The issue of High School reconfiguration has emerged in the community as a contentious issue. The school district, as is often the case, has done itself little favor by delivering mixed messages.
The school district issued a statement through a letter from Superintendent Winfred Roberson, which he also read aloud at Thursday evening’s school board meeting.
“The purpose of this message is to clarify that the DJUSD Board of Education and district administration have not predetermined a 9-12 transition,” Superintendent Roberson writes. “I hope this eases some anxiety.”
The superintendent made it clear that any changes would not take place in the 2013-14 academic year.
Davis Enterprise columnist Bob Dunning writes, “High School reconfiguration is simply the vehicle the Board has chosen to carry us all to the desired destination, which is school closure.”
I am not sure that is correct.
He notes, “Strangely, no one was talking about adding a fourth year to the high school – and closing elementary or junior high school campuses in the process – when we elected two School Board members four months ago.”
That is true, it did not seem to be on anyone’s radar at that time.
I might take some issue with his comment, “If it [is that] we’re only about the pros and cons of reconfiguration from an academic standpoint, there’d be no debate. You don’t change what’s not broken, and given that Davis High School is one of the highest performing schools in the state, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else is doing.”
After all, there are always ways to improve and you can look to do things better even if you are already doing things well.
However, no matter which side of the debate you find yourself on, Bob Dunning gets things remarkably wrong with regard to school financing here, to the point where the record must be corrected.
He writes, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but most of us believed the pre-November hype that if both our school parcel taxes passed and Gov. Brown’s Prop. 30 passed, we’d have enough money to maintain our schools as they are for the time being.”
What the parcel tax did was a few things. First, it renewed Measure A which was set to expire after this school year. Without Measure E, the school district would have had to cut over $3 million from the schools.
Measure E also was protection in case Prop. 30 did not pass. Had Prop. 30 not passed, of course, there would have been about a six-month gap that the district would have had to backfill until the new funding came available in July. Fortunately, we never had to go there.
However, Measure E did not protect us against future shortfalls. Why? Because it did not have any escalator clause in it.
The problem that the district faces is the problem that we have faced all along. The state, while doing better, is not going to deliver a lot of money for wealthy districts like Davis. The result is that, while costs continue to rise because inflation and step and column increases, the state is still not funding COLA (cost-of-living adjustment) for Davis.
The result is that, at some point, Davis will have another structural deficit that they have to deal with. In the spring of 2012, following the passage of Measure C, the district still had about a $3 million structural deficit and when the teachers failed to take concessions, the result was about 50 layoffs.
The district did not hide any of these things from the public. And, in fact, this cycle has continued several times since 2007, so it should come as no surprise that the district will face more cuts in the future if the state does not start funding inflation or what they call COLA.
As we have argued, at some point the district is going to make changes to how they fund programs, because the community is not going to continue to pass parcel tax increases indefinitely.
They were able to get a renewal of three parcel taxes in 2012 – Measure C renewed Measures Q and W and Measure E renewed Measure A, and would have backfilled for the trigger cuts had Prop. 30 not passed.
It is not clear that closing a school is in the works, but that might be necessary, given budgetary considerations and demographics.
Writes Bob Dunning, “If the parcel tax wasn’t going to provide enough money to keep all our elementary and junior high schools open, why weren’t we told that at the time? Why wasn’t a higher parcel tax put on the ballot to keep these schools open?”
These issues did come up at the time, both by the school board candidates and in district responses.
Why was a higher parcel tax not put on the ballot? The district was concerned that they were going too high to begin with. Had Prop. 30 not passed, you were looking at about a $230 increase in the parcel tax. Bob Dunning wanted to go higher than that?
Apparently so.
He writes, “Some will argue that the parcel tax barely gained enough votes as it is. That if the district had asked for more, it would have failed. It’s an unproven theory that with every increased dollar asked for on the ballot a handful more voters will defect. Ask for too much and you automatically lose.”
Instead, he argues, “That’s not necessarily true, especially in a town like Davis where our schools and teachers collectively are universally regarded as a community treasure.”
He adds, “Without a doubt, many of us would have dug even deeper and continued to vote ‘Yes’ had we been told that school closures would almost certainly be on the docket just four months down the road.”
The funny thing is that when the district does put a parcel tax on the ballot, Mr. Dunning spends much of his time trying to shoot holes in it.
But the bottom line is that we knew, or should have known, that if the state did not start funding COLA there would be more cuts. At some point, the voters are going to say no to more parcel taxes.
And this is not an immediate crisis. As we noted, Superintendent Roberson believes that this is not a change that would be even considered until the 2014-15 school year. A lot of discussions need to take place and it is far from clear either that school closures are imminent or that these changes will be enacted.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
We’ve been considering changing the configuration of Davis schools for decades. Just because the recent crop of parents wasn’t aware of the conversation, because it didn’t impact them at the time, or they weren’t living here yet, doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.
Link to Bob Dunning column, It’s a big change that nobody wants ([url]http://www-new.davisenterprise.com/local-news/dunning/bob-dunning-its-a-big-change-that-nobody-wants/[/url])
[i]”Strangely, no one was talking about adding a fourth year to the high school – and closing elementary or junior high school campuses in the process – when we elected two School Board members four months ago.”[/i]
In the last school board election, some board candidates were basically saying that “everything must be on the table when dealing with budget.” I understood that to mean that school closures were a possibility.
School reconfiguration has a better chance of saving money long term, that can avoid staff layoffs, particularly teachers. But reconfiguration takes more time to pull off than is available in planning for next year’s budget.
[quote]But reconfiguration takes more time to pull off than is available in planning for next year’s budget. [/quote]And, I believe the superintendent and the board have already acknowledged that the SOONEST it could happen is in 14-15.
dunning is guilty of not paying enough attention to what was going on last summer and failing to ask questions now. if he had, he would have seen the discussion from last summer when richard harris was proposing a $600+ parcel tax. he was talked down to the $444 primarily from concerns that the community would be reluctant to support it. everyone knew at that time, the parcel tax as proposed was not going to prevent the need for cuts. the district has never been skittish about saying this.