Forcing districts to loosen transfer policies

Forcing districts to loosen transfer policies and to split when they get too large... is how the Salt Lake Tribune started their article abut yesterday's State School Board meeting where DavisParents.org persuade there goal of giving Parents a choice in public education. (See Board Examines Bulging Districts, SLTrib 4/6/07).

It was purely coincidental that the issue with bulging district size was on the same agenda as enrollment options but the correlation between the problems was easy to see. When the district it too large, the district administration is too far aware from the public they are hired to serve.

In the Public School Choice discussion, Granite School District spoke to the fact that 10% of their students attend a non-resident school and Davis School District spoke increasing the allowed tranfers from 1.5% to 2% (but only for one year).

After hearing from the Davis School District, Grantite School District and Davis Parents, Board member Mark Cluff made the following concluding comments:

"I have no doubt in all my working with the districts that they're trying to meet the needs of schools and parents and communities. As we try to over-define what needs to happen, we become more concerned with what's best for us, what's easiest for us, and forget what's best for the parent and the child."

To that I say...Amen.

Public schools are monopoly - DNews Letter to the editor

I found this is Saturdays Dnews...

I am generally happy with the public eduction system. It has generally served my family well. However, the problem is when a parent wants or needs special considerations for their child, parents and the child generally lose this battle. Public schools are a monopoly. I pay for public education with my taxes, and I have no freedom of choice about who teaches my children, what they are taught, where they are taught or how they are taught. School vouchers give many parents a powerful tool for the education of their children. Public education is not about the teachers, it is about the children. Vouchers will provide parents a much needed tool to take control of their children's education.

Richard Mann
Centerville

Who is accountable in the Davis School District?

See related articles:
* Randy Smith responds to critics
* Just the facts...

Guest Commentary
Standard Examiner Feb. 2 & Deseret News Feb. 4

Thanks to some truly outstanding teachers, the Davis School District is one of the top districts in the state and four of the District high schools were listed among Newsweek’s top high schools in the country. However, recent events have provided an important reminder why parents and taxpayers must avoid becoming complacent and the $4.3 million Title I scandal reminds us how easy it is to become complacent when we trust people. Just as it was naive for a Superintendent to fail to put in place reasonable controls over the District’s use of Title I funds, parents are similarly naive when we fail to require that the administration justify their actions. As someone who was very involved in the recent boundary debate, but unaffected by the boundary changes, I would like to share some questions I have after reading hundreds of emails sent to DavisParents.org.

Why is the Davis School District fighting parents in an expensive legal battle over their open meeting violations? Why ignore the opinion of the 2nd District Court, the Editorial Boards of all three local daily papers, the Davis County Republican Chairman and the Democratic Chairman who have all been critical of the District’s failure to comply with the letter or intent of this law? What public benefit can result from fighting to resist open government?

Even though Bountiful High School had 170 empty seats this school year, the District denied seventy of the ninety students requesting a variance to Bountiful High. When the Sunset Hollow community petitioned to move out of the portables at Woods Cross High and into the empty classrooms at Bountiful High, why did the District deny this request in favor of plans to expand Woods Cross and bus students away from the 300 empty seats at Davis High? How many more teachers could we hire, or text books could we buy, if we simply filled our current school buildings rather than busing children away from empty classrooms?

I recently met one family who applied for a variance to Bountiful High so their daughter could attend the same school as her older sister. Unfortunately, the administration believes that variances hurt the resident school and so this variance request and numerous appeals were denied. The family even offered to send their senior from Bountiful to Woods Cross so their children could be together, but the athletic programs wouldn’t allow that to happen. Only after six months of persistent pressure through letters, phone calls and personal visits did the district allow this distraught family to stay together. When did it become appropriate to hold children hostage to protect programs rather than using programs to benefit a child?

We applaud the Salt Lake School District for their open enrollment policy. In that district 25% of the high school students choose their school. The Davis School District limits school choice to 2%. As public educators mobilize to fight vouchers, would they consider speaking up to help the children in the Davis School District get “public school choice”? If public educators are truly fighting for our children, public school choice should be easy to support. In the real world, if a supplier could force their customers to buy only from them, there would be no motivation to improve, or even maintain the quality of the product or service. As a father who will have children in the public school system for another fourteen years, I fear the mediocrity that is sure to follow if our public school administrators have no accountability and patrons have no choice.

Randy Smith
Father
DavisParents.org, Spokesman

Testimony to the Utah State Legislature

On 1/31/07, Randy Smith from DavisParents.org testified before the administrative rules committee of the legislature. Following his testimony and that of State Superintendent Patti Harrington, the committee voted unanimously to invalidate the current rules and require the State School Board to create new rules allowing open enrollment. As a result of this testimony, SB122 was amended to require the State School Board to create new rules to implement Open Enrollment. The amended bill passed unanimously in both the House and the Senate.

The following is the outline of his testimony:

Rules governing the Open Enrollment/Open School statutes (53A-2-207 - 209 and 213)

The “Open Enrollment/Open School statutes (53A-2-207 through 209 and 213) states: “A local school board shall allow students who reside within the district to attend any school within the district” (53A-2-231(1)(A)), subject only to capacity constraints and the application procedures. Other areas, of the statute, extend that to any public school in the state. However, the rules defining capacity are such that no district is required to ever consider this statute. The rules define capacity as follows:

1. Only classrooms, where the administration has assigned a teacher, are considered when calculating capacity (R277-437-1(F)).
2. Capacity is calculated based on 20 students per classroom (R277-437-1(K)(6-7)).
3. The enrollment threshold for compliance is 90% of capacity (R277-437-1(B)).
Here is how these rules work in practice. The new High School #8 in Syracuse was build with 93 classrooms for a capacity of 2,344 students, at a cost of $50,000,000 or $21,334 per student. The school district enrollment projections based on the new boundaries show an average enrollment of 1,450[1] students over the next ten years. If you assume a student to teacher ratio of 25 to 1, only 58 (58 = 1,450/25) of the 93 classrooms will be utilized. The capacity, based on the definition above, is 1,160 (1,160 = 58 * 20) students. The actual enrollment before compliance, with this statute, is required is 1,044 (1,044 = 1,160 * 90%). This leaves 1,300 empty seats in 52 heated but empty classrooms, before compliance with this statute is required or $27,734,000 of empty school space.

Of even greater concern is the fact that the rules add protection to the “resident” school (R277-437-1(E)), even though the statute makes no provision to protect the “resident” school. In our opinion, the administration, not the child, is responsible for the quality of the “resident” school. No child should be “held hostage” by a resident school.

This school year the district denied seventy of the ninety students requesting a variance to attend Bountiful High which had a projection of 205 empty seats. Last year the Haycock family applied for a variance to Bountiful High so their daughter could attend the same school as her older sister. Unfortunately, the administration believes that variances hurt the resident school and so their variance request and numerous appeals were denied. Only after six months of persistent pressure through letters, phone calls and personal visits did the district allow this distraught family to stay together.

Because of these rules, the statute has no bearing on how our public schools operate. Our recommendations:

• Define capacity based on the building capacity designed as extended through existing portables.
• The 90% enrollment threshold for compliance should not be considered for intra-district transfers.
• Remove protection of the “resident school” in favor of protecting the child.
  [1] Enrollment projections based on current enrollment of students from K-11th grades.

Comments to the Conservative Caucus, 1/31/07

Comments to the Conservative Caucus,

January 31st, 2007

By Randy Smith, DavisParents.org

Thank you for the opportunity to take a few minutes this morning. As mentioned earlier, I’m Randy Smith with DavisParents.org, an organization of Davis School District parents. In the next few minutes, I would like to share some of the lessons parents, taxpayers and legislators should learn from recent events in the Davis School District. There are many things that the families in DavisParents.org are concerned with, but last evening as I sat and listening to the Davis Youth Symphony, I was reminded once again how lucky we are to have such great teachers and programs in our district. The Davis Youth Symphony is a District wide symphony that is absolutely amazing. It is directed by a talented and dedicated musician and life time educator, Richard Marsden. He is supported by several talented music educators from throughout the district. My family and the families of many many others have been deeply enriched by this incredible program. Although my comments today are focused on things that are not so good, I don’t want us to loose sight of the fact that many things are going well.

The recent boundary debate
First, a little background about the recent school district boundary changes. By way of disclosure, I should point out that my family was not affected by any boundary changes, but obviously, many of the families in our organization were affected. The school district is about to complete High School #8. Even though this high school is at the north end of the district, the majority of the controversy resulted from the districts plans to send students south, away from high school #8.

In the August 1st school board meeting, Chase Rogers, Director of Planning for the District, reported to the Board that the staff wanted to change the boundaries in the south at the same time they filled High School #8 in the north. This was necessary because Bountiful High was declining in numbers and “bouncing off 3-A status”. However, after the Standard Examiner reported that the plan might be “A Play to Stay 4-A” the District started saying that it was not about athletics but rather to “protect programs”. Mr. Rogers then described the plan to bus Farmington students “right by Davis High” to Viewmont and then take the neighborhoods surrounding Viewmont and move them to Bountiful. He also reported that “Woods Cross was right where we want them to be”. He did not point out that Woods Cross was currently 190 students over the physical capacity of their school building. Six and a half months later, this is exactly the plan that the board approved.

Financial analysis and fiscal over-sight
So what does this tell us about the district’s level of financial analysis and fiscal over-sight? Even though this controversial plan was presented to the School Board four times, over six and a half months, the district never reported, to the Board or the public, the incremental cost of busing students away from empty classrooms at Davis High School to “protect programs” at distant schools. In fact, several members of the citizens committee, which had been tasked with drawing up the boundaries, reported that the district told them several times that “transportation was a state expense, not a district expense, and therefore they did not need to worry about transportation costs”.

This plan not only increased the transportation budget, but it requires that the needed renovations at Woods Cross also include an expansion of classrooms. This is amazing, especially when you consider that, this school year alone; the district denied seventy of the ninety students requesting a variance to Bountiful High. These requests were denied even though Bountiful had 170 empty seats. Why deny these requests? Because most of the requests were coming from Woods Cross High School students and granting the request would hurt “programs” at that school.

So, what programs would have been lost at Bountiful or Woods Cross? Parents submitted a GRAMA request to see this analysis. But no analysis had been done, or at least none was surrendered. Let’s think about it for a moment. Many schools in the State are smaller than Woods Cross or Bountiful High and they have Math, English, and Science. In fact they have all the core subjects. Academic research shows that high schools with student populations between 600 and 900 students perform best academically, so what programs could be at risk? Jewelry Making? Yoga? 4-A athletic classification? Probably. Maybe even AP French or German. However, here is the real unanswered question. What is the cost to save these programs? Given that AP French or Jewelry making are likely to have less then 15 to 20 students per class, what is the cost per student?

There are three Bountiful area high schools within a few miles of each other. If we could view neighboring high schools as part of a campus, rather than a rival school, just think how many more programs we could offer and how much more reasonable the cost would be.

Open Government
Parents questioned whether the rumored $750,000 donation to the $1,000,000 plus Astro-turf football field at Woods Cross High played a factor in the District’s boundary decisions. The parents requested a list of all contributions directly or indirectly to Woods Cross High School and were presented with a list all donors for the previous two years totaling $32,000. They asked again and were told that the list was everything on record. A week later the Davis Clipper interviewed the donor and asked if the district had made any boundary promises as a result of the donations. His reply was: “I’ve never publicly said whether or not I made a donation to the football field…but such a thing [boundary commitments] is just not worth discussing”.
That said, there is a new Astro-turf football field that was used this past football season. The district may not have done anything illegal, but is this the degree of transparency we can expect from our public school officials?

You’ve probably read that the district is spending scarce educational resources to fight parents in an expensive legal battle over violations of the Open Meeting laws. Why? What public benefit can result from resisting open government?

Title I scandal and the school board
A review of past 15 months of School Board meeting minutes did not find one account of a Board member asking the Superintendent to explain how the Title I scandal was able to continue so long or what was being done to prevent similar abuses. In fact, I’m not aware any public statements the district made, to the Board or others, describing any improvements to internal controls until after the Tribune reported that no changes had been made and the editorial board referred to the district as: “…a gullible administration asleep at the wheel. Moreover, the district can't even begin to regain the confidence of its patrons if it can't seem to rouse itself to the urgent need for immediate reform.”

Voters in Davis County, like much of the state, are complacent in regards to the administration of the district. As a result, very little attention is paid to the candidates for school board, leaving it wide open for a Superintendent to hand-select candidates and then once they are elected, the Superintendent builds a relationship that will secure his position. Superintendent Bowles has a pretty good job. He is at the head of a $470 million dollar venture and no one holds him accountable his lack of fiscal oversight. His opposition to HB144, requiring a retention election every two years, should not be a surprise to anyone. In our opinion, a good superintendent, like a good judge will not have anything to worry about.

Recommendations:

• We support efforts to increase the visibility and public debate over the election of local school boards.
• Require that education funding increases be spent IN (not on) the classroom.
• Require that a Fiscal Note be attached to every proposal presented for action by a School Board that will result in an increase in spending.
• Provide funding for the State Auditor to create “best practices” and then audit the internal controls and financial oversight of our school districts.
• Remove the loopholes in the “Open Enrollment” Statute (53A-2-213). See the handout for a copy of our comments to the Administrative Rules Committee later today.

Legislative agenda, 2007

DavisParents.org, a grass roots parent organization from the Davis School District supports Governor Huntsman’s goal to increase funding for education this legislative session if the spending is tied to an increase in accountability and oversight. As the legislature considers the increase, DavisParents.org offers Davis School District as a case study for discussion.

With four schools listed among the top high schools in the United States, our great teachers, in partnership with parents, have shown how much can be done with just a little. However, recent events have highlighted the need for better oversight. In fact, without enhanced oversight and accountability, experience tells us that the proposed increase may never reach the classroom and therefore be insufficient to address the needs that parents, teachers, and the legislature are hoping to meet. The examples below show that the enemy of public education is not the parent asking for accountability and choice, but a system that is complacent in its way of doing things, and resistant to input and review.

In order to ensure that Utah’s children receive the maximum benefit from increased educational spending, there are at least two areas of improvements that should be addressed this legislative session, before any substantial increases in funding are authorized – (1) fiscal accountability and (2) intra-district school choice. The need for both areas of improvement are clearly demonstrated with current examples from the Davis School District.

FISCAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Davis School District Problems

Example 1:
Apparent lack of oversight appears to have allowed an alleged multi-million dollar fraud to continue for years in the Davis School District. A review of the Board Minutes from October 2005 through December 2006, did not find any discussion of how the abuse was allowed to continue or what is being done to prevent it in the future. While litigation and personnel issues may have been closed to the public, any discussion of improvements to internal controls was required to be in Open and Public Meetings. There were none.

Example 2:
The new high school in Syracuse and the recently rebuilt Davis High School were built for 2350 students. The budget for High School #8 was $50,000,000 or $21,000 per student. However, the district’s target numbers, which drove the recent boundary changes, had a maximum student population of 1900 students at both Davis High and High School #8. When asked, neither Superintendent Bryan Bowles nor former Superintendent Darrel White would explain why the district built these schools, but now refuses to fill them. Mr. White reported to the School Board that new home development in the Davis High School boundaries would not have a significant impact on the Davis High School student population over the next ten years.

Example 3:
Rather than moving students out of portables at Woods Cross High School and into the empty classrooms at Bountiful High School, just two miles away, the District is planning to expand Woods Cross and bus students from Farmington to fill the Bountiful area schools. The District’s staff has advocated this plan since the August 1st School Board meeting, but has never reported the costs associated with transportation or the costs of the new classrooms that will be required at Woods Cross. Paula Alder, Farmington City Council member and member of the 39-member Boundary Committee said that “we were repeatedly told that transportation is a State, not District cost, so we should not consider it”

Example 4:
The Davis School District has chosen to spend scarce education dollars to fight a legal battle to avoid compliance with the Open Meeting laws, even though the 2nd District Court, the Editorial Boards of all three local daily papers, the Davis County Republican and Democratic Chairmen and parents have all criticized the Davis School District’s failure to comply with the letter or intent of the law. What public benefit can result from the District’s decision to incur these legal expenses? And, why resist open government?

Example 5:
The district has announced plans to implement Small Learning Communities at Woods Cross, Bountiful and three other high schools, at a cost of over $800,000 per school. Small Learning Communities were created, after the Columbine tragedy, as a way to mitigate some of the negative effects of large high schools (student populations greater than 1,000). Why is the School District spending this money at the same time they are busing students to artificially inflate the student populations of these same schools?

FISCAL ACCOUNTABILITY – RECOMMENDATION

1. Require that at least 70% percent of every education dollar be spent IN (not on) the classroom.
2. Require that a Fiscal Note be attached to every proposal presented for action by a School Board that will result in an increase in spending of either state or district funds.
3. Provide funding for the State Auditor to create “best practices” and then audit the internal controls and financial oversight of our school districts.
4. The State School Board should review the Federal Sarbanes Oxely Act and then develop procedures that will assist local school boards in maintaining the independence necessary to hold administrators accountable to the public.
   

SCHOOL CHOICE (Intra-District)
Davis School District Problems

Example 1:
Ninety students applied for a variance to attend Bountiful High School for SY06-07 but the district denied seventy of those requests. Bountiful High School is 170 students under capacity this school year. Had parents been able to choose how to fill the school, there would be no need to bus students to fill Bountiful High School or add classrooms to Woods Cross High School.

Example 2:
Against strong opposition from parents because of safety concerns, the Davis School District plans to move 150 students, who live just 2-3 miles from the approximately 400 empty class room seats at Davis High School to commute 3 times further to Viewmont High School.

SCHOOL CHOICE (Intra-District) – RECOMMENDATIONS

1. If each school district applied the current law (53A-2-213) which allows students to choose any school in the district, more resources would be available for our children’s classrooms. As every child is different and has different needs, only the parents can know what is best for their child. Please help parents regain the ability to make decisions concerning their child’s educational needs.
2. The legislature should remove the loopholes in (53A-2-213) so that this law can achieve its original intent. Please enable parents to have greater influence over the education of their own children.