A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

SB 83: Mandatory Public Comment at School Board Meetings

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Sen. Leising (the quixotic cursive crusader) has introduced SB 83 which mandates the opportunity for public comment at school board meetings. This is a reaction to the measures taken by school boards to deal with pro-COVID parents who objected to the idea of having to work with the community to limit the spread of COVID. Some members of the public not only disagreed with mask policies, they turned abusive and belligerent. When the Public Access Counselor was asked about how public bodies could comply with the Open Door Law and still get business done when civility broke down, the PAC observed that public comment was not required by the Open Door Law and eliminating the public comment period was one tool that boards could use when necessary.

[N]othing in the Indiana Open Door Law guarantees or even mentions the right  to participate in the proceedings of a governing body much less interrupt…[G]overning bodies can choose whether to extend the courtesy of a  comment forum, and therefore revoke it if misused. Tumult, disorder, and disturbance on the part of the audience should not be tolerated by a board, council, or commission.  This office does, and will always, advocate for a meaningful public comment opportunity  at public meetings, if practical. Ultimately, however, a public comment forum during a  meeting is a privilege and a courtesy extended by a governing body to the public.

Sen. Leising’s bill does not have much to say about the public comment period she would require school boards to provide. Certainly, it does not give schools any tools to deal with interruption, tumult, disorder, or disturbances. This legislation could be read as a sanction for using such tactics as a means by which to influence public policy. By the same token, however, the legislation says nothing about rules the school board could use to regulate the public comment period. “You have ten seconds and comment must be germane to agenda items. Go!”  Any rules on public comment used to ensure order is maintained will no doubt be decried as tyranny. But, I suppose once everything is tyranny, then nothing is tyranny.

My Remarks to the West Lafayette Community School Board on the subject of new superintendent compensation

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My remarks to the West Lafayette Community School Board, December 13, 2021. The background is that IC 20-26-5-4.3 requires that, prior to entering into a contract with a superintendent, a school board must hold public hearing to take public comment on the proposed contract with the superintendent at least 7 days before entering into the contract. The statute permits the identity of the potential candidate to remain confidential during these negotiations. Because many potential candidates would prefer not to alienate their current employers by having their interest announced in public, this is the process followed by our school board (and, it’s my understanding, by most Indiana school boards.) I offered the following as public comment.

(This transcript is based on my notes and may not have come out as coherently!)   

First of all, thank you all for your work in the superintendent selection process. When the General Assembly adopted the law requiring these hearings a few years ago,  I got the sense that the intent was to put school boards in an uncomfortable position.  Public hearings put downward pressure on superintendent compensation which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  But it’s also part of a theme where the General Assembly makes schools justify every dime spent on public education.

One problem you face is that it’s hard to know what a position like this is actually worth. For example, the Mayor of West Lafayette is a big job that affects us all and pays something like $105,000 plus benefits. I’m a county government guy, so I happen to know that some of our local county elected officials make quite a bit less. On the higher end of the scale, the State of Indiana has set compensation for our judges, prosecutor, and chief public defender at close to $160,000 plus benefits. The Exponent reported that the average salary for Purdue’s top 100 employees was close to $350,000/year. I read in recent news that Purdue’s President was paid something like $900,000 last year. So is the superintendent job more or less valuable to our community than a judge or a professor or mayor? Is it a harder or easier job? That’s tough to say.

We’re proposing to pay this individual a base salary of $160,000 and a total package in the range of $240,000 per year. Is that the right salary? Again, it’s difficult to say. I can Google salaries for various school districts or various kinds of jobs, but ultimately there is enough range in compensation and variety in circumstance that, beyond a certain point, it’s a judgment call as to what the relevant metrics should be.

Should we look at schools with similar numbers of students? Or maybe similar academic performance levels? Maybe districts with similar costs of living?

We can point to schools of a similar size that pay less and we can point to some that pay more. But size is just one variable among many.  Small populations can have big challenges. Ask any teacher how much work 2 or 3 challenging students can add to a classroom. Or, maybe the fact that we’re small means that there is less staff at Central Office and, therefore, the superintendent has to do more of the work.

For my part, my view is that our schools are the heart of our community. We’re asking this person to take a job that’s essentially 24/7. Ideally, the person will move into the community and put down roots. West Lafayette is not the cheapest place to live — in part because of the quality of our schools.

It’s a big job. This is not unlike running a $40 million company.  You have something like 150 teachers plus the administration and support staff required to run a school. Between full and part time, I think that gets close to 500 people all told. And, unlike your average company, every year they have to adapt to the pile of new rules the State throws at them.

We have the best school system in the state, and we want to make it better. The position comes with high expectations and a lot of pressure. That’s worth something in terms of compensation.  As long as the salary is in the ball park, it doesn’t make sense to be penny wise but pound foolish with this decision or to nickel and dime every line item.

Ultimately it’s up to you to make this decision. I’m mindful of the fact that I asked for your job, and I didn’t get it.  I haven’t spent months thinking about the question. I’m sure there are any number of variables I haven’t even considered. I haven’t consulted with Ross or Steve or any of the other people who know about the school’s finances or with folks who have expertise about superintendent compensation.

I’m sure we can find people in the newspaper comment sections who are extremely confident in their ability to make these decisions without putting in that kind of work. People who effortlessly know more medicine than doctors and more law than Constitutional scholars. Undoubtedly, they can run a school system without breaking a sweat. But, I’m not as smart as those people, so thank you to the members of the school board for doing this work.

Behind the Scenes of a Political Campaign

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Usually, you have to find a disgruntled campaign staffer for a behind the scenes look at a political campaign. But, here at Masson-for-School-Board, we run a lean operation. Unless Amy is looking to sell a book, it’s going to have to be me telling the tale. I doubt this will change the vote count very much. With early voting having been under way for the better part of a month, I expect almost anyone interested in reading this has already voted. Maybe something for posterity or of interest to my regular blog readers.

First, the context: I’m a non-incumbent looking to get on the board of a school ranked top in the state which has a teaching staff ranked fourth best in the nation. The current board and administration have largely been in place for ten years or more. The finances and strength of the school are better now than when they took over. For a challenger in a typical political race, the normal approach would be to attack the record of the incumbent. That’s an uphill battle when things are going reasonably well. But, with four slots to fill, the context is a little different; particularly with one of the incumbents not campaigning. It’s fortunate that I don’t have to pursue the standard two-person approach.  Dissatisfaction with the school is not really what I’m about. I’m a huge supporter of our schools, and think I have a skill set that might be valuable in that position. I want to get elected, but if I don’t, the schools will be fine.

The Plan

With that as the background, I made the decision to focus on my experience as an attorney with a background in local government law, my history of volunteering in support of the school, a desire to improve the school by advancing the strategic plan I participated in developing, and my generally friendly demeanor. However, in a crowded down-ballot race, simply having good qualities probably isn’t enough to get elected. In an ideal world, every citizen goes into the voting booth having carefully weighed the pros and cons of each candidate on the ballot before casting his or her vote. In our world, however, there will be a sizable number of voters who go into the voting booth with Trump v. Biden on their mind and will be absolutely befuddled by any school board race, let alone one that presents them with fifteen candidates. Name recognition will be important.

In my mind, the big endorsement available for this race was from the teacher’s association — the WLEA. So, I definitely wanted to pursue that. One of the items on the WLEA interview questionnaire asked whether the candidate would accept PAC money if the candidate received the teacher’s association endorsement. Even though it became a source of consternation later (more on that below), I assume most of the candidates who interviewed for the endorsement stated (as did I) that they would accept such assistance. For my part, in addition to genuinely wanting the support of the teachers, I also wanted assistance in getting some name recognition. The unfortunate political reality is that name recognition probably earns more votes than policy positions or other substantive qualities. I felt, correctly as it turned out, I had a good shot at getting the WLEA endorsement: I had worked shoulder-to-shoulder with a number of WLEA members on such things as the 2017 referendum and strategic plan workshops. And I’ve been a full-throated supporter of their efforts to improve teacher pay, limit diversion of state funds to charters and vouchers, and move away from wasteful high-stakes testing.

The final, and maybe biggest, arrow in my quiver is being married to an inveterate organizer who is also extraordinarily tech savvy. I don’t know if I’ll win or lose, but my wife is a born campaign manager. We put together what feels like a pretty good social media campaign for this kind of race. We’ll see if that translates to votes.

The PAC

One of the big wildcards from this race came from the political action committee I mentioned earlier. If you haven’t heard anything else about this race, you’ve probably heard about the RDP PAC. In a 15 person campaign with no defining issues that seem to encompass all of the candidates, it seems to be the only handle our local news outlets have been able to get in terms of a narrative for the race. They’ve run a couple of stories on it. Sometime between the close of the candidate filing window but before the WLEA endorsements were made, RDP PAC determined to provide money to promote whoever the teacher’s association ended up endorsing. The PAC sent out a ham-fisted fundraising letter that conjured the specter of the 90s when West Lafayette stumbled through a disgruntled school board and the troubled tenure (not to mention litigious termination) of Stella Battagianis. The letter warned ominously that selection of unnamed candidates might  return us to those days. Basically, “send some money in support of whoever the WLEA endorses, and we can keep the good times going. (Don’t send money and the bad old days might return.)” On its own, that letter probably would have been inconsequential. The distribution couldn’t have been very wide. It probably went to some people, but I don’t know anyone who received it in the wild. A PAC campaign finance disclosure revealed about a dozen contributors, and it’s hard to believe many of the names on the list would’ve needed that letter to contribute.

But the letter was not to die in obscurity. Instead, it got a signal boost by a post in a local Facebook group whereupon a sort of Streisand Effect took hold. The act of decrying the letter served to amplify it. And this group made a bit of a meal of the thing. As I mentioned above, given the strength of our schools, I thought it would be challenging to win the race by being very critical of them. I think this PAC letter (as amplified by local news and social media) made that approach more challenging.  Remember that the letter itself was non-committal as to who the scary candidates might be. With so many people running, it could be any of them or none of them in particular. But it created a risk that some of the non-incumbent candidates might self-identify themselves as being analogs of their mid-90s counterparts if they protested the letter too much and/or were perceived as being too critical of the apparently successful West Lafayette schools.

Whether the PAC money itself will prove to be of any use remains to be seen. But, as I write this, its efforts don’t appear to be terribly influential. As of the October filing date, it had spent about $8,000. (The Journal & Courier inflated that number by more than 200%, mistaking the “cash on hand” line item for expenditures.) That money was spent on signs for other candidates (I already had mine from four years ago), some sign-toppers indicating the WLEA endorsement, a four-person sign that doesn’t seem to have wide distribution, and a text to voters urging support of the four WLEA-endorsed candidates. Whether or how it will spend the remainder of the money it raised, I have no idea. Maybe it will blanket the airwaves with ads. Maybe it will give every voter in the district root beer and pie. Maybe it will do nothing. In the final analysis, I might end up taking more of a hit from the WLEA endorsement and its PAC association than I benefit. But, you make your decisions and you take your lumps. We’ll see what happens.

Other Strategies

Other candidates have pursued their own strategies. Many of those approaches, I can’t match, don’t agree with the substance, question the strategic value, or some combination thereof. For example, one candidate has been a juggernaut at sign distribution. If signs win elections, congratulations to her in advance, because I just couldn’t keep pace.

Transparency

Another approach was to focus on “transparency.” A lot of candidates were critical of the school’s COVID re-opening plan. (And, coming as that did during the candidate filing window, I suspect that was the trigger for a lot of our candidates jumping in.) For my part, I thought the school could have done a better job of communicating its thinking and outlining the variables it had to deal with when making its decisions. But, as I write this, the school’s COVID plan has been far more successful than I had anticipated. I think for some candidates, the success of the substance of the COVID plan caused a shift in focus to the more procedural notion of transparency.

From a purely strategic perspective, I think process matters like transparency mostly don’t appeal to constituents unless they are already upset about substantive matters. For example, years ago,  I remember being critical of members of Congress when they stopped  conducting “town halls.” But, truth be told, I never had much interest in those town halls when I approved of what Congress was doing. When that changed, my real concern wasn’t the town hall. I mostly wanted to see members of Congress get yelled at for the substantive things I disagreed with. As a practical matter, “transparency” is an ambiguous term that’s tough for me to embrace before it’s been defined pretty thoroughly. I have a great deal of expertise with Indiana’s public records and open door laws. I’ve won probably dozens of favorable opinions from Indiana’s Public Access Counselor over the last twenty years. I support full compliance with these requirements. But the kind of free-wheeling public meetings that a few of the candidates seem to contemplate (unless I misunderstand the limitations they would impose on the proceedings) just seem too unworkable for me to promote in support of my own campaign. Over the years, I estimate that I’ve attended more than a thousand governmental meetings in one capacity or another. Those meetings need structure to be productive.

By way of analogy, consider a social media group with no moderator. The conversation comes to be dominated by the same handful of people who like to re-visit the same issues. The passionate few tend to drive out or silence the average member, and there’s a tendency toward wheel-spinning. Government-by-YouTube-comment-section is not a recipe for success. To get its job done, a governmental body has to impose structure on its meetings that will be regarded by some percentage of the population as censorship or lack of transparency. There are similarly issues with public records. The law requires some to be public, requires some to be confidential, and gives the governmental body discretion on others. I usually advise clients to err on the side of disclosure. But there is a cost in terms of money and/or labor to sort these documents. If not many people are looking at them, then there’s a real question about the cost/benefit equation to making records available before anyone has asked for them. So, as a practical matter, I’m cautious about embracing “transparency” as a policy without knowing exactly what we’re talking about. And, as a strategic matter, I’m just not convinced it’s a burning issue for a lot of voters.

Teacher Retention

A couple of candidates have tried to make the case that there’s a problem with our teacher retention. This is a tough argument to make for a variety of reasons. First of all, there’s that risk of inadvertently self-identifying with the otherwise unidentified “scary” candidates in the PAC letter. Beyond that, it’s hard to make the case that a teaching staff ranked fourth in the country is all that unhappy. Our teachers are paid better than average and our teacher retention is better than the state average. And, unless you’re very careful about who you name or what statistics you use, you quickly run into the fact that, for example, some of the teachers were very happy at West Side but had to leave for personal reasons, some were just retiring because they’d finished a long and successful career, and there were some that we probably didn’t want to retain for various reasons. Without navigating those shoals very carefully, even meritorious concerns about teacher satisfaction will be overshadowed. As a strategic matter, it gave one of the incumbents an opportunity to elevate his profile by providing facts and figures on the subject.

Teachers everywhere face a challenging situation. I believe the health of our schools depend on us seeking ways to relieve the stressors on teachers, to treat them as professionals, and to give them the space they need to exercise that professionalism. But, inasmuch as the lot of a West Side teacher is probably better than the lot of a teacher in most other parts of the state, it’s tough to score points against the current school administration as part of a school board campaign.

School Finance

School finance is another area where a few candidates have tried to rise above the field. This is a challenging path. Local government finance is, quite frankly, a thicket with snares beset by other snares. For example, schools and other units of local government use a governmental building corporation when they want to issue bonds for construction. One or two candidates got out over their skis when they took notice of the school’s governmental building corporation and called it a “shell company.” I get it. If you haven’t seen it before, it looks fishy. Why the hell would you need a separate corporation to take out bonds and then lease you the new building? But there are historical reasons why basically every unit of local government in Indiana that wants to build something uses these corporations and have done so for probably eighty years. That being the case, coming out strong with a phrase like “shell company” with insinuations that something untoward was involved is bound to backfire.

There were questions about whether past referendum money was spent on debt financing. But that was based on a state document that turned out to have an error. There was the notion that reducing the money coming out of our debt service fund could somehow open up money for operations. But that’s not allowed under state law: money from the debt service tax rate can only be used for capital expenses and the ability to increase the operations tax levy is limited by the State. There was the notion that reducing the money coming out of our debt service fund could at least reduce taxes for West Lafayette taxpayers. But given how our tax cap and circuit breaker system works, reducing debt service taxes would probably serve mostly to give more money to the City of West Lafayette and Tippecanoe County government.  On the upside for me, all of that gave me the opportunity to stretch my legs a little with a blog post about the intricacies of local government finance. Other than my puppy video, that finance post got way more traffic than anything else I’ve done in this campaign.Which shocked me. Because local government finance is, as it turns out, not exciting.

Now the school finance argument has shifted to speculation about whether future payments for construction might possibly require use of referendum funds. But, as the man said, there’s many a slip ‘twixt a cup and a lip. A lot of variables will be at play between now and then, and the folks who have navigated school finances reasonably well for a decade will probably find a way to deal with the next challenge. The potential for disagreeable actions in the future isn’t nearly as compelling as the transgressions originally alleged. And, after all, this construction debt served a purpose: there was a need to build and renovate.

It’s tricky navigation as a campaign strategy to begin with, and the evolving nature of the allegations might make it easy for a voter to tune out.

Knocking on doors and word-of-mouth

I’m not sure if any candidate is knocking on doors, but it’s something I had wanted to do when I originally envisioned running for school board again. Back in 2016, I didn’t knock on any doors, and I lost by four votes. In 2017, campaigning for the referendum, I knocked on a lot of doors. I found out I was good at it, and I liked it. What I didn’t envision was that the 2020 campaign would be in the midst of a global pandemic. Even if I was comfortable going door-to-door (which I’m not), I think the voters who answer the door would be put off by that sort of risky behavior in pursuit of votes. It might well lose me more votes than I gained. Ultimately I decided to take a pass on that campaign strategy.

The biggest wild-card is word of mouth. I can see the stuff that’s taking place online. But, the Internet is not necessarily the same as real life. I saw this play out in the Democratic Presidential primaries. On the Internet, Sanders supporters were legion: they were active, and they were everywhere. In real life, they were rather thinner on the ground. I have no idea how word-of-mouth is going in the West Lafayette school district. Even if I thought I had the pulse of what was being said within the school community, the fact remains that there are a lot of voters with no kids in the school at all. Unfortunately, I don’t have Nate Silver giving me the daily update of polling data in the district. So, my vision of how the race is going may be badly skewed.

Ultimately, I think it’s important to keep in mind that this is a local race with friends and neighbors involved. When this is over, we still need to work with and among each other. We’ll run into each other at the grocery store, in the schools, and on the sidewalks. I know it’s been harder on some folks than others — maybe harder on candidates’ families and friends than on the candidates themselves. It’s easier to take incoming fire yourself than to watch it happening to a loved one. I feel like I’ve had an easier time than most. Maybe years of trading barbs with opposing counsel in litigation has made me numb. Mostly I feel like this has been a positive experience, and all of the support has been humbling. I suppose it’s an inevitable part of campaigning, but it’s still a little weird listening to other people say nice things about you and having them put your sign in their yard.

In any event, that’s some background on how I’ve seen the race. I wanted to write this down before knowing the results colored my impressions. There’s a fantastic chance I’ll be wildly off-base with respect to what I think are winning and losing approaches. With a fifteen person field in a down-ballot race, it’s tough to call any strategy a winner. And, lest anyone forget, I’m the only person who has managed to lose a West Lafayette School Board race in at least 15 years. The only thing I can say for sure is that in the very near future, I will have a lot of company. For now, I’ll cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Red Devil Pride!

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This post isn’t really about how I’d be a better school board member than anyone else. In fact, if anything, this reflects great accomplishments under the current school board. (Not that I’m necessarily looking to oust an incumbent — one of the incumbents is on the ballot but has since decided that he’d rather not serve another term.) It’s about what a strong school system we have and why I want to continue helping it to stay strong.

This week, there were two pretty remarkable stories showing the strength of our system. The first was an October 13, 2020, New York Times story about Cumberland Elementary.The story is about a firefly project Mrs. Samudio, a second grade teacher, worked on from 2015 through 2017 in conjunction with people from Purdue and the Bezos founded Blue Origin rocket company. One of her students asked her whether a firefly would light up in space. She posed the question to a professor she knew at Purdue who suggested that they didn’t have to guess, instead, they could do an experiment:

Following Dr. Collicott’s suggestion, Ms. Samudio’s children at Cumberland got to work, collaborating with Purdue students in Dr. Collicott’s classes.

“For the next two years, I had aeronautical engineers in my second-grade classroom teaching mini-lessons on basic principles of flight and propulsion as well as the basic principles of ‘firefly’ chemistry,” Ms. Samudio said.

On December 12, 2017, an apparatus that replicated the chemistry of how fireflies generate light went up in space. Dr. Collicot attended the launch, and two days later reported that, in fact, fireflies can glow in space.

The second was a NICHES school ranking for 2020 that put West Lafayette Community School Corporation as top in the state & twelfth in the nation, and its teachers as top in the state and number four in the nation. Now, you can pick at this ranking in a bunch of different ways: school rankings are largely proxies for socioeconomic status, West Lafayette benefits from a lot of educated parents, even highly ranked schools might be leaving kids behind. There is validity to all of that, but the fact remains that West Lafayette schools are accomplishing a lot notwithstanding the fact that they start with a lot of advantages. There plenty of school districts in the country with more money than us who are, nevertheless, below us in the rankings.

Even while we search for our problem areas and seek to make them better, we should not forget to take pride in the school system we’re building and give credit where it is due. Sometimes, I think folks are hesitant with praise – even where it’s appropriate – because they think that might breed complacency. But the flip side is that despair has a tendency to slip in if we don’t praise the praiseworthy. (“Nothing’s ever good enough. Why try?”)

We’re part of a very special school system in which we can take pride, and we should never take that for granted. If elected to the school board, I intend to remain cognizant of that fact, taking care to maintain what we have even as we seek to make improvements where we fall short. As the saying goes, “examine all things; hold fast to what is good.”

West Lafayette School Board: Quick Campaign Finance Report

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Just a note in case anyone wants to know about the big money being spent on my School Board race. The campaign finance rules for school board state that you don’t have to file a report unless you receive more than $500 or spend more than $500. I’ve done neither. But, if someone wants to know the extent of my finances:

On the expenditure side, I’ve spent just under $165 on Facebook and Instagram ads.

My share of some signs showing all four of the WLEA endorsed candidates constitutes a “gift-in-kind” of $332.

My wife added the school board section onto my website which I believes falls under the category of “personal services of a volunteer who is not being compensated” and, therefore, not a contribution.

And, I used yard signs I had in my basement from 2016.

I’m a high roller.

West Lafayette School Board: Local Government Finance and Policy Options

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One of the reasons I am asking folks to vote for me as a candidate in this West Lafayette School Board race is that I have some experience with local government finance. A school board’s policy options are tied to its funding options. This stuff is opaque (to put it charitably) and it takes awhile to get up to speed. Understanding the twists and turns of the state’s regulations on local government finance ends up being important not just because it helps you understand what the board can and can’t do, but also because it helps you explain the board’s choices to constituents who might otherwise find the school’s choices arbitrary or wrongheaded.

A subject that often seems to come up when money is tight has to do with funding building projects. It’s pretty common to see a citizen who doesn’t really understand the process (or a disingenuous anti-education legislator who probably does) respond to calls for increased funding for teacher pay by grousing about how schools are wasting money on “cathedrals.” (My first exposure to this argument was about twenty years ago when I lived in White County – someone was complaining about a new baseball field when the subject of having to let an assistant band director go was being discussed.) On the surface, it’s a pretty common sense argument. Don’t spend the money on “x.” Spend it on “y.”

The reason that argument falls apart has to do with state law. The tax rate that supports capital construction projects (i.e. buildings) is distinct from the funding sources for teacher pay and other operating expenses. This is further complicated by the maximum levy imposed by the State and the fact that local units of government have their tax rates tied together, in a sense, through the state imposed tax caps. More on that below, but the upshot is that reducing your tax rate for capital projects doesn’t mean that you’ll have lower taxes or more flexibility to spend money on non-capital expenses. It might just mean that another unit of local government gets more money from its tax rate.

(And, by the way, a quick note to acknowledge that just because I have a fair amount of background in this area, doesn’t mean my knowledge is anything like perfect. There are probably mistakes in this post. But my experience is usually good enough to allow me to separate the real issues from the non-issues. And I know when to go lean on people with expertise in the area: we’re fortunate enough to have Everybody’s Favorite Economist ™ in the district, a long-time CFO working for the corporation, outside contractors like Baker Tilly, or in my County work, our County Auditor.)

Looking at my 2019 tax statement for illustration, the tax rate attributable to the West Lafayette Community School Corporation was $1.2762 per $100 of assessed valuation. In 2019, the certified rate attributable to debt service was 0.5375, the rate attributable to operations was $0.3687, and the rate attributable to the referendum was 0.37. Add those all up, and you get the $1.2762 on my tax statement. That debt service amount crept up a little between 2015 and 2016 (from 0.5322 up to the 0.5375 where it’s been since) but it’s held pretty steady at around that rate as far back as I can see. That $0.5375 rate seems to generate in the neighborhood of $5 million per year. The rate has held steady despite the additional debt the school corporation* bonded for to fund the new construction at West Lafayette Intermediate School, improvements at Cumberland, and additions to the Jr./Sr. High School.

(*Technically the bonds were issued to the West Lafayette School Building Corporation. This is not some sort of arcane end-run around local government finance rules. This is routine practice for units of local government using bonds guaranteed by property taxes to fund capital improvements. In the case of schools, the procedures are set forth in IC 20-47-3. In the case of other units of local government, the procedures are set forth in IC 36-1-10. I believe there is some artifice here, but it’s not local or recent. It’s a legal fiction of long-standing (since the 1920s), used nationwide. With respect to Indiana, my understanding is that the State was scarred by its experience with the Indiana Mammoth Internal Improvement Act of 1836. The State defaulted on bonds related to those internal improvements in a big way, leading to adoption of Article 10, section 5, of Indiana’s 1851 Constitution which has a general prohibition on the State (and by extension political subdivisions of the State) incurring debt. However, as it turns out, it’s not terribly practical to fund long-term assets with cash on the barrel head, so these building corporations were devised as a way to create a bit of legal separation between the government and debt while still providing bond holders the security they need to lend money.)

So, back to our hypothetical citizen or legislator criticizing spending on facilities (and forgetting for the moment that adequate facilities are important to education).

Why not spend the debt service money on teachers instead of buildings?

The General Assembly says we can’t. IC 20-40-9-6 lists the uses of the debt service fund, and paying school operating expenses aren’t on the list.

If you spend less on debt service, won’t that let you lower the debt service tax rate and increase the operations tax rate?

No. The two aren’t really tied together under state law. Lowering the debt service rate won’t increase the amount available for the operations fund. That amount is capped by something called the maximum levy and generally that amount will increase each year based on the assessed value growth quotient —  which is a multiplier calculated using the non-farm personal income growth for the previous six years. The growth quotient for 2021, based on the average income growth from 2013 to 2019, is 4.2%. For what it’s worth, due to COVID, there is a good chance that there will be some low or even negative personal income growth years baked into that formula for years to come, reducing the growth quotient and limiting the maximum levy for the operations fund.

If you spend less on debt service, won’t that at least reduce our overall taxes?

Probably not. In many cases, the effect will be to send more money to the City of West Lafayette or the County. Property taxes in Indiana are capped at 1% for residential property, 2% for rental and agricultural property, and 3% for commercial property. Any given parcel has taxes from a number of local units stacked on top of each other. Using the 2019 tax statement again for reference, the total tax rate on the property was $2.7603 for every $100 of assessed valuation. As I mentioned, $1.2762 of this was attributable to the school. The City, the County, the township and the library all added their rates on top of that. It’s not as easy as just multiplying that tax rate times assessed valuation because there are things like homestead deductions and the fact that the referendum tax rate doesn’t fall under the cap, but generally, that tax rate is going to take you over the tax cap for a lot of properties in the West Lafayette school district. When that happens, the taxpayer gets a “circuit breaker credit” which is deducted from all of the local units tax revenue.  If WLCSC reduces its debt service tax rate, the total amount of the circuit breaker credit is reduced, generally to the benefit of the other taxing units. In other words, if the School reduces its debt service tax rate, the County and the City have a smaller amount of their tax revenue reduced by circuit breaker credits. So, the taxpayer pays the same amount of tax on the property, the school doesn’t have the money to use on capital projects, and the City and the County get a bigger piece of the pie.

Is the referendum tax rate used on debt service?

No. Legally, it can be (because referendum money is legally allowed to be used for any purpose on which the school can otherwise spend money), but for the West Lafayette schools, referendum money is not used for debt service. It’s used to supplement the education and operations funds. For 2020, there was a filing with the Department of Local Government Finance that created the impression that maybe the referendum money was being used for debt service. (In fact, the form showed $4.5 million used for debt service). But, this appears to be from some kind of glitch caused by how the school’s software communicated with the State’s Gateway software for financial filings. If you look at the same report for the debt service fund,  it shows $6.5 million on debt service and lease rentals (these “leases” are from the building corporations we discussed above.) The school corporation simply isn’t spending $11 million per year on capital expenses.

If you look at the 2019 report for debt service it’s similar to the 2020 debt service report. Meanwhile, in 2019, the referendum fund shows nothing for debt or leases. Our bonds and leases for building construction are being paid from the debt service fund which, as we discussed above, can’t be used for non-capital expenses like paying teachers.

Was there some shuffling of referendum money between the education fund and the operations fund?

All right. Our hypothetical citizen or legislator isn’t asking this, but I wanted to mention that the General Assembly passed legislation saying that 85% of State money has to remain in the education fund with not more than 15% going to the operations fund. The education fund is to be spent on student instruction and learning (e.g. teachers). The operations fund is for non-instructional operating costs of a school (e.g. human resources, utilities, food service, and other non-classroom expenditures.) The referendum fund money can be used to supplement either or both of these. It used to be that the referendum money was allocated among both instructional and non-instructional uses so that the school could keep track of what would likely have to disappear if the referendum money ever dries up. Due to the State’s 85% rule, the school shifted more of its referendum money to operations so that less State money counted as operations. The substance didn’t change, but the school had to do a bit of rearranging to comply with statutory requirements.

So, the take away is that: a) debt service tax rate money can’t be used for teachers; b) our debt service tax rate is the same now as it was before the new construction; c) foregoing new construction would not have given us any flexibility to raise other money for teachers; d) foregoing new construction would not have reduced the tax bill for most residents; and e) referendum money was not used on the new buildings.

Anybody who has made it this far, thank you! This stuff is about as exciting as watching paint dry. My main point is that it’s useful for a school board member to have familiarity with this type of thing so that he or she can walk a constituent (or legislator!) through the issues and hopefully be able to identify which complaints are well-founded versus those that are based on a misconception. Then, hopefully, folks can focus their attention on the former without wasting too much time on the latter.

I believe my background will allow me to get up to speed as a school board member more quickly and be a productive part of the board. So, in conclusion, Vote Masson!

West Lafayette School Board: Who Else Should I Vote For?

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(General programming note for blog readers in the West Lafayette school district: I am a candidate in the 2020 West Lafayette School Board election. There are four seats open, and I would like to fill one of them. If you want to know more about my campaign, ask questions, request a yard sign, please go to https://masson.us/schoolboard.)

So, if you are in the West Lafayette School District, there are fifteen people on the ballot for four open spots on the school board. Who should you vote for? After a month of campaigning, my reflexive first response is “Vote Masson. Tell Your Friends!” I think I’ve made a decent case that I would be a good addition to the board. Among other things, I’ve demonstrated a commitment to the school that goes beyond running for school board, I have a legal background in municipal law, and I balance some board experience with a fresh perspective and energy from having been off the board for a few years.

My second response is that if you know a candidate and strongly believe their presence on the school board would make it better, vote for them. If that still doesn’t get you to four candidates, I’ll suggest that you “rely on the teachers.” In other words, the West Lafayette Education Association – the teacher’s union – has endorsed me, Amy Austin, Brad Marley, and Tom Schott.

Obviously, there is an element of self-interest in that I’m one of the WLEA endorsed candidates. But, if you have been part of the West Lafayette community, you know that our schools are excellent and a big part of this is attributable to our teachers. They have every interest in seeing that our schools remain outstanding; they interviewed the candidates; and they know the schools, what they need, and how they operate. Their endorsement should carry some weight — particularly if you’re in the dark on who the candidates are and what the school board does.

Brad and Tom have long experience on the Board. That shouldn’t be discounted. One of them said that it takes a full term to really understand the job, and I think that’s pretty accurate. I had two years on the board plus more than a decade practicing municipal government law, and I still had a fair amount to learn when my term ended in 2016. On top of experience, Brad’s financial background is something the school will need as the impact of COVID on municipal finance sinks in. Tom knows the school up and down, has great communication skills, and deep connections to Purdue.

Amy is, full disclosure, a close family friend. More significant to a prospective voter would be that she has put a lot of time and effort to working with the school. Those of you who have had students in the district in the last several years might recognize her as “Newsletter Amy” sending out parent council letters. Or maybe you’ve seen her on field trips, volunteering with the backpack program, working to supplement the school breakfast and lunch program when COVID caused some disruptions, organizing class parties, participating in the parent council, or doing any of the other countless things that show a dedication to the school. She’s also terribly smart, and her compassion is seemingly boundless.

Beyond those four, I’ve also come to know Melissa Prochnau reasonably well. If one of the four I’ve already mentioned isn’t your cup of tea for some reason, definitely give Melissa a look. She beat me by four votes in 2016. I’m not going to pretend that a narrow loss didn’t sting a little bit on a personal level, but I can’t say the school has been any worse off for it. I’m President of the West Lafayette Schools Education Foundation and, in that position, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Melissa who is one of the school board appointees to the WLSEF board. In addition, she has four years of experience from having been on the school board and is very active with the schools generally.

Brian Bittner is an incumbent on the board who is on the ballot but has made the decision to withdraw from campaigning. So, I think he’d agree that you shouldn’t vote for him.

As for the remaining nine candidates, I can’t say I know any of them very well if at all. I’m certainly not inclined to disparage any of them, their abilities, or their motives. I will say that I get the sense that the COVID reopening process created a lot of the energy that led to some of the school board runs.

I think the ultimate result of the school’s COVID plan has been pretty good under the circumstances. The initial plan suggested by the school board was met with some anxiety because, as I recall, it did not provide for a virtual option unless there was a health concern and did not mandate masks. The plan came out during the filing window for school board candidates. Communication about the plan and the planning process definitely could have been better, and the initial plan had its deficiencies. But that was never set in stone, and the COVID measures the school ultimately put in place (including virtual classes taught by West Side teachers and masks in the school) seem to be working. In the school’s defense, I think it’s important to note that it wasn’t working in a vacuum. Our knowledge of COVID itself has been a work in progress and the school had to work with or around other federal, state, and local decision makers. So, with respect to that initial plan, the school may be taking heat for issues that were beyond its control at the time.

In any event, I’d caution you not to take my characterization of these issues as complete or necessarily representative of any particular candidate. Check out their websites for more information. But, if you’re looking for my opinion: vote Masson, Austin, Marley, and Schott!

Public Schools and Community

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(General programming note for blog readers in the West Lafayette school district: I am a candidate in the 2020 West Lafayette School Board election. There are four seats open, and I would like to fill one of them. If you want to know more about my campaign, ask questions, request a yard sign, please go to https://masson.us/schoolboard.)

I’ve written a number of times that I think public schools are important for reasons that are in addition to the education our kids receive. I usually say something like, “they turn us from a collection of individuals into a community.” I think this is true of traditional public schools generally, but maybe more so in the two school systems with which I have the most experience: West Lafayette and Richmond. Basically you have one school corporation for the city that pretty much everyone goes to. (Though, you can make a decent argument that the relevant community is “Tippecanoe County” and there are several different school systems.) In any event, the systems in West Lafayette & Richmond struck me as binding the community together more tightly than in places (like Ohio where I went to college) with high numbers of students going to private schools.

In the abstract, this sense of community comes from the age old tradition of a tribe banding together to provide for its young and, by extension, for its future. We all — whether we have kids or not — pay taxes into the system that are, in turn, used to build schools, pay teachers, run buses, and do everything else that goes into education. We do this because we all have a stake in the education of the community’s children. Back in 1846, Caleb Mills – the father of Indiana education – began his series of “Read, Circulate, Discuss” pamphlets which were ultimately instrumental in persuading the General Assembly to adopt a program of general education for the State. Part of his argument had to do with the benefit to the community at large. He argued that “the rich land-holder [is] interested, to the full amount of his property, in the intellectual and moral character of the community in which it is located” and that the value of the property is enhanced by “the intelligence and virtue,” and lessened by the “ignorance and vice of the surrounding neighborhood.” The merchant and the manufacturer benefit from operating in an “intelligent and virtuous” community rather than in one that is comprised of “ignorant and vicious” people. “We can better meet the expense of the proper education of the rising generation, than endure the consequences resulting from the neglect of it.” Self-interest aside, Mills also argued that the mere fact that we all would be paying for schools would cause us, whether we have children or not, to take an interest in them. In his second address published in 1847, Mills advocated:

Awaken the public mind, and concentrate it on the question, “Am I not interested in the proper education of all that are socially and politically connected with me?“ The bearings of such a question have not been duly considered. It needs to be discussed and examined. We are a shrewd people where dollars and cents are concerned. Many have never taken that view of their duty, and when it has been presented to them have frankly acknowledged that they have never thought of it in that light. Does not the Farmer derive as large a percent upon what he expends in the education of his children, as from any investment he can make of his funds? Does the amount which he pays to sustain a good school for the instruction of all the children in the district or township in which he lives, never find its way back again to him in the improved character of the community for intelligence, enterprise, and morals? Is not real estate in such a community more valuable, capital more productive, and enterprise more intelligent and successful? Would not the general thrift and prosperity caused by this intellectual and moral elevation, lighten public burdens, increase social enjoyments, enhance the value of property, multiply the facilities for its acquisition, and increase the security of its possession? Such cultivation could not fail to diminish pauperism and crime, lessen poverty and suffering, throw around the gardens, orchards, and the products of the field, an enclosure that would never be passed, improve the highways, and materially increase the substantial comforts and conveniences of the house, the farm, and the implements of husbandry.

All of that’s true, and I’m certainly not going to try to second guess Caleb Mills. But the way I experience the community created by our schools is a little more direct. For me, it’s also high-fiving the people next to me (or complaining together about a blown call) at the football and basketball games. It’s talking to neighbors while we sit in the yard watching the Homecoming Parade. Back when the kids were younger, it was chatting with other parents outside the school to walk the kids home and getting to know the younger siblings or maybe the dogs; driving to and from field trips with those other parents. It’s the band events, it’s watching the kids I coached in the rec leagues play on the high school soccer team. Hosting a bunch of my kids’ friends for movie night. Eating lo mein and strudel at “One Community, Many Cultures” after listening to kids rapping in French or playing a Spanish horn number. Being a practice judge with other parents for the “We the  People” civics competition. Reading in the paper about your how your friend’s kid did at the volleyball match. Maybe a night at the theater watching the school play. And I know my experiences are just the tip of the iceberg. Before COVID, I was taken by how much the high school, in particular, was a hive of activity for something like 16 hours a day. Clearly there is way more going on than even the long list of things I was experiencing.

Seeing that kids get a solid education is obviously first and foremost on my mind when I think of the schools. And, the abstract public good of the type Mills talks about is vitally important. But schools also provide that “third place” where members of the community can get together, share experiences, and form a common bond. That makes West Lafayette a better place to live. If I am elected to the school board, I will be mindful of this aspect of our school and work to preserve and promote its value as a source of community.

 

West Lafayette Schools Strategic Plan

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(General programming note for blog readers in the West Lafayette school district: I am a candidate in the 2020 West Lafayette School Board election. There are four seats open, and I would like to fill one of them. If you want to know more about my campaign, ask questions, request a yard sign, please go to https://masson.us/schoolboard.)

One of the things that I would like to do if elected as a school board member is to focus on implementation of the school corporation’s strategic plan. My involvement with this document started in the middle of 2018 as part of the strategic planning committee which made recommendations for updating the mission statement, statements of belief, objectives, and strategies. That committee consisted of approximately 30 administrators, educators, and community members such as myself. Later, throughout 2019, the “Re-imagining West Lafayette School Corporation” committee (about 25 people this time) followed up on the work of the strategic planning committee by drafting action plans for the strategies. I served on this committee as well.

The strategic plan and action plans were recommended to the School Board which adopted them in February 2020, right before COVID upended everyone’s plans. The dates for various milestones were always fairly speculative and now they’re going to be delayed further, but that’s not critical as long as the corporation continues to make the sort of improvements contemplated by the strategic plan. The Mission Statement is high minded and ambitious:

Our mission is to engage students in a world-class educational experience that prepares them to be well-rounded, ethical, innovative, creative, productive, and adaptive citizens who shape our global society.

It’s very West Side in its scope. We’re not just preparing students for survival or getting them a degree or a vocation. We’re preparing them to live lives with meaning. This mission informed the Statement of Beliefs:

We Believe:

  • Our students are our foremost priority.

  • Highly effective faculty and staff are critical to our success.

  • Parenting and family support are fundamental to successful educational outcomes.

  • Public education is a shared resource and responsibility that defines and unites our community.

  • Student engagement in learning leads to higher achievement.

  • Academic excellence is the hallmark of our school corporation.

  • Public education’s primary purpose is to develop educated citizens.

  • Children deserve an equal opportunity to achieve their highest potential.

  • There is inherent worth and dignity in every person.

  • Students learn in different ways.

  • Accountability is critical to the success of our school corporation.

  • Involvement in extracurricular activities enhances the educational experience.

  • School safety is essential.

  • Public education contributes to the development of productive, ethical, adaptive, and healthy citizens.

The Statement of Beliefs (along with the Mission Statement) further informed the objectives, strategies, and action plans. I won’t belabor the whole document, but two points of emphasis which received particular attention above and beyond what they had received in the prior strategic plan were the ideas that we wanted a sense of ethics to inform our students, and we wanted to remove or at least minimize barriers to learning related to a student’s socioeconomic status.

With respect to the question of ethics, the committee grappled with the concept but did not settle with any precision on what that term meant. Philosophical considerations of ethics can and does form the basis of entire lifetimes of study. At the broadest level, however, the committee wanted to emphasize that our educational system should not just be teaching facts and figures. It should be giving students the background they need to become good citizens, and lead lives with value to themselves, their families, and their communities. One of the action items will be to form a committee that will focus more directly on defining a corporation-wide definition of what it means to be “ethical,” provide professional development to help staff and parents understand what an “ethical K-12 education” looks like, and create awareness of the concept for our students.

With respect to socioeconomic concerns, a world-class educational system doesn’t just mean a few of your students are among the best and the brightest. It means that you are consistently providing all of your students with a high quality education. And, if out-sized individual achievement is what a parent wants for their particular student, the fact remains that if all students are starting from a high base line, more of them are going to reach the highest levels of achievement (however you want that defined.) The Corporation will, among other things, conduct research to determine best practices from other high achieving school districts for ensuring that socioeconomic status does not form a barrier to education and collect data from our own district to determine what needs we are not meeting.

Those two items are just the tip of the iceberg to some extent. There is a lot in the way of studying, data collection, and fund raising to be done. We want to continue learning from school systems in other parts of the country and other parts of the world so we can learn from their successes. We want to enhance our early childhood education offerings. We want to identify sustainable short term and long term funding models. We want to identify any current sources of waste, grant opportunities, and areas where we can leverage relationships with Purdue and other community partners. If you take a look at the strategic plan, you’ll see there is a lot we want to do.

This is a big undertaking and, chances are, there will be a lot remaining to be done when it comes time to draft the next strategic plan. But, that’s not really a problem. Setting high aspirations will help us do great things even if we don’t quite hit the target. As a school board candidate, hoping to become a member of the board at this next election, I would love to be part of moving this process along.

West Lafayette Education Association Endorsement

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(General programming note for blog readers in the West Lafayette school district: I am a candidate in the 2020 West Lafayette School Board election. There are four seats open, and I would like to fill one of them. If you want to know more about my campaign, ask questions, request a yard sign, please go to https://masson.us/schoolboard.)

I am happy to announce that I am one of the four candidates for the West Lafayette School Board who has been endorsed by the West Lafayette Education Association. I think teachers are the backbone of our education system, so having their support is extremely gratifying. As part of its endorsement process, the WLEA sent out a questionnaire to the candidates and then interviewed us as part of a process with the League of Women Voters. (With 15 candidates, that’s no small investment of time; even if not all of the candidates sought the WLEA endorsement.)

I may have started with a bit of an edge over some of the other candidates inasmuch as I’m a known quantity to the members.  Obviously, I was on the school board for a couple of years. But I’d say I really got to know the union members after I lost in the 2016 election. They were instrumental in working for passage of the school referendum in 2017. I walked door-to-door with several members over the weeks of canvassing West Lafayette for support. Knocking on doors with someone is a great way to get to know them! There were also many teachers involved with the school strategic plan during the 2018-2019 process, and I had the good fortune of learning from and brainstorming with a number of them as we broke into work groups as part of the planning process. Additionally, I’ve offered my full-throated support for teachers on my blog over the years. Probably the entry that has received the widest circulation was the post I wrote in support of Red for Ed entitled “Some thoughts on Red for Ed, Caleb Mills, and Indiana’s School Policies.” Here’s a sample:

At root, there is a lack of appreciation as to what a world-class educational system provides and possibly a lack of ambition by policymakers. Can we afford one? We can’t afford not to have one. Opportunity is slipping away from Hoosiers because we’re allowing our foundation to erode. The high stakes testing and privatization approach that have been in place for the better part of a generation have put us in a downward spiral. Teachers have been scapegoats and their salaries have remained mostly stagnant as their burdens have grown.

When it comes to education, we are too often shrewd with our pennies but foolish with our dollars. This is an investment.

It bears mentioning that this was a post directed to state policymakers. I recognize that the power of a local school board is very much circumscribed by state law. Even in a community like West Lafayette that is very supportive of its schools, there are significant limits on funding. If elected as a school board member, I will work to make teacher compensation a priority but we will have to work within fiscal constraints and recognize that the school has other needs as well. I expect that the relationships I’ve made with the teachers outside of the school board will help on both sides of these negotiations. Because we know each other, we’ll all recognize that each party is advocating in good faith on behalf of the constituents they represent. Hopefully that will result in an amicable relationship that’s in the best interest of the school, the students, the teachers, and the community.

But, one step at a time. The first step would be to get elected. We have great teachers in West Lafayette, and I’m honored by their endorsement.