Wiley in numbers

Note: I contacted the Board and the Superintendent asking for comments or objections to this post. They did not provide any.

So, now Wiley. Two months after the district managed to avoid turning Leal school into a dual language castillo, the administration is at it again, with all the attendant drama.

I will bracket out most of the human component of it, and focus on the numbers. Numbers with the $ sign in front of them.

The premise of the whole story is the obvious need to clean Wiley school from asbestos. This is an uncontroversial project, – better done sooner than later, at a cost (see the district’s slide deck) of about $1.5-2 millions. A nontrivial amount, sure, but not something awe inspiring, given the district’s budget tops $100,000,000. Still, the district might need to borrow a bit.

And borrowing is easy! A few years ago, Champaign county voters¹prodded by the relentless propaganda on height of property taxes in Illinois increased their sales tax by 1%, – specifically to fund school capital projects and various safety undertakings (like hiring policing force). Besides being regressive and impacting our poorest citizens the most, the sales tax has the advantage that one can use it as the bond collateral without asking the citizens. (Bonds backed by the property taxes require a referendum.)

No wonder the district’s admins love that tax, and the contingent borrowing opportunities. To share the joy, they asked a bond underwriter, a St. Louis company called Stifel, to explain how good these bonds are.²Forced by federal disclosure rules, Stifel says, in small print, that their love for bonds is not entirely altruistic, and that the advice they give is biased by their healthy lust for profit. The administration couldn’t be bothered less. Stifel obliged (if anything, their job is to make money for themselves, and they make money off the fees and commissions on the debt they help to sell). As a result, in their assessment, “additional funding for Wiley can be produced by a sales tax backed bond in the amount of between $12-25 million at any point the District is ready to proceed.”

$12-25 million! Like a teenager who missed his Home Economics class, the administration rushed into fantasies of what can be done with this kind of money. The list of ideas overwhelms: International Baccalaureate! Balanced Calendar! Magnet School or STEAM/Math Academy! Fine Arts Academy!… (And why not, indeed, – from the Urbana Middle School, rated Comprehensive,³i.e. among worst 5% in Illinois straight into the International Baccalaureate track, whichever this means.) Of course, the dear to our hearts Dual Language Whole School is on the option list as well.

And so, the administration pressed the pedal to the floor to close the deal and to start the Wiley Project. Never mind that its scope is uncertain, or that the timeline is breakneck (the HR matters have to be settled by March 1st, to start with, and the kids assigned to new schools before the end of the school year, – in three months). They are doing it anyway, and don’t ask us why, we don’t know. (One obvious explanation is the cold reality that the new Board of Education, to start in three short months, might be less pliant than the current one.)

Some small troubles, like the enraged parents and teachers don’t seem to worry the administration much. The Superintendent, Dr. Ivory-Tatum helpfully explained that the panic was caused by the delay in releasing the news (a week ago), done intentionally to avoid panic. The Chief Information Officer, Mr. Gutzmer weighed in that the Wiley students population can be easily accommodated in other district’s schools: to get there they discounted fifth graders (who graduate) from the sum total, but didn’t take into account the incoming students, because who knows how many of them will be there, so let’s just set the number to zero.

The most astonishing datum though is on the slide 21 of the deck: the administrators plan to save $1 million on educational staff salaries and benefits. In other words, the administration plans to address the chronic shortage of teachers by enabling further downsizing.

At this point we should take a break and start seeing this buffoonery for what it is: a dead serious threat to the future of Urbana. The district can live without an International Baccalaureate program. The district cannot hope to climb out of the hole it dug itself into without a dramatic expansion of the educational budget. We need more teachers and they need to be better paid. We need more trained specialists for speech therapy, dyslexia, other disabilities (that the district refuses to diagnose for, or to recognize, because, surprise, they don’t have the people to do that). We need far better and bigger workforce for special education⁴perhaps not so coincidentally, the Board meeting where the Wiley Project was officially introduced started with a heart-breaking plea from a group of special need parents for desperately needed help. (the stories abound about IEP and 504 plans routinely denied⁵or worse, made into an instrument of coercion: many parents with special need kid are afraid to speak up for fear of being denied access to services. to absolutely clear cases).

All this costs money, and if one wonders, how the district, awash in funds,⁶The district’s per student expenditure is almost twice the national average and way higher than Illinois’ average. still is so miserly when it comes to the educational needs, the Wiley Project is a poster example, – that is how. We commit tax revenue in the decades to come to some fancy, ill-defined, asked for by nobody projects. (To that the district, surely, adds administrative bloat, explosion of patronage jobs, some questionable subcontracting etc, etc, etc.)

The folks in the central office know that large infrastructure projects buy a lot of love to the administrators from men in suits in construction and finance sectors, and favorable mentions in the press. If that costs a couple of dozens of special education kids in any given year to lose their access to services they need, that’s a small price to pay for that love, a tradeoff they accept gladly.

This is the nature of not just this district’s administration (power corrupts, yada, yada,…), – this is the nature of any school administration where the Board of Education allows them to be that way. And that is where the real failure lies: with the Board, the current and the many preceding them. They allowed the district to bloat, abandon any vision, accelerate to an imminent failure.

I predict the current Board of Education will drag their feet and won’t approve this comically poorly conceived Wiley Project. But even that won’t start the healing process. The Board’s charge is to create strategy, and oversee its execution, to ensure that the future of this town, – of the kids raised here, – is bright. One day we will have such a Board. Right now we do not.

Notes

• 1
  prodded by the relentless propaganda on height of property taxes in Illinois
• 2
  Forced by federal disclosure rules, Stifel says, in small print, that their love for bonds is not entirely altruistic, and that the advice they give is biased by their healthy lust for profit. The administration couldn’t be bothered less.
• 3
  i.e. among worst 5% in Illinois
• 4
  perhaps not so coincidentally, the Board meeting where the Wiley Project was officially introduced started with a heart-breaking plea from a group of special need parents for desperately needed help.
• 5
  or worse, made into an instrument of coercion: many parents with special need kid are afraid to speak up for fear of being denied access to services.
• 6
  The district’s per student expenditure is almost twice the national average and way higher than Illinois’ average.