time, the facilities director presented a similar choice to the board about TREC (the former Roosevelt Elementary):

If we’re going to keep that building, which may be another decision for another day, this needs to be moved up [to 2020-21 in the timeline], so that at that point, we’re air-conditioned a hundred percent.

By January, though, the picture had changed, for both Hills and TREC. By the time the board settled on a bond proposal, it had decided to put neither facility into the seven-year bond-funded period. In the case of TREC, the explicit administration recommendation was to start looking for new homes for the programs there in anticipation of closing the building.

In both cases, the administration told us: If we’re going to do these, let’s do them. In response, the board took both facilities out of the bond-funded seven-year period and put them on the unfunded “future needs” list. Are Hills residents unreasonable to be concerned about the future of their school?

School board agenda for July 25

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

We’ll discuss and possibly approve the district’s legislative priorities for the next legislative session. Proposal here.

We’ll hear a report about the district’s efforts to teach students about safe and responsible use of social media. Information here.

We’ll hear a report about reading assessment results. The district has been implementing a weighted resource allocation model to shift resources (including classroom teachers) toward schools with larger numbers of students from low-income households, students receiving special education services, and students who are English-language learners. This report will focus in particular on reading assessment results at those schools. Information here.

We’ll hear a report about school climate disparities when it comes to student gender identity and sexual orientation. Information here.

We’ll hear a transportation update, including an update on activities buses at the secondary level and a comparison of busing costs in the 2015-16, 2016-17, and 2017-18 school years. Information here.

We’ll hear an update on the progress at Hoover East and on its use by Longfellow students this coming year (while Longfellow is being renovated). Information here.

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

UPDATE: The administration came to us at the July 25 meeting asking to hire a contractor to create more rooms out of common space at Penn Elementary to make up for the loss of temporaries (which were relocated elsewhere). We were told that this change would permanently raise Penn’s capacity rating of the building to 683. This was the only option we were presented. It represented a change to the building’s capacity rating under the Facilities Master Plan that would have a lasting effect on how many students the district will expect that building to hold, and it came to us in the form of a consent calendar item just four weeks before school was to start.

Earlier this year, the administration had already revised the Penn building capacity up from 587 to 633, based not an any additional space but just on a reassessment of the building. But the building is still using the same cafeteria it was using when the building capacity was 387. Eight classrooms (200 seats) have been added since, and this project would have added 50 more. I don’t have confidence that that building can comfortably hold 683 students, even with more classrooms added. Moreover, I don’t believe the board should approve a permanent change to a building’s capacity under the Facilities Master Plan without receiving any input from the families at the affected school. I felt that the proposal at the very least should have been brought to the board much sooner, so the affected families could have a chance to comment on it.

I fully understand that the elementary schools in the North Corridor need more capacity—one of the reasons I’m against the bond is because it limits the district’s ability to respond to the expected growth in that area. But new capacity shouldn’t be achieved simply by carving more classrooms out of a building that is already too large for its common spaces. I saw the project as creating a long-term problem to address a short-term problem, so I voted against the contract proposal. The proposal failed by a vote of 3-3.

Three weeks later, the administration brought back the same contract proposal. I moved to adopt the proposal on the condition that the district would not change Penn’s listed capacity number without further board approval. The motion passed 5-1.

The future of Hills Elementary

One of the primary themes of the district’s bond proposal is “facilities equity”—the idea that your school facility shouldn’t be so different from those elsewhere in the district that it impacts your child’s educational experience. At the elementary level, this has included the idea that every school ought to have a separate gym and cafeteria, which not all currently do. Because of this emphasis on equity, by the time the bond-funded projects are completed, every elementary school in the district will have a separate gym and cafeteria.

Except one: Hills Elementary. Hills, which has one room that serves both purposes, and which will have eight temporary rooms this year, was conspicuously left out of the bond proposal. Instead, the board majority put Hills on a separate list of “future needs” that are not included in the bond proposal. That list includes an item for adding a gymnasium and art and music rooms to Hills at an estimated cost of $2.5 million.

Our administration has told us that there are only so many projects that the district can run at any given time; that’s why the facilities projects are spread out over years rather than all done simultaneously. So if a project is not included in the bond, which covers all the projects in the facilities plan through 2023-24, there is no reason to think that it can be added to the plan until after 2023-24, even if the funding materializes. And, of course, anything that is not included in the bond proposal could not happen without its own funding source (such as a possible second bond proposal in the future).

Actually, there are two elementary schools in the district that will not have a separate gymnasium and cafeteria by the time the bond-funded projects are completed: Hills Elementary and Hoover Elementary (which, of course, the district is planning to close and tear down). The “future needs” list, where the Hills project now appears, is also where the board put the renovations to TREC (the former Roosevelt Elementary), after the superintendent told us that he’d prefer to close the TREC building and thus hopes to be able to cancel those renovations altogether.

Hoover and Roosevelt are not the company that Hills wants to be in. The Hills community has good reason to worry about the district’s commitment to that school—especially since the district has floated multiple proposals to close Hills in recent years.

Continued here.

Mixed messages, part 11

(Part 10 is here.)

I think the district’s inconsistent statements about the effect of bond passage are at least partly responsible for the fact that members of the public seem to hold different understandings of the issue. For example, when I tweeted the article about the Minnesota school district that closed schools after telling voters it would renovate them, I quickly heard from one bond supporter who told me that “In Iowa the bond language is a legal document that cannot be altered after the fact by any admin or board,” and from another who told me that “It was clearly [our] board’s intent to have flexibility.”

Moreover, even if voters discount the district’s more enthusiastic statements (“A GO bond locks in the plan!”), they still do not have clear statements of the district’s position on several important questions, such as:

• After the bond passes, can the district completely drop a project from the list of projects in the ballot language?

• The governing statute says that if the voters pass the proposal, the district “shall issue” the bonds. Does that mean that if the bond passes, the district is legally required to issue bonds in the stated total amount ($191 million), even if it might have some freedom to reallocate the money among the listed projects?

• Does it mean that the district would have to issue the full amount of bonds, even if the legislature extends the SAVE sales tax before we need the money? (The current SAVE statute allows districts to pay off bonds with the sales tax revenue, but there could be significant transactions costs if we’re required to issue all the bonds first.)

Even if the district’s answer were “we don’t know, because the law is unclear,” that in itself would be informative. Readers: Maybe one of you will have more success in getting publicly shareable responses to those questions than I have. (I don’t feel free, as an individual board member, to share information that has come to the board in the form of advice from the district’s counsel.)

Finally: What is the cumulative effect of the district’s statements on this issue over the last nine months? Is the district being sufficiently candid? Is it being sufficiently careful about the public expectations that it’s generating? Do its statements, collectively, make you more confident that the district will treat the public respectfully as it moves forward after bond passage? Do they make you more willing to entrust the district with $191 million?

Mixed messages, part 10

(Part 9 is here.)

It may well be true that the broad, general ballot language gives the district great legal leeway to alter the planned projects after the bond passes. That may even be for the best (though it would be less necessary if the bond plan didn’t extend out so many years). But if that’s the district’s position, shouldn’t it be trying hard not to raise any expectations to the contrary?

But the district is not only including inconsistent messages about the issue in its bond information, it is widely disseminating detailed descriptions of the projects that are planned for each school (example here)—none of which say anything about being subject to change or about how little they are reflected in the ballot language. Here, for example, is how the descriptions are introduced:

On September 12, 2017, voters in the Iowa City Community School District will consider an estimated $192 million bond package. The bond will fund the second half of the approved 10-year Facilities Master Plan (FMP), which impacts every school in the District and every area of the community. Below you will find detailed information on the impact of the FMP on each building within our District. Each school’s project sheet also includes FMP project information on their associated feeder schools.

The descriptions explicitly link the projects to bond funding:

If people are enticed into voting for the bond by these detailed project descriptions, how easy will it be politically to change course later on, if the projects turn out to be unnecessary? Will it be enough to point out the disclaimers that appeared in some parts of the FAQ? By sacrificing candor now to generate support, isn’t the district needlessly laying the groundwork for future conflict?

A more frank presentation of the district’s stance, though, would invite a discussion about whether voters should trust the district to implement the plan in a way that makes sense and is based on real needs.

Continued in part 11.

Mixed messages, part 9

As I mentioned in the last post, the district’s current bond FAQ continues to send mixed messages about the effect of bond passage. In one place, it states:

Q: What if the bond passes and the board changes its mind on what projects need to be completed?

A: There is no clear answer to this question. As a general rule, ballot propositions should be drafted as precisely as possible; at the same time, the Iowa Courts recognize that their phrasing encompasses some measure of board discretion and leeway and that inaccuracies in drafting do not always involve material matters. The particular language of the ballot and facts and circumstances at the time will be important considerations for the board.

The bond referendum provides voter approval to the District to sell bonds for many projects in accordance with the Facilities Master Plan. Operationally, the District will sell the actual bonds as approved by the referendum to fund the projects in increments with various legal requirements. These incremental sales will list specific projects for which the funds from that sale must be used for only those projects specifically within a 24-month period.

The bond language makes it clear that the purpose of the bond is to fund the remaining projects on the Board-approved Facilities Master Plan. The 10-year Facilities Master Plan is based on projected population growth provided by professional demographers. The Board will continue to receive updated biennial population growth projections. If necessary, based on those projections, the Board can adjust the size and scope of particular projects.

Saying that the board can “adjust the size and scope” of projects is different from saying that it can cut a project entirely, which is what we were told in our work sessions. And elsewhere, the FAQ still contains these statements:

Q: What happens if the bond passes?

A: We continue to transform the learning environment delivering a 21st Century classroom for our students and our staff. Air conditioning, renovations, and capacity increases to accommodate student growth continue as planned by the FMP.

. . .

Q: Will more schools close if the bond is approved?

A: No. If the bond passes, the District can fully fund the Facilities Master Plan that allocates millions of dollars to renovate schools that are otherwise vulnerable to closure. With the exception of Hoover Elementary School, the Facilities Master Plan commits to keeping all schools open.

(Emphasis added.)

Although the specific wording in the district’s materials has changed over time, the pattern has repeated itself: Cautious legalistic disclaimers in one place, enthusiastic doubt-free assertions in another. What to make of it all?

Continued in part 10.

Mixed messages, part 8: School closures

In my last post, I wrote about the mixed messages the public received from the district about whether passage of the bond would “lock in” the plan. The district also sent—and continues to send—that kind of mixed message on the particular issue of school closures. In April, the district’s materials stated:

Q: Will more schools close if the bond is approved?

A: No. It is the total opposite. A GO bond locks in the plan! Investing millions of dollars in your school is a good reason to keep it open.

Yet, at the April meeting where the board approved the ballot language, the following exchange occurred:

Director Liebig: We also had a community commenter who said that passage of the bond would be “a guarantee of no more school closures.” Is it a guarantee of no more school closures?

Superintendent Murley: This is—from that standpoint, that’s a board action, so, no, it’s not a guarantee of anything in the future from a school closure standpoint.

The superintendent’s statement is plainly correct, regardless of the legal effect of the ballot language, since some schools (e.g., Hills Elementary) are not in the ballot language at all. Yet even today, the district’s bond FAQ contains the following:

Q: Will more schools close if the bond is approved?

A: No. If the bond passes, the District can fully fund the Facilities Master Plan that allocates millions of dollars to renovate schools that are otherwise vulnerable to closure. With the exception of Hoover Elementary School, the Facilities Master Plan commits to keeping all schools open. Hoover ES is the exception based on its location in proximity to City High School. The Facilities Master Planning Steering Committee determined that the additions needed at City HS required the acquisition of additional property.

The district thus states as a fact that no more schools will close if the bond passes—contradicting the superintendent’s own statement—and that the facilities plan “commits” to keeping all schools open. This is one more example of the district’s inability to give a consistent answer to questions about the effect of bond passage.

Continued in part 9.