School board agenda for March 8

Some of the items on the agenda for Tuesday’s board meeting:

The board is about to order an updated enrollment report, which will give us enrollment projections for (I’m assuming) the next ten years. This week, we’ll discuss what information we’d like that report to include. Info here.

We’ll discuss the board’s decision to bring back the seventh-grade football program that the district cut two years ago during that year’s wave of budget cuts. This issue came up at the board’s Education Committee meeting last month, and there was a consensus for allowing the program to be brought back. But afterward enough questions were raised that I asked to have the topic put on the agenda for further discussion. (See this post.)

The board will discuss our annual evaluation of the superintendent. By law, because it involves a personnel evaluation, this part of our meeting has to occur in a closed session (not open to the public).

At its work session after the regular meeting, we will also be continuing to discuss redrawing attendance zones in preparation for the opening of Liberty High in 2017 and Grant and Hoover East Elementaries in 2019. One topic will be what kind of additional maps and data the board would like to see as it goes into that process. Info here.

One thing I’d like to see is a map that would show what the elementary attendance zones would look like if we sent every child to his or her closest school. We can’t do that, of course, and might not choose to do it even if we could. But I think that map would help us explain to people why we can’t always do that. For example, it would show very clearly when the number of people who live closest to a particular school exceeds the capacity of that school building. In those cases where we have to send people to a school that isn’t the one closest to home, it would help to be able to have a clear explanation of why it had to happen. (See this post.)

Also goats. Goats are on the agenda.

All that and more. The full agenda is here. Feel free to leave a comment below about anything that catches your attention.

Apology

This is not a major issue, but I’m upset with myself about it, and I just want to admit that I don’t think I handled it well. At last night’s Education Committee meeting, the school board heard a proposal to bring back the funding for seventh-grade football. Seventh-grade tackle football was one of the things the district cut two years ago when it had to cut $3.6 million from its annual budget. The cut saved the district $30,000, a relatively small amount in the scheme of things. Other cuts included fourth-grade orchestra ($444,000), junior high foreign languages ($239,000), and high school German ($124,000), among many other things.

At the meeting, we heard a brief presentation of the proposal. Given the dollar amount, a formal board vote wasn’t requested (which couldn’t have occurred at a committee meeting anyway). But it’s a sufficiently sensitive topic that the administration (understandably) didn’t want to act without getting a reaction from the board first. We talked about it and there seemed to be a consensus that it wasn’t objectionable and that the superintendent could go ahead with it.

As soon as the meeting was over, I regretted not speaking up to slow the process down. Even though the issue didn’t actually require a vote, once we signaled support for the idea, we owned it. I wasn’t ready to, and I should have said something.

The proposal might well be a worthy one. I’d like to bring back all the things the district cut. But I don’t like the idea of addressing one of them in isolation from the others (and from other possible uses of scarce general fund money) just because that one happened to work its way onto our agenda. Just a few weeks ago we made a major cut to discretionary busing for many neighborhoods that had grown to rely on it. The dollar amounts are not comparable, but if we’re cutting services, we need to be sensitive to how we’re making decisions about competing items, no matter how minor. I should have suggested that we sleep on it, solicit additional viewpoints, and revisit it at a board meeting where there could be community comment. We may well have reached the same decision in the end, but the process matters.

Not blaming anyone but myself here. So many things come at us on these agendas that being on the board sometimes feels like being the goalie in some crazy video game. I just need to do a better job of recognizing when something is rushing past that ought to be explored more fully before we act on it.