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.

Listening posts are for listening

I enjoyed last night’s school board listening post on the facilities master plan at Kirkwood Elementary School. About twenty people (and several district staff members) came out on a cold winter night to exchange views and ideas about the district’s building plans. (It was almost caucus-esque!) Two more listening posts are scheduled next week.

One thing I wish had been different, though: A listening post on the facilities master plan should not be preceded by a twenty-minute commercial for the facilities master plan. I understand that it’s helpful to present some information at the outset so people can have well-informed discussions, but it should not be presented in a way designed to influence the opinions we’ll hear from the participants.

The hard question facing the board is just what it takes to create a bond proposal that has a reasonable chance of attaining 60% approval at the polls. I was very curious to hear people’s opinions on that question last night. Of course, people who attend the listening posts may be particularly likely to favor the bond, but even those who most strongly favor the bond have to think objectively about how to maximize its chances of passage. If they voice their opinions only after sitting through a lengthy pro-bond argument, without hearing any of the likely counterarguments, they’re going to be in less of a position to realistically assess the prospects of different proposals.

Similarly, the group activities should not involve leading questions. (“Please share a short story of how the facilities project(s) have impacted your students.”)

I’ve written before about how our district sometimes seems incapable of soliciting public input without trying to manipulate it. Why walk right into that criticism?

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.

School board agenda for March 22

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

The administration is asking the board to approve three high-level administrative hires: Diane Schumacher as Director of Curriculum/Instruction/Assessment, Adam Kurth as Director of Technology/Innovation, and Scott Kibby as principal of Liberty High. News coverage here. Agenda item here.

I asked that we put our community comment policy on the agenda. The current policy allows up to one hour of community comment at the beginning of each board meeting, with each speaker allowed to speak for up to four minutes; after an hour, any further speakers are put off until the end of the meeting, which might be hours later. By that time, the board may already have acted on the topic the speakers came to address. I know we can’t allow an infinite number of speakers, but I’d rather hear from more people at the beginning of the meeting. I raised the issue now because as we go into the redistricting process, we could see an increase in the number of speakers.

We’ll also be asked to approve the 2017 Operations Life Cycle budget. This budget allocates money from the Physical Plant and Equipment Levy (PPEL) and the Secure an Advanced Vision for Education (SAVE) fund. Both PPEL and SAVE funds can be used to maintain, repair, and upgrade physical facilities and grounds. Those funds cannot be spent on operational expenses such as teacher salaries. More info here.

After the board meeting, we’ll have a work session to continue our discussion about redistricting. Info here. There are not yet any scenarios on the table; so far, we’ve still been asking for information about “building blocks”—that is, how many students live in particular areas.

All that and more. The full agendas are here and here. Please chime in on anything that catches your attention.

March 1 special board meeting on redistricting

This Tuesday, March 1, the school board will hold a special meeting to hear public comment on the redistricting of attendance zones.

The board has to draw new elementary school boundaries because it plans to open two new elementary schools in 2019—Grant Elementary in the North Corridor and Hoover East Elementary on the far east side of Iowa City. This redistricting may also give the board an opportunity to address some of the overcrowding that is projected to occur under our current boundaries. (By “overcrowding,” I mean situations where projected enrollment will exceed a school’s capacity.)

The elementary redistricting will also affect secondary school assignments. The previous board settled on a secondary feeder plan under which certain elementary schools would feed into certain junior highs, which would then feed into certain high schools. Some of the current board members appear to be interested in reconsidering that feeder plan as part of this redistricting process. But even if the plan stays in place, some people’s secondary destinations will change if they are rezoned into different elementary schools than they currently attend. For example, it’s possible that some families currently in the Wickham attendance area will be rezoned into the new Grant attendance area, which would change their junior high and high school destinations.

The new elementary school zones will take effect in 2019, when Grant and Hoover East open. But the secondary feeder plan, based on those redrawn elementary zones, will take effect in 2017, when Liberty High opens. (See this post.)

At the meeting on Tuesday, members of the public are invited to address the board about their redistricting preferences. We’re expecting that some of the speakers will be speaking on behalf of their neighborhoods, having submitted a neighborhood input form. The board members will have an opportunity to ask questions of the speakers to make sure we understand the input.

More information here.

Community input on redistricting

The school board is beginning the process of drawing new elementary attendance zones in anticipation of opening two new elementary schools in 2019. We’re drawing them now because, even though those elementaries won’t open until 2019, they could affect the attendance zones for junior high students as of 2017 or even as of next year.

The board has invited public input on attendance zones. You can provide your thoughts via email to board@iowacityschools.org, or by attending our public hearing on the issue on March 1 at 6:00 p.m. at the Educational Services Center, or by speaking at public comment before one of our board meetings. The board won’t be able to accommodate everyone’s preferences, but they are certainly a factor we should take into account.

The board also posted a “neighborhood input” form, which you can use, if you’d like, to aggregate the comments of people in your neighborhood (however you choose to define your neighborhood). I’m not crazy about the form, because it seems to require a degree of organization and agreement that I think many people would not have the energy for, and I worry that it could function as a barrier to participation. But it’s just one way to provide input; you can always use a simple email if you’d rather.

Some in the Hoover neighborhood have wondered how they should provide input. The board’s current plan is to draw districts that would eliminate the Hoover attendance zone, since the current plan is to close the school in 2019. Hoover area residents want to have input into the rezoning process, but many of them do not want to be perceived as approving of the closure itself. How should they express their input?

I don’t think Hoover area residents should pass up the opportunity to provide input into the districting process. The board is well aware that many people (there and elsewhere) oppose the closure. Feel free to tell the board that “Old” Hoover is your first preference, but then go ahead and identify your second and third (and even fourth) preferences. You can do that with a simple email or by using the neighborhood input form.

This public input process is not intended to measure support for the closure, but just to enable the board to draw up a zoning plan. The fact is: we don’t know whether Hoover will close. Three of the seven current board members (including me) oppose the closure. This board or the next one (with three seats to be filled in 2017) could decide to reverse the closure decision. In fact, the difficulty of drawing workable attendance zones without Hoover could provide another occasion for revisiting the decision. Either way, it will be helpful to know what people’s preferences are when it comes to attendance zones.

You’re most likely to be affected by this rezoning if you live in the areas near the two elementaries that will open in 2019. Grant Elementary will be in the North Corridor (map here); “Hoover East” will be on the far east side of Iowa City (map here). But it’s hard to know what the ripple effects might be; it’s a good idea to provide input no matter where you live. The current elementary school attendance zone map is here.

If you’re going to send input, it would be best do it by March 1.

Defeated by email

After a struggle, I find that I just can’t keep up with the amount of email I’m receiving as a school board member. At first I was able to respond individually to most emails, but the volume has just grown to the point where there are not enough hours in the day. I do read them all, and I hope people will keep sending them, but I’m now resigned to the fact that I will have to start sending non-individualized acknowledgements, so people will at least know that I have received and read their emails.

Even if can’t respond to each email individually, I hope I can sometimes use this blog to post my thoughts on topics that I get a lot of emails about, so I can at least refer people to those posts. I have two posts like that on their way tonight.

School board agenda for January 26

Sorry to be posting this so late; I was distracted by drafting a longer post about the options for changing the bell schedule, which I hope to post within the next couple of days.

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

Discretionary busing. The district has to provide busing to K-8 students who live more than two miles from school and to high school students who live more than three miles from school. The district can choose to provide buses to kids who wouldn’t qualify for them based on distance from school; that’s known as “discretionary busing.” We have done that for some neighborhoods, sometimes on the theory that there were particular safety concerns. Director Chris Lynch has proposed that we change our criteria for providing discretionary busing to focus exclusively on areas with lots of kids who are “at risk” of not getting to school, rather than on safety. You can read his full proposal here. More information here.

Redistricting. We’ll discuss our process for deciding how to redistrict elementary attendance zones as we plan to open two new elementary schools in 2019, and in particular our process for gathering community input. At our work session, a neighborhood “caucus” system was proposed, under which people would gather input from their neighborhood (however they define it) and submit that group feedback to the board. The proposed form for that feedback is here. Some board members (including me) raised concerns about whether that process would be sufficiently inclusive. We’ll discuss that issue again tonight. More information here.

An update on the bell schedule task force. I’ll post more on this topic soon. Information here.

Magnet school. We’ll discuss the results of the district’s survey about the possibility of starting a magnet school. Information here.

We’ll vote on the proposed 2016-17 school calendar. The proposal is here.

We’ll discuss our preliminary budget assumptions for 2016-17.

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

Why I voted against ThoughtExchange

At our last meeting, the board voted 4-3 to enter into a three-year contract with ThoughtExchange, an online platform to solicit ideas and opinions from district residents. The contract cost $106,462. I voted against it, for several reasons.

The cost alone was not my primary objection. I can imagine issues on which a well-done survey of community opinion would be worth paying for. My concerns about ThoughtExchange were:

1. Although ThoughtExchange was presented as a way to “take the temperature of the community”—the vendor even referred to it as “polling”—it was not at all vetted for that purpose and is very clearly not up to the task.

There is a difference between tech expertise and statistical expertise; the vendor provided no information about the statistical capability of ThoughtExchange to measure the opinions of the community as a whole. He probably couldn’t, even if he tried. Participation is not random; some users might make one quick visit while others might visit repeatedly and participate for long stretches; it’s fairly easy for people to have multiple accounts; and the total number of participants on any given issue is likely to be a small fraction of the total community population. As a result, the margin of error, if it could even be calculated, is likely to be so enormous that the results would tell us very little about community sentiment.

That problem is compounded by the fact that a significant chunk of our community (estimated at about six percent of households) does not have regular internet access, and that’s probably not a random chunk, but skewed toward low-income residents.

2. I’m concerned that the motivation to use ThoughtExchange is more about putting on a show of community engagement than actually engaging in a meaningful way. (I had these same concerns about ThoughtExchange’s predecessor, MindMixer.) There’s no point in asking the public for input if we’re not willing to adjust our decisions accordingly once we get it, but it often seems like the district wants to do the former and not the latter. In those instances, people just feel worse than if their input was never solicited at all.

The district’s likely strategy is not to ask any questions that it doesn’t want to hear the answers to, and to word the questions in ways designed to push participants in certain ways. Three years ago, I made fun of the district for using MindMixer to ask, “What are the school district’s biggest strengths?” Then, when the ThoughtExchange vendor made his presentation, one of his examples of a question that could be asked was, “What are some things you appreciate about your school this year?”

Unfortunately, my (1) and (2) correspond to the two things we’re actually paying for (that we wouldn’t get from engagement through, say, the district’s Facebook page): (1) the “data” analysis (which is of little value if the data is not representative of the community as a whole), and (2) the manipulability and control that comes from being able to decide what questions to ask and how to ask them. We should not pay for either of those things.

It’s hard not to see ThoughtExchange as primarily a public relations campaign posing as a concern for community input. The board should consider whether that might put off as many people as it attracts. As commenter Amy Charles wrote, “No, do not tax me in order to build a case for more taxes. Spend the money on the frigging schools, and do it sensibly.”

Agenda topics for November 24 meeting

Some of the topics we’ll be discussing at this Tuesday’s board meeting:

Superintendent discretionary leave. Info here. Our superintendent’s contract provides that he can take up to ten paid personal leave days each year for personal business, consulting, and other activities “that will contribute to the betterment of the district.” His use of these days must be mutually agreed upon between him and the board president. Do we need to change this practice going forward?

The Open Meetings Act. Info here. I believe we may have the board’s legal counsel present to take questions about it from the board.

The district’s facilities master plan. Info here.

ThoughtExchange. Info here. See this post for previous discussion.

“Administrator attrition.” We have recently had significant turnover in our central administrative positions, so I assume this topic is to discuss transition plans and the possibility of changes to our organizational structure that might be part of that process. Info here.

And more! The full agenda is here; chime in if anything attracts your attention.

October 27 board agenda

I’d love to use this blog as a way to hear some thoughts about issues that appear on our board agenda. The agenda for this coming week’s meeting is here. Among other things, we will be discussing:

The bell schedule. The district changed the bell schedule this year, extending the elementary school day and adjusting the daily start and end times for all students. I was against the change and, especially given some of the unintended consequences we have experienced (for example, with bus schedules), am strongly inclined to revisit it. My fellow director Lori Roetlin, who also wants to revisit the issue, has written a letter explaining her thoughts about how we should move forward with the issue. What are your thoughts?

The possibility of buying into ThoughtExchange, an online platform for gathering and aggregating public input on school issues. I have some initial thoughts about this issue that I’ll try to post separately. You can read about ThoughtExchange (or at least see advertisements for it) by clicking on the links and PDFs here. The service would cost $170,000 over five years. Your thoughts on ThoughtExchange?

The preliminary report about this year’s class sizes. You can read the report here. I’ve heard a lot of concern about our class sizes this year. Chime in if you have thoughts on the issue.

You may find something else in the agenda that catches your eye. Feel free to post a comment.

UPDATE, 10-29:  Thanks, everyone, for the terrific comments.  I’ve had less time the past couple of days to respond individually—as will inevitably happen here—but I always read the comments and I really value the input.  At our Tuesday night meeting, we voted unanimously to adopt Director Lori Roetlin’s proposal to set up a task force to examine the bell schedule and make recommendations.  The proposal is designed to get the process going soon there will be plenty of time to get input from the community before any decision gets made.

We also heard a presentation from the ThoughtExchange vendor and discussed the service at some length, but we did not vote on it.  Some of my fellow board members are very supportive of the proposal, while others want more information about alternatives, while others (including me) are pretty skeptical, so the discussion will continue at a future meeting.

The board president summarized our clarification of the threat protocol that occurred at last week’s work session, and the issue will go to board committees for further discussion.  The class size report focused (as I would have expected) on the shortage of supplemental state aid and on the district’s choices about how to put available funding to the best use.