The Aaron Harber Show

Aaron's Real Opinions (Yikes!)

STOP CLOSING PUBLIC SCHOOLS
04-24-03

In a graphic illustration of what is wrong with public educational governance systems statewide, the Board of Education for the Boulder Valley School District proved how out-of-touch the District is with the needs of its students, parents, voters, and the community as a whole when it voted to close two more schools. Base Line Junior High and Mapleton Elementary – two longtime pillars of the Boulder K-12 community – are being added to the list which includes a recent decision to close Washington Elementary (another important community school) -- all to help save the District a total of almost $1 million annually. In a bold move for which it should get substantial credit, the District already is reducing its administrative budget by $2.2 million next school year in its efforts to save money but still needs to find additional savings as its expenses continue to exceed revenues due to declining enrollment (hence, the school closings). The two sets of actions should close the $3 million budgetary gap faced by the District for its next fiscal year.

Sadly, what the Boulder Valley School District is overlooking, are obvious questions about its mission, fairness, and alternatives. Its mission should be to provide the best education possible for its students. That ultimately means providing smaller schools to the communities it serves -- not larger schools. The District should be finding ways to keep small schools open – and open more of them – rather than consolidate schools and make them larger and more impersonal. The fact some schools aren’t bursting at the seams should be seen as a good – not bad -- phenomenon. But, in an effort to maximize efficiency, the Board continues to push a model which has as many students as possible at each school. While this may appear to improve productivity on paper, it doesn’t necessarily result in a better education for kids. In education, "smaller is better" almost all of the time.

The process of how the decisions were made also was terribly unfair – coming with little warning to students and parents, and with absolutely no opportunity for the community to come up with solutions other than closure. The timing of the process made it a fait accompli – justifiably angering the community. This isn’t just a result of poor planning. It’s a function of a Board and an Administration which makes decisions in secret and then implements them in "open" Board meetings after these decisions have been made. That only serves to undermine the process and the credibility of the Board and its Administration. This approach doesn’t build trust -- it destroys it.

At the minimum, these decisions should have been discussed and initially presented in public a year or two ago. These budgetary issues are not new and the District should have been on top of this situation long ago. Either it was not in command of the facts or else it intentionally delayed delivering the bad news. Either scenario does not reflect well on the District.

The community should have been given this information much earlier so it could have had the opportunity to use the intervening time to come up with innovative solutions. This is where the Board and the Administration failed the most. If the community, the Board, and the Administration had teamed up but ultimately failed to find a solution, there would at least have been near unanimity on the closing decisions – hence, avoiding the uproar which has occurred. The Board had a chance to forge a consensus on the closings but chose an inflammatory and divisive path – forced on it, in part, due to the Administration’s ineptness.

The reason the Board and the Administration did not go this route, however, was that they thought a quick end-run around students, parents, and the community would be the fastest and actually least painful way to implement a decision they were not going to change. After all, every student would still have a school and get a good education, right? Just because they were shuffled to a new school wasn’t that big a deal, right? Again, the Board and the Administration ignored the trauma such decisions inflict on students (and parents) simply because they see the cost savings as being more important than the human factors.

This is a common occurrence when board’s allow themselves to become captives of their own administrations. They become too insulated from their constituents. They stop asking the "right questions" and become overly dependent on a single source of information – their administrative staffs. In Boulder, the "right questions" still need to be asked.

NEXT: In Part II of this series, some specific solutions to the current crisis will be proposed as alternatives to closing any schools at all, using the Boulder Valley School District as a model for the thesis that Colorado school districts should be trying to keep and even open more small schools rather than consolidate schools.