Last Tuesday, the Urbana School District 116 held public hearings on the budget proposal for the next fiscal year. If you live in Urbana, you certainly should’ve heard about it, because it is a big deal. At $109 million of proposed expenditures, it is a third bigger than what the whole town of Urbana spends on parks, police, firefighters, street repairs and what not. As I keep saying, the Superintendent Dr. Ivory-Tatum is the most powerful public official in town, and the impact of her decisions will be with us for the decades to come.
So the public interest was strong, and…
…and you know I’m jesting. Ruth and I (the disruptors) were the sole attendants of the “public hearing,” and, it seems, on a typical year nobody shows up at all.
And it is hard to fault Urbana dwellers for the truancy. The public interactions with the Board (forget the administration) are emphatically one-way. No questions are ever answered, and no feedback is ever provided. The fake performative procedure mandated by the Open Meetings Act; something like the Duma of the modern Russian state, a facade of participatory democracy which nobody bothers to take seriously. (But even that is becoming too burdensome: the Superintendent aired the idea of limiting public participation, so in the case when too many people feel passionate about a topic, you could cut them short, to have it easy on our busy public servants.)
Taking discussion out of public hearing is just the first line of defending the district’s budget from real scrutiny. One can also make the budget as hard to parse as possible. And one does! The tools are standard: you release pdfs in lieu of the spreadsheets, you mix and match the rubrics, you insert typos making search hard (how many ways to spell liaison do you know? the district uses also liasion and laison; coordinators, – there are a lot of them! – appear in arbitrarily shortened forms) and so on…
We are not nitpicking here. Making the budget messy doesn’t just raise the threshold to the citizen’s rights to know how their resources are spent. It also allows to potentially hide questionable practices, like patronage. I wrote already about a bizarre case where out of $80K worth grant aimed to help homeless schoolkids, $55K were spent on the salary of a coordinator of this effort. Similarly, in the current budget, out of $179K allotted to a mentoring program, $155K go to the DIR & COOR of the program. It surely can be good allocation, but then, who knows, it can also be just a good position for a good friend. When the water is murky, piranhas and goldfish look the same.
Working through any large org budget is hard; doing it when obfuscation is one of the rules of the game is harder tenfold. Ruth, heroically, worked out some of the issues here.
I, meanwhile, will focus on the big picture, which is grim. The district spends tons of money, and it spends it poorly. Our per student expenses are higher than average whichever sample you choose, and the outcomes are worse.
But this is not the worst part here. The worst part is that we have no idea, why the district performs so poorly. An honest, by the numbers, analysis is needed of how we allocate very sizeable resources, and where we squander them.
This is just not happening. The district made extreme data reticence its operational procedure. If they cede any performance indicator, it is invariably in a hard to read shape, often inconsistent with other documents, always with gaps. Some of this aversion to data is quite principled (say, the thesis of Dr. Wiemelt, one of the many Directors in the district, insists throughout that numbers do not give you the whole picture, and therefore… should be de-emphasized). Some of it is just the usual desire of the bureaucracies to hide anything that does not reflect on them well.
However you slice it, we are endangering the future of our kids who will miss, – are missing! – the education that would give them full, interesting lives. And we are doing it in a most bizarre fashion, by paying high taxes (which is good! we need to invest a lot in public education), but immediately forgetting to pay any attention, to how these monies are spent.
Take it from a foreigner: this sounds very un-American to me.
Ruth’s Statement Notes for the USD116 Budget Public Hearing on 9.6.
- Tentative budget assumptions, item 9: there is a new admin position of “Executive Director of Secondary Multilingual & Alternative/Inclusionary programs.”
First – this administrative position is redundant since we already have a director of Multilingual Programs AND a director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). In addition, no other director position is split into 2 positions, one for elementary and one for secondary school.
Further, last year, the new admin position of the DEI director pushed the increase in administrative costs over the 5% limit. This was discovered only later in the Fall semester and a petition for exemption had to be filed to avoid penalties. This year we should be more responsible… Can the financial officer inform the public what the increase in administrative costs is this year? - In the budget assumptions, the proposed average salary increase for the administration is to match the avg teacher’s salary increase (which is 2.8%). This does not seem appropriate: The teachers salary increase is part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and it includes the increase due to doing extra course work.
The administration salaries are not part of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Our administrative cost per student is in the top 20% in IL, with our administrators being paid well above the IL avg school-district admin salary, while our teachers are being paid far below the Illinois average teacher salary. For this reason, perhaps the avg salary increase for the administration should be lower than that of the teachers. - There are a couple of unexplained unusual expenses on the proposed budget:
- On P. 63, under EMPOWER GRANT: There is ~$170,000 for “SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT AND INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS” for Dr Williams only and not to any of the other elementary schools.
- On p. 118, under “BUILDING IMPROVEMENTS”, Leal stands out, with expenses of $275,000. This is much higher than the other elementary schools, with at most $25,000 expenses.
- One might wonder if these unexplained large expenses directed only at Leal and Dr Williams, are for the administration’s plan to turn Leal into a Dual Language school and to swap student population between Leal and Dr. Williams (or vice versa).