BURKEonBOARD

(Oct. 23, 2008) – The Rotary Club’s school board candidates forum is tonight at 7 p.m. in the Little Theater at Farmington High School. Come out and watch. There may be an opportunity (not guaranteed) to submit questions. If you can’t make it, the Farmington Independent will stream the forum live (and archive it for later viewing, too) from their web site.

The Pioneer Press has posted their Farmington school board candidate profiles with Q&As from the candidates. You can read it here. (Conspicuously absent, current school board chair Julie McKnight.)

The Farmington Independent has also published its voters guide with Q&As in today’s issue. It’s not online as of late morning but it be available later. Here are the questions and my answers to the Independent.

1. Why are you the best person to serve on the District 192 School Board?

I won’t presume that I am the best person to serve on the school board, but among the six candidates, I think I’m one of the three best because I ask questions and I seek answers. I am persistent. I understand local government having worked in and around government from the local to the federal level for nearly 30 years as a news reporter, staff member, appointed government official and elected government official.

2. If you could address just one issue as a school board member what would the issue be and how would you address it?

Not a fair question. There’s much more than one issue that needs attention and to reduce it to one is a disservice to the community.

We’re about to open a new, hugely expensive high school that’s left our district mortgaged to the hilt. We have the highest school taxes around. The board has just hired a new bureaucrat at more than $155,000/year while teachers are screaming for classroom computers built in this century. The board says it’s OK to spend $750,000 on artificial turf for the big fancy football stadium attached to the new high school.

Our academic achievement is below the standards set by our neighbors. Four Farmington schools were cited for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under Minnesota’s No Child Left Behind program this year. Meanwhile, the district is busy taking over recreation programs run the by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.

There’s no shortage of challenges facing the next board, but the one big challenge is refocusing all our attention on doing a better job teaching our kids. The board and administration have spent the last five years distracted by Sportsplexes and new school buildings, ancillary programs, bond and levy referenda that have take their collective eye off the real job—education. It’s time to refocus.

3. What criteria would you use to determine whether the school district is succeeding?

The closest thing we have to objective criteria for judging the success of our schools is the state’s MCA-II tests—an imperfect tool to be sure. But it does give a useful measure of how we compare to other school districts, particularly our neighbors. That measure shows us to be below the standards set by our neighbors, particularly in the higher grades. Our first goal should be to raise ourselves at least to be the best among our neighbors.

4. Communication has been a topic of conversation lately in the district. Do you think the district does a good job communicating with residents?

No.

Where do you think it can improve?

The district, board and administration, needs to be more candid about our problems, particularly academic achievement, and do a better job explaining how it is trying to solve these problems. In this case, the issue is not how many newsletters it sends out or columns it gets printed in local papers. It is about the content of the communications. This district has a credibility gap with its constituents and it has done many things in the past two years to make that gap worse instead of better. The district’s communications problem can only be solved with candor.

5. School districts have to balance a need to serve their students with a desire to keep taxes low. What would your priorities be when setting the district’s budget?

We are the highest taxed school district in the area. That has to end. It’s bad for our residents and it harms us when businesses consider locating in Farmington and they can find less expensive places to locate immediately beyond our borders.

We need to set clear priorities that our spending must go to efforts that demonstrably benefit academic outcomes. We need to forgo other spending as much as possible.

6. What do you think the Farmington School District does well?

We have a great group of teachers, almost all of whom I have met personally I would be happy to have teach my kids.

What would you like to change?

If we have good kids, good families and good teachers, we need to figure out where the problem really lies. By process of elimination, the issue is not in the school buildings. So it must be in the administration. We need to carefully evaluate our administrative structure, our command and control, if you will. We need to evaluate our administration not on process but on outcome.

For instance, the school board recently gave the superintendent a five star annual evaluation. Clearly, they are measuring unimportant criteria if they can give such a glowing evaluation in the face of such poor academic achievement in a district that taxes its residents so heavily.