TL/DR: Reelecting me makes continued use of my talents and commitment to the LRSD.
My little medical hiccup has thrown me off stride and has flattened the rhythm of my campaign for reelection to the Little Rock School District Board of Directors. But that won’t determine the outcome of this race. The outcome will also not hinge on “celebrity” endorsements (many made by people who don’t know me and a great many that haven’t been to a school board meeting in over twenty years). The outcome will depend on which candidate can show the voters of LRSD’s Board Zone 4 that they won’t have a steep learning curve on hitting the ground in March.
I think much of the first year of a board member’s term is spent in learning what they can and can’t do with the people they are working with. Time must be spent getting to know his or her fellow board members and their internal culture. And time must be spent in getting to know the board’s direct report, the superintendent. No one runs for political office of any sort without having a pretty healthy sense of one’s own importance. And no one takes the job of superintendent of a school district of the size and complexity of LRSD without some of that same confidence.
My sense of confidence and ego come from this: I know the LRSD. No I didn’t attend LRSD 25 or 30 or 50 years ago. But my daughter is an LRSD graduate (Parkview ‘80) and I have lived in Little Rock all my adult life and have been connected with the district in one way or another since 1987, coming up soon on 40 years. I served on the Board from 2000-2006, the last gasp of board stability until the current era. I am an historian who has written about the district. I know where it has been, where it is now, and where it is likely to go in the future. And I know how it got to each of those places.
I know that politics and governing are often called arts of compromise. I know how to seek consensus; I’ve been formally trained in how it’s done. And I know when a principle is too important to be compromised.
I know that in any public service business such as a school district that it is the customer who determines the quality of their interactions with the business. The Board and the administration and the faculty and staff can all be certain they are delivering the highest quality services, but if what the parent is expecting is up here and what they are getting is down here, something has got to be re-explored and quickly. This applies to internal customers as well. Teachers have certain expectations of admin, the Board has expectations of the superintendent and the superintendent of the board, etc. The determination of customer satisfaction and quality service is not made by the service provider.
It is important for voters, when casting their vote, to know that the Board has put your money where their mouth is. It is no doubt disheartening for all involved from student to parent to teacher all the way across the chains of responsibility for a child to be unable to read on grade level. The State is also concerned that the money they provide for the teaching reading be used well. So, intense testing and timely interventions in the teaching/learning cycle are made. The law requires that the board hear a report on some aspect of classroom intervention at every board meeting and the board is held responsible by the state for providing a curriculum that addresses everyone’s concerns (see the previous paragraph about who determines the quality of those kinds of interactions).
The Board has also spent the public’s money on a not-quite-completed audit of our special education programs. State money for special ed is shrinking, yet the costs for it, at least in the LRSD, is increasing. And the percent of every dollar that the district spends overall is also going to increasing special ed costs because those kids don’t leave the district. A larger and larger part of our overall student population is drawing on special education services. Private schools and charter schools don’t have to accept these students and the district is required to provide special education programs for home-schooled students.
As the district loses students -- a problem that is nation-wide in scope, driven by national “parental choice” politics -- it loses state funding. Leaving aside the unconstitutional idea of vouchers or “freedom accounts,” as the student population falls, so do the dollars from the State. It doesn’t take much cogitation to see that public school districts quickly come out on the losing end of the idea of economies of scale. A $300, 000 program might reach 3,000 kids. It does not follow that 2500 kids will only need $250, 000 for that same program. So as money from the State contracts but the demand for services grows, the district has to face a cascading series of difficult, often no-win situations.
The most obvious action to take would be to increase the district’s income. Not so easily done. Grants are not always easy to come by (particularly in our current national climate in regards to education) and they don’t last forever. Millage increases (the property taxes that are paid by property owners to the district) can only be increased by a majority vote of the district’s qualified voters and that can also be very difficult if your families have taken their kids out of the district’s schools. And, costs depend heavily on personnel (more about this later) and again, the rates don’t match up. Losing 20 out of 100 kids could quite easily not be made up by cutting 20% of the work force, and gaining 10 kids could easily require adding more than 10% to the payroll.
Another sensible approach is to increase the number of students in the district – or at least maintain what we’ve got. And the district has commissioned a sophisticated communications/public relations plan with lofty goals, with this very idea in mind. But remember what I said about cascading hard decisions? Planning costs money, and executing a plan costs even more.
It is important to know that any public-facing, public services-offering business has most of its operating funds caught up in personnel costs: salaries, benefits and professional development. For budget cutting to have any real impact for LRSD, there must be personnel reductions.
And, undoubtedly the hardest of the hard decisions that must be faced is the simple fact that we have more school than kids. If the student population continues to fall, and it is projected to do so for at least another couple of years, there will have to be personnel cuts and, perhaps, more schools closed. To help in making those hard decisions, the Board has adopted a school staffing formula that determines how many teachers, assistant principals, library aides, etc. that each school will be assigned for its given population. At the K-8 level these formulations are somewhat simpler than they are for the high schools where student course choices have a large effect on what will be taught each year, and therefore, how many teachers will be needed for what courses.
Oh, and to address a concern that is often heard from classroom teachers and parents, that our district is administratively top-heavy, for at least the last couple of years deep cut have been made at the administrative level. Yes, we closed schools and reduced the umber of faculty, but similar cuts have been made away from the classrooms as well.
This letter is to let you know that I (and the rest of the Board) have not made capricious decisions regarding your schools. We collect data, analyze it and try to make the most efficient use of your money. I am the candidate who won’t have to learn the details of where the district is currently and where it needs to go.
Note that a person can easily reach consensus and even compromise and remain ethical. However, there are principles that sometimes don’t lend themselves to less than the most faithful devotion. I will never compromise on the safety of LRSD’s community. I will never let better or lesser services or opportunities be offered to any child on the basis of gender, race, religion or economic background.
The central tenets that I use in my own life are the same that I apply to my governing responsibilities as a member of the Little Rock School District Board: I will do all I can to eliminate suffering (strength), to pursue the truth (courage), and secure the future for our children and their planet (hope).
Sincerely, and with a request for your vote on March 3rd,
Tony R. Rose
Little District School Board of Directors /, Zone 4
