[I am retired from the blogging business. But I sent a letter to the school board today, and I’m posting it here in case that makes it more easily shareable.]
Dear Board Members,
I write to ask you to reconsider the proposal for closing Hills Elementary School.
Judging from the news reports, the Board seems inclined to argue that the sustainability of Hills as a community is not the district’s concern, and that the district must focus solely on the costs to the school system of keeping the school open.
But that has never been—and still isn’t—the district’s approach when it comes to the sustainability of the district’s other, non-rural communities. The $191 million bond plan that the district presented to the voters in 2017 was explicitly driven by such concerns, especially about maintaining the desirability and development of Iowa City’s east side. Those concerns drove not only the bond plan but also the redrawing of secondary attendance zones.
Promotion of Iowa City is still driving the district’s policy choices. If the board really believed that cost concerns should drive its decisions, it would not stop at closing Hills. The Hills closure will barely make a dent in the number of empty seats in the district’s elementary schools. The district has created a situation where it will have hundreds—or even thousands—more elementary seats than it has students. Many of those empty seats are in Iowa City’s elementaries. The logic supposedly driving the Hills closure would apply equally to reducing the number of elementary schools in Iowa City to achieve the same kind of cost savings.
Again, the district itself created this situation, through its poor and cavalier management of public resources. When I was on the board from 2015 to 2017, the board majority consciously chose to ignore the ten-year enrollment projections that it paid for, and instead proposed elementary school additions for 1,370 more students than we had any reason to believe would materialize.
To make matters worse, after the voters passed the bond and soon after those additions were built, a later board voted to take all the sixth graders out of the elementaries and put them in the junior highs instead—thus creating hundreds more empty elementary seats. The board made that decision with almost no public input, and despite the fact that, when it created the bond proposal in 2017, the previous board considered and rejected the idea of moving the sixth graders to the junior highs because it was unpopular with the public.
Yes, if you build far more elementary capacity than you have any reason to believe you need, and then you take all the sixth-graders out of those schools and move them to the junior highs, it’s only a matter of time before someone can say, “We have too many elementary schools. Why run twenty-one elementary schools when all the kids will fit into just sixteen or seventeen?” (Meanwhile, I expect the district will propose costly additions to the junior highs to accommodate all those sixth graders.)
The board’s plan to place preschools in each elementary school doesn’t solve this problem. First, there is only limited demand for half-day preschool. But more importantly, if the board really believes that keeping too many schools open drains resources from the K-12 program, it can’t justify a preschool plan that does the same thing.
So the board’s actions show that it doesn’t really believe that keeping schools open costs too much money. In fact, the savings from closing Hills is small—basically a few FTEs and some utility bills. If the board can accept that cost to keep Iowa City elementaries open, there is no reason it can’t do the same for Hills—which will be devastated by the closure of its only elementary school.
(The district’s statement that the closure will save $1.66 million in general funds appears to be a wild exaggeration not even supported by the district’s own math. Even if, as the administration contends, the per-pupil cost of running Hills is $2000 higher than at other schools, and there are 126 students there, that’s $252,000. Where does the other $1.4 million come from?)
The district’s cost assessment itself seems penny-wise and pound-foolish. If Hills Elementary is closed, Hills could ask the legislature to remove it from the ICCSD and annex it to Highland or Lone Tree instead. Given this legislature’s antipathy toward Iowa City, such a proposal would stand a reasonable chance of success. Right now, each Hills student brings per-pupil funding into the district for thirteen years. Is it worth losing that funding to achieve the small savings that would come from closing an elementary school?
Finally: Closing a school is a big deal. It should be publicly debated during a board election, not proposed right after one. We just had a school board election a few months ago. Did any of the candidates advocate for closing Hills?
Thank you for your consideration and for your service on the board.
