16
Apr
2002
Nikki DeFauw has three children in Adams Elementary School. If the Davenport Community School District votes next week to close Grant and Johnson elementary schools, the ensuing realignment of school boundaries will result in her kids being sent to Harrison next fall.
DeFauw said there's much she likes about Adams: She knows the teachers, she likes the educational methods and the media specialist, and she appreciates the level of parental involvement. "They really stress reading," she added.
However, she doesn't have anything negative to say about Harrison, where her children might end up. That school, too, has an active PTA. When asked why she's fighting so hard to prevent the closure of Grant and Johnson, she eventually abandoned a comparison between the two schools. "It's a greater issue at this point than where my kids attend school," DeFauw said. The issue is "the manner in which the decision was disclosed. There didn't seem to be a lot of [public] input."
Such is the state of the relationship between the Davenport school district and the community it serves. Although the school district has not yet determined the fates of Johnson and Grant, parents are already bitter and entrenched, expecting the worst of the seven-member school board when it votes April 22 on the issue of closing the two schools.
Unlike the first time it voted in January, the school board will have options as it considers closing Johnson and Grant. But many parents doubt that members of the board will look closely at a variety of alternatives presented to them by parents and a task force charged with studying options. At Monday's public hearing on the potential closings, DeFauw implored the school board to "prove my skepticism unfounded."
The task force that spent five weeks exploring alternatives has developed 13 possible budget or program cuts, nearly all of which target expenses at the school level. Only two options the task force developed would financially affect the district's administration, and even those are relatively minor - one adding an employee-paid health-insurance premium and another setting a flat amount for deferred compensation. (See sidebar.)
Parents, independent of the task force, have put together additional alternatives. "Most of what we're talking about is administrators," said Alan Guard, who has spearheaded the parents' campaign to keep Grant and Johnson open and also served on the task force. Guard argues that the cuts favored by many parents would have much less impact on students than closing schools, and could be spread across the district. For example, asking schools to cut 1 percent of their budgets - and saving more than $1 million in the process - would have only a minor impact on the individual schools. "Why should Grant and Johnson shoulder the burden of the whole deficit?" he asked.
Brenda Jordahl-Buckles, president of the Johnson PTA and a member of the task force, objected to the short period of time with which the task force had to work. Last week, she asked the school board for more time, but she never got a response. "I think we would have been able to get through everything a little more thoroughly," she said. "I think it would have led to other ideas and options."
Guard agreed, noting that the task force only managed to get through its entire agenda in the last of its five meetings.
Mass Defections?
Some parents aren't waiting for a final decision. The Hassig family had planned to move in a few years, once their two older children were done with elementary school at Johnson, but now they're waiting to close on a house in Bettendorf.
In addition to possibly forcing two of her children to change schools, the potential closing of Grant and Johnson prompted Caroline Hassig to wonder how many more schools the district plans to board up. "I keep thinking, 'What's next?'" she said. If the school board decides to close Johnson, the family's current house would put her children in the area served by Wilson school.
"Everybody knows who I am" at 250-student Johnson Elementary, Hassig said. "Everybody knows who my kids are." She doubts the district can maintain that level of intimacy at Wilson, with more than 580 students already.
While children who now attend Johnson and Grant would be greatly impacted by school closings, it's estimated that a total of 600 students would be displaced by boundary changes and the absorption of Johnson and Grant students.
The Hassig family isn't alone in moving, and Guard promised that school closures would prompt a defection from the Davenport Community School District, thus reducing the amount of money the district receives from the state. (The district gets more than $4,500 per pupil in state funding.) "I know 40 people by name who are leaving if you close these schools," Guard said.
Lisa Crews' six-year-old son currently goes to kindergarten at Wilson, but boundary changes associated with the closing of Johnson and Grant would send him to Jackson next year. Crews said she and her husband built their home three years ago specifically so their son would go to Wilson. "We had heard good things about Wilson," she said. "We built our home with that assumption. We didn't anticipate him at all having to switch schools." The Crews have applied for a transfer that would keep their child in Wilson, but if it's denied, "we will go to Jackson," she said.
Crews said she doubts the school board is making a good-faith effort to look at alternatives to closing the schools. "They're going through the motions to pacify," she said.
The school board initially voted six-to-one on January 28 to close the schools, but an appeal by parents to the Iowa Department of Education forced the school district to re-start the process. Parents argued that the district violated both its own policies - since rescinded - and state guidelines when it made its decision in such a compact period of time and with so little public input. The possibility of closing the schools first became public on January 10, and when the school board voted, the district administration gave it no alternatives to closing the schools.
"I don't think they considered any options" aside from closing schools, said Guard, who filed the appeal. "It's clear they didn't do any homework at all."
"I do think there are some tough choices ahead," DeFauw said. "I think closing two schools might have been the simplest decision."
The new process began March 11, when the school board voted to "re-examine" its January 28 vote and form a task force to explore options to the school closings. The task force, which included school-district representatives, parents, a school-board member, and interested community members, met five times, and its report was given to the school board at the April 15 public hearing.
The parents' appeal will resume May 1, and if the school board votes to close the two elementary facilities, an administrative law judge will consider whether the school district followed state-set guidelines for school closures.
What's different now is that the school board hasn't been put in a close-schools-or-do-nothing quandary. The group of parents that filed the appeal has put together five different packages of budget cuts and staff adjustments that would allow the school district to match the cost savings of closing Johnson and Grant ($2.3 million) or erase its worst-case-scenario deficit ($4 million).
"It's obvious there are better alternatives," Guard said.
If the school board votes next week to keep Grant and Johnson open, Superintendent Jim Blanche said the board would most likely choose alternative cuts to implement.
The school district decided to close the schools because it was facing a deficit that it projected would be $3.2 million on June 30, 2002. That figure was cited at the January 28 meeting at which the initial vote was taken. The district said then that closing Grant and Johnson - and saving $2.3 million - was merely one step toward eliminating the deficit.
Now, the district is saying that its deficit could be even larger than earlier predicted. Blanche said mid-year cuts probably absorbed only about two-thirds of Governor Tom Vilsack's $2.7 million cut to the district's state funding. "We could actually be looking for $4 million," he told the River Cities' Reader on Monday.
That's one reason parents opposing the closure of Grant and Johnson have crafted packages of cuts that total nearly $4.3 million. While the group that filed the appeal has always been skeptical of the district's accounting - "Their numbers are so phony," Guard said last week - it is playing the game with the school district's set of rules.
DeFauw said there's much she likes about Adams: She knows the teachers, she likes the educational methods and the media specialist, and she appreciates the level of parental involvement. "They really stress reading," she added.
However, she doesn't have anything negative to say about Harrison, where her children might end up. That school, too, has an active PTA. When asked why she's fighting so hard to prevent the closure of Grant and Johnson, she eventually abandoned a comparison between the two schools. "It's a greater issue at this point than where my kids attend school," DeFauw said. The issue is "the manner in which the decision was disclosed. There didn't seem to be a lot of [public] input."
Such is the state of the relationship between the Davenport school district and the community it serves. Although the school district has not yet determined the fates of Johnson and Grant, parents are already bitter and entrenched, expecting the worst of the seven-member school board when it votes April 22 on the issue of closing the two schools.
Unlike the first time it voted in January, the school board will have options as it considers closing Johnson and Grant. But many parents doubt that members of the board will look closely at a variety of alternatives presented to them by parents and a task force charged with studying options. At Monday's public hearing on the potential closings, DeFauw implored the school board to "prove my skepticism unfounded."
The task force that spent five weeks exploring alternatives has developed 13 possible budget or program cuts, nearly all of which target expenses at the school level. Only two options the task force developed would financially affect the district's administration, and even those are relatively minor - one adding an employee-paid health-insurance premium and another setting a flat amount for deferred compensation. (See sidebar.)
Parents, independent of the task force, have put together additional alternatives. "Most of what we're talking about is administrators," said Alan Guard, who has spearheaded the parents' campaign to keep Grant and Johnson open and also served on the task force. Guard argues that the cuts favored by many parents would have much less impact on students than closing schools, and could be spread across the district. For example, asking schools to cut 1 percent of their budgets - and saving more than $1 million in the process - would have only a minor impact on the individual schools. "Why should Grant and Johnson shoulder the burden of the whole deficit?" he asked.
Brenda Jordahl-Buckles, president of the Johnson PTA and a member of the task force, objected to the short period of time with which the task force had to work. Last week, she asked the school board for more time, but she never got a response. "I think we would have been able to get through everything a little more thoroughly," she said. "I think it would have led to other ideas and options."
Guard agreed, noting that the task force only managed to get through its entire agenda in the last of its five meetings.
Mass Defections?
Some parents aren't waiting for a final decision. The Hassig family had planned to move in a few years, once their two older children were done with elementary school at Johnson, but now they're waiting to close on a house in Bettendorf.
In addition to possibly forcing two of her children to change schools, the potential closing of Grant and Johnson prompted Caroline Hassig to wonder how many more schools the district plans to board up. "I keep thinking, 'What's next?'" she said. If the school board decides to close Johnson, the family's current house would put her children in the area served by Wilson school.
"Everybody knows who I am" at 250-student Johnson Elementary, Hassig said. "Everybody knows who my kids are." She doubts the district can maintain that level of intimacy at Wilson, with more than 580 students already.
While children who now attend Johnson and Grant would be greatly impacted by school closings, it's estimated that a total of 600 students would be displaced by boundary changes and the absorption of Johnson and Grant students.
The Hassig family isn't alone in moving, and Guard promised that school closures would prompt a defection from the Davenport Community School District, thus reducing the amount of money the district receives from the state. (The district gets more than $4,500 per pupil in state funding.) "I know 40 people by name who are leaving if you close these schools," Guard said.
Lisa Crews' six-year-old son currently goes to kindergarten at Wilson, but boundary changes associated with the closing of Johnson and Grant would send him to Jackson next year. Crews said she and her husband built their home three years ago specifically so their son would go to Wilson. "We had heard good things about Wilson," she said. "We built our home with that assumption. We didn't anticipate him at all having to switch schools." The Crews have applied for a transfer that would keep their child in Wilson, but if it's denied, "we will go to Jackson," she said.
Crews said she doubts the school board is making a good-faith effort to look at alternatives to closing the schools. "They're going through the motions to pacify," she said.
The school board initially voted six-to-one on January 28 to close the schools, but an appeal by parents to the Iowa Department of Education forced the school district to re-start the process. Parents argued that the district violated both its own policies - since rescinded - and state guidelines when it made its decision in such a compact period of time and with so little public input. The possibility of closing the schools first became public on January 10, and when the school board voted, the district administration gave it no alternatives to closing the schools.
"I don't think they considered any options" aside from closing schools, said Guard, who filed the appeal. "It's clear they didn't do any homework at all."
"I do think there are some tough choices ahead," DeFauw said. "I think closing two schools might have been the simplest decision."
The new process began March 11, when the school board voted to "re-examine" its January 28 vote and form a task force to explore options to the school closings. The task force, which included school-district representatives, parents, a school-board member, and interested community members, met five times, and its report was given to the school board at the April 15 public hearing.
The parents' appeal will resume May 1, and if the school board votes to close the two elementary facilities, an administrative law judge will consider whether the school district followed state-set guidelines for school closures.
What's different now is that the school board hasn't been put in a close-schools-or-do-nothing quandary. The group of parents that filed the appeal has put together five different packages of budget cuts and staff adjustments that would allow the school district to match the cost savings of closing Johnson and Grant ($2.3 million) or erase its worst-case-scenario deficit ($4 million).
"It's obvious there are better alternatives," Guard said.
If the school board votes next week to keep Grant and Johnson open, Superintendent Jim Blanche said the board would most likely choose alternative cuts to implement.
The school district decided to close the schools because it was facing a deficit that it projected would be $3.2 million on June 30, 2002. That figure was cited at the January 28 meeting at which the initial vote was taken. The district said then that closing Grant and Johnson - and saving $2.3 million - was merely one step toward eliminating the deficit.
Now, the district is saying that its deficit could be even larger than earlier predicted. Blanche said mid-year cuts probably absorbed only about two-thirds of Governor Tom Vilsack's $2.7 million cut to the district's state funding. "We could actually be looking for $4 million," he told the River Cities' Reader on Monday.
That's one reason parents opposing the closure of Grant and Johnson have crafted packages of cuts that total nearly $4.3 million. While the group that filed the appeal has always been skeptical of the district's accounting - "Their numbers are so phony," Guard said last week - it is playing the game with the school district's set of rules.
