I was invited by Kevin Myles, president of the Wichita Branch of the NAACP, to participate in a community mini-debate series about the proposed Wichita school bond issue. Lynn Rogers, president of the Wichita school board, also participated.
You can read the questions and answers in the post What YOU need to know about the Proposed School Bond Issue.
Thank you to Mr. Myles and the local NAACP branch for this public service.
At the August 25, 2008 meeting of the board of USD 259, the Wichita public school district, John Todd and I addressed the board members, asking that they exercise their veto power over the formation of a tax increment financing (TIF) district recently created by the City of Wichita. My remarks may be read in the post Wichita School District: Don’t Give Up Your Tax and Revenue Base.
At issue is the Wichita school district giving up its claim to tax revenue from possible future development surrounding the downtown Wichita arena. As is usually the case with TIF districts, confusion reigns. That works to the benefit of politicians, bureaucrats, and political entrepreneurs (those are the taxpayer-subsidized downtown developers), but against the interests of citizens.
At its core, the arithmetic of property taxation is simple. There’s the assessed value of all the property within the boundaries of USD 259. Then there’s a mill levy, or tax rate. Multiply the two, and that’s how much tax revenue the district is entitled to receive. (Collecting that is a different matter. According to USD 259’s comprehensive annual financial report, the district does quite well, usually collecting over 97% of the tax it imposes.)
But there are some restrictions imposed by the state of Kansas, and evidently these restrictions are difficult to understand. I say this because Linda Jones, chief financial officer for USD 259, postponed a presentation until she could “receive clarifications from the state,” as reported in the Wichita Eagle story School district to leave TIF debate up to city, county.
This postponement uncovers a problem. If the Kansas school finance system is so complex that the chief financial officer of the state’s largest school district — someone paid $116,055 per year with a staff to assist — doesn’t have command of the mechanism, the system is not serving us well. It means that ordinary citizens can’t understand how things work without devoting extensive study to the issue. It also means that legislators and journalists probably don’t understand the full workings of the system. School finance, then, is understood by only a handful of politicians and bureaucrats in Topeka. And, you can be sure, by a handful of taxpayer-funded lobbyists for school districts that work the system to their advantage.
The Wichita school board had another reason for postponing action. By its next meeting, the window of time for the board to take action vetoing the formation of the TIF district will have closed. Board president Lynn Rogers told John Todd that there will be a presentation about TIFs at the board’s next meeting. But by then, it will — conveniently — be too late for the board to take action on the downtown arena TIF district. Does Rogers understand this, I wonder?
There is another TIF district that the city of Wichita approved that can be considered for veto at the school board’s next meeting. I’m going to ask that this matter be placed on the board’s agenda for discussion and a vote. I have no idea if I will be successful. But this will be a good test as to whether the Wichita school district is willing to address issues squarely and transparently, or dodge them as it did last night.
Wichita’s mysterious “Boondoggler” posted today that George Fahnestock, the businessman selected to lead the campaign for the proposed bond issue for USD 259, the Wichita public schools, doesn’t live in the Wichita school district. The post is Fahnestock’s Motivation? A map of his house, along with school district boundaries, may be viewed here.
Earlier this year, USD 259 board members Lynn Rogers and Kevass Harding made an issue of the fact that a mailing address used by Citizens For Better Education, an anti-bond group, was in the Maize school district. A “fact check” sheet on USD 259’s website raised the same issue. You can almost feel the glee school district officials must have felt when they learned this.
So when it turns out that the celebrity spokesman for the bond issue doesn’t live in the Wichita school district, I wonder what the board’s reaction will be.
To me, it’s not a very substantive issue. There are many more important reasons to oppose this bond issue. But it raises these questions:
Shouldn’t a celebrity spokesperson for an issue at least be able to vote on the issue? Fahnestock, by not living within the boundaries of USD 259, isn’t eligible to vote for the bond issue.
Then, what is Fahnestock’s motivation for wanting the bond issue passed? As part or whole owner of two companies that work in the heating and air conditioning field, would that be any motivation?
Why is business support for this bond issue so weak that a businessman who lives within the district can’t be found to speak up for the bond?
Talking to news media during a break in the meeting of USD 259, the Wichita public school district, on Monday August 11, 2008, Connie Dietz referred to her surprise motion to increase the amount being asked for by $20 million, remarking “I knew what I wanted to do, and I guess I was trying to find the courage to do it.”
Personally, I want to take Ms. Dietz at her word when she says that her motion was unplanned. But I’ve talked to quite a few people in the community, and no one I’ve talked to believes that the board’s action at Monday’s meeting was not scripted in advance. I can understand how people might feel this way. The interplay between the actions of a citizens group and the board this summer rightly heaps suspicion on both groups, not to mention on Schaefer Johnson Cox Frey Architecture, who many suspect is really directing the action in this drama. This architectural firm has a huge financial incentive for passing the largest bond issue possible.
But here’s my question: I wonder why it took courage to make this motion. After all, it’s for the “kids, kids, kids,” as board president Lynn Rogers said. And according to news reports, the district started with a list of $550 million in needed items, and then cut that down to the $350 million originally proposed for this bond issue. So this motion gets things closer to what the district believes it really needs.
So why the need for courage? Why stop at $370 million?
Could it be that Ms. Dietz realizes that the way the Wichita public schools raise money is through the force of government coercion?
Could it be that Ms. Dietz realizes the Wichita school district already has a tremendously large budget by any measure, and that asking for more would appear greedy?
Coould it be that Ms. Dietz has become aware of the Wichita school district’s monopoly on the use of public money for education, and how harmful this is to Wichita schoolchildren?
In an article in the June 27, 2008 Wichita Business Journal (Passage of 2000 school bond issue highlights Brooks’ legacy in Wichita), reporter Josh Funk makes another error. (The first error is explained in Wichita Business Journal: Where is the Increasing Enrollment in Wichita Schools?)
In this case, Mr. Heck claims, in his tribute to departing USD 259 (Wichita public school district) superintendent Winston Brooks, that “He leaves Wichita before resolution of a $350 million bond issue, but his legacy as superintendent will be the passage of another bond issue — this one for $284.5 million — eight years ago that bailed out a city from a depressed post-9/11 economy while making necessary improvements to the school district.”
Mr. Heck must be relying on reporting from his own newspaper, for a few months ago it printed the article “Brooks: Bond issue possible in spring” (December 28, 2007 Wichita Business Journal) in which Brooks and Joe Johnson, head of the school district’s architectural firm Schaefer Johnson Cox Frey Architecture say that the bond issue in 2000 did, indeed, save Wichita.
This is nonsense of the highest order. Government spending cannot create prosperity. Borrowing against future tax revenue only compounds the problem. See Wichita School Bond Issue Economic Fallacy.
The Wichita Eagle let its guest columnist make the same mistake when Wichita school board member Lynn Rogers tried to make the case that the 2000 bond issue was an economic benefit to Wichita. See Wichita School Bond Issue Impact Is an Illusion for discussion.
Listen to an audio broadcast of this article here.
I recently learned that USD 259 (the Wichita, Kansas public school district) considers it a burden when citizens make requests for records. At least that’s what Lynn Rogers, vice-president of the board of USD 259, told me at a May 12, 2008 meeting when I was invited to express concerns regarding my opposition to the proposed 2008 bond issue. I suspect the other board members and administration officials agree with him.
As a government institution, the Wichita public school district is subject to the Kansas Open Records Act, which requires it to respond to citizen requests for information. The ability to smoothly and competently, with a minimum of fuss, provide records to any requesting member of the public is a core competency that we should routinely expect of a public agency.
It is not the fault of a member of the public if a government agency is thrown into disarray by a few public records requests; rather, that suggests that the agency has not yet developed a professional competence in records archiving and management. The budget of the school district is $544,384,275 a year (2006-2007 school year). If they spent 0.01% of that on records management, the annual amount available for records management and retrieval would be $54,438.
I’d encourage the Wichita school district to follow the practice of District 300 in Illinois, which not only provides copies of records requested in a professional manner but posts all records requests and records retrieved under those requests on its own website, so anyone can see them. In this way the effort of the district to produce records is leveraged, and more citizens can become aware of school district information. The Illinois District 300 site may be viewed here: The District 300 Freedom of Information Act Online Program.
In order for school districts to effectively educate their students there must be a strong bond of trust between the school and its stakeholders in the community — parents, students, taxpayers, and district employees. These bonds of trust are undermined when the school district carps about providing records to the very public with whom it needs to build strong bonds. No better example of this is the scolding that interim superintendent Martin Libhart delivered to me at the May 12 meeting. “We do know how many classrooms we have, I can assure you of that,” he said. So Mr. Libhart, why not share those numbers with us?
Wichita school district officials say they want to be held accountable. Responding to records requests is one way for them to fulfill that desire. But the district’s attitude when faced with requests filed by citizens reveals a different attitude.
As Randy Brown recently wrote in The Wichita Eagle: “Without open government, you don’t have a democracy.” I rely on a greater authority, Thomas Jefferson, who said: “The same prudence, which, in private life, would forbid our paying our money for unexplained projects, forbids it in the disposition of public moneys.”
Recently Lynn Rogers, a USD 259 (Wichita public school district) board member, made this statement: “I know there are kids from many Catholic schools that have come to public schools when the Catholic schools have kicked them out.”
This attitude reflects a common perception or myth: that private and religious schools kick out the misbehaving students they don’t want to deal with. Since the public school system, by law, must accept them, these problem students are a reason why the public schools have such a difficult task. So goes the story, anyway.
I have read that this perception is false, so I decided to do some investigation on my own. The Kansas State Department of Education website can supply the number of students expelled from schools each year, not only for the public schools, but for some private and religious schools too.
As it turns out, the average number of students expelled from the Wichita Catholic Diocese schools is a little less than five per year. The Diocese covers an area much larger than Wichita, and presumably some of these expelled students didn’t live within the boundaries of USD 259. Given that, plus the fact that there just aren’t very many students expelled from the Catholic schools each year, accepting them can’t be much of a burden to a large school district like the Wichita public schools.
The statistics I looked at are revealing in another way: expulsions, adjusted for the number of enrolled students, are much more frequent in the Wichita public schools. For the eleven years shown in the following table, the Wichita public school system expels students at a rate nearly ten times higher than does the Wichita Catholic Diocese.
I wonder if the USD 259 board member who made the statement quoted at the beginning of this article is ignorant of these facts. Or perhaps the board member simply believes, without critical thought or investigation, the myths told about public schools. Or perhaps there is another explanation.
In an article published in the April 10, 2008 issue of The Bond Buyer newspaper, USD 259, the Wichita public school district, vice president Lynn Rogers is quoted as follows:
School board vice president Lynn Rogers said he supported the delay, but believes the bonds will be approved whenever the election is held.
“I don’t think if will make any difference if we have an election in May, in August, or in November,” he said.
“I’ve had 20 sessions with groups in the past couple of weeks, and nobody has been negative, except those from the anti-bond groups who always show up,” Rogers said. “I don’t think this delay is going to affect us.”
I have a few questions:
If Mr. Rogers believes the bond issue will be approved no matter when the election will be held, then why did he vote for the delay? His board as well as the staff and superintendent of USD 259 vigorously argued for the special election to be held in May. Why? The district claimed large savings would accrue from the early election. Also, an August or November election would delay the opening of a proposed high school by one full school year.
If Mr. Rogers believes the bond issue will be approved by voters on any election date, why is he willing to forgo these cost savings? And why is he willing to delay the opening of a high school by one year? Or were these facts they used to make their case really just fiction?
The board of USD 259 and the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Education, a group supporting passage of the bond issue, also claim that a delay is needed so that they have time to make their case to the voters. According to Sarah Olson, co-coordinator of CARE: “We don’t think there is sufficient time available to adequately inform Wichita voters on the merits of the bond issue.” But both she and Mr. Rogers claim that the response they received from groups they’ve been to is positive.
So why, again, the need for the delay and the loss of the savings we were told only an early May special election would bring?