It’s 2024 – and the district’s work to prepare for the year ahead is underway, with its first budget/organizational meeting on Jan. 4th at 6:30 p.m.
New board members and the change of board president could signal a fresh start with new objectives for the remainder of this school year.
The calendar year ended with a significant shift, the board rescinded the notorious and widely unpopular “Culture of Kindness Resolution” and settled the lawsuit filed nearly 18 months ago with funds from liability insurance. While the district issued a statement admitting that ongoing legal defense of the resolution would perpetuate a distraction from educational focus and create unnecessary expenses, the interim board President Jonas signaled a different response with her own statement, issued outside of district practices.
Many community members expressed hope that the new board members will help shift the focus away from grievance-based issues such as the kindness resolution, and the targeting of individual teachers within the district that we experienced under now former board president, Linda Hausfeld. Hausfeld, together with Jonas, targeted several teachers for investigation and discipline over Diversity Day participation and support, teaching state-approved curriculum in an AP course and stating her pronouns in an email signature, none of which violated policies.
To begin the year, a district board sets out strategic objectives for the district. A strong board would set the objectives and communicate them, as well as communicate the measurements of success for those objectives that can be monitored monthly for performance. No objectives from the board leadership in 2023 were provided to the community, under Hausfeld’s leadership.
The board would benefit from engaging FHSD’s treasurer Alana Cropper, hired into the district in 2018 with 40-years of experience in finance and accounting. Cropper already reports on two strong performance measurements each month that help stakeholders track performance.
The first is dollars spent per student. ($/student) and the second is percent spent year-to-date (% YTD spend). $/student as a metric helps normalize our district’s unique characteristics to a common measurement that allows stakeholders to easily compare our district’s performance against others that might have a different student population or physical footprint. In a recent EdWeek Article, the organization quotes Marguerite Roza, the director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, who states, “More people in the district ought to have greater engagement with those numbers because they can’t weigh in on whether they’re getting full value,” she said. “I think having more eyes on this can potentially surface either better expectations for how we deliver the money, better expectations for students based on what we spend, and new ideas for how we might better deploy the funds and solve the problems that we have.”
A second measure of performance, % YTD spend, helps stakeholders understand the spending run-rate, and can indicate if a district will run out of cash before year-end. Additional information about district finances is available on the district website, here.
The district leadership should prioritize new forms of revenue as well; something that they’ve claimed they’ve made progress on but no significant measurable impact to the $80M+ annual budget has been demonstrated. In addition, to bring revenue from outside the district to offset the ever-increasing pressure on parents for fees, charitable organizations support the schools, and rising taxes due to the state re-evaluation of home values,
This year, the district and the community would benefit from a shift by the board towards learning to manage operations by focusing on these informational measures, and a shift away from hot-button identity politics. This district has hard problems to solve, and a lot of work to do to solve them. As newly-elected board member Jason Simmons stated in an NPR article on 2024 and the year ahead, the new board composition is “a team now” and “our kids are watching”. The ability to focus on delivering against clear and reasonable performance metrics would be a positive change for the 2024 board, and a way to differentiate themselves from the culture created over the last two years and position the district for success in the year ahead.
The meeting on January 4th will be open to the public, and, we hope it will be live-streamed and recorded by the district, per the official notice. We will be providing live blogging coverage in our facebook community group.
