Last night’s ostensibly urgent School Board meeting at Lin Howe School died an abrupt, and quite indistinguished, death two hours along when member Scott Zeidman summarily announced he was not voting on budget cuts.
He promptly explained why:
The required data needed for casting an informed vote had arrived far too late for proper absorption, a mere 30 minutes in advance of the meeting when members were otherwise distracted.
The rough interpretation of responses from each of Mr. Zeidman’s four School Board colleagues was, “Me, too.”
And so the next sound heard was the gurgling of the evening dribbling down the nearest drain, on into the Meeting Cemetery.
To condense a heavily wonkish, thoroughly bureaucratized evening:
At last week’s regularly scheduled Board meeting, members complained that, when asked to impose dozens of personnel and programmatic cuts to satisfy requirements for a budget that was not yet final, they were flying blind.
What Does This Mean?
Owing to the amorphous lexicon of contemporary public education, they said they did not understand abbreviated job titles that had been handed to them. They requested a rolled-out description of responsibilities for each of the positions they were asked to consider eliminating or reducing.
President Jessica Beagles-Roos, Dr. Dana Russell, Saundra Davis, Steve Gourley and Mr. Zeidman will devote part of the next 6 days to digesting and parrying upwards of 50 pages of documents prior to next Tuesday night’s regularly scheduled School Board meeting.
With a state-mandated budget deadline staring at them, Board members are expected to execute between $3 million and $4 million worth of people and programming cuts at the meeting.
As for last night, about 150 community members formed the anxious, curious audience. All had their say, but many went away unsatisfied a little after 9 o’clock. Some still wondered what the meeting’s objective had been.
Taking the Plunge, but When?
One of the most informed persons in the room was Alan Elmont of the Community Budget Advisory Committee, He was prominent among those who went away disappointed. He has invested perhaps hundreds of hours in probing the structure of the School District, in search of soft-landing cuts or layoffs that the committee could recommend to the School Board.
Frustrated that no action was taken, although he understood and agreed with the reason for demurring, Mr. Elmont said, “They are just delaying the inevitable.”
Reasons for Failure
Besides the late-arriving job data, Board members said there were other reasons last night’s hurriedly — and mysteriously —organized assembly fizzled.
Entering the Lin How campus, at least some Board members did not know what they were supposed to do. They did not know the plan for the meeting, whether they were expected to vote on the second round of budget cuts or merely to assimilate parent/teacher testimony.
Mr. Zeidman, who has a driving force on the Board, said there was a further complication.
The body of information on which last week’s decisions were based, had been scrambled and changed for this week’s iteration.
He said the elaborate re-arrangement of already dense information, and the subtraction of some vital data, turned last night’s worksheets into impenetrable forms that defied quick study and caused abiding confusion.
One of the critical changes from the week before that severely irked dozens of persons in the crowd was the School District office’s subtraction of the names of two administrators who had been on the vulnerable list, Leslie Green and Andrew Sotelo.
Squeezing Salaries
The office of Supt. Dr. Myrna Rivera Cote did not explain why they were rescued from the vulnerable list any more than the tardy arrival of the job-description documents..
Two of the most forthright persons in the room who thought that voluntary salary reductions, across the entire personnel spectrum, was a capital idea were the activist Roger Maxwell and Teachers Union President David Mielke.
Each had a different take. Mr. Mielke, for example, was in no mood to give back. He calculated that his 325-plus membership did that in the latest round of contract negotiations by accepting a smaller-than-expected pay raise. Now he believed it was the turn of the District’s higher-ups to improve rank-and-file morale by making their own sacrifice.
Another option is Mr. Zeidman’s innovative, oft-expressed desire to slightly increase K-through-3 class sizes as a source of ongoing, permanent revenue.
A highly successful entrepreneur, he has brought his considerable skills in the commerce universe to the School Board, and he has been applying them industriously for the past year and a half.
He devotes uncommonly large chunks of his days to poring over ways to skirt layoffs.
Surrounded by worksheets and his trusty calculator, he has devised an ambitious, imaginative formulation by which the School District can make the necessary fiscal contractions without losing a single person.
It strongly involves increasing the sizes of the lowest classes by two students, a recipe that would increasingly reap fresh state funding.
Will the plan be too radical for Mr. Zeidman’s School Board colleagues?
