My Platform

During the 2023-24 school year, the Poudre School District administration formed a Facilities Planning Committee to address financial implications of student-based funding. The action group, primarily consisting of district employees, made preliminary recommendations in October, 2023, and after lengthy public hearings, the School District Directors formally identified several neighborhood schools for closure, with the intention of transporting students to consolidation sites, as necessary under the plan. However, for various reasons the initiative was paused on May 20, 2024, with lingering questions emerging. These issues remain unresolved.

Thus, after the expenditure of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of staff and volunteer time, the question that remains is “Why wasn’t the School Closure and Consolidation Plan adopted?”

First, focusing on school closures and consolidation as a way to meet budgets was misdirected from the start. Public education funding is a continual problem for large districts, in spite of the fact that Niche Ranking in Colorado Schools 2024 ranked PSD as #3 among districts with more than 25,000 students in per pupil funding. Since PSD citizens traditionally support bond and mill initiatives, a mill levy proposition should have been the first action taken by the Board, rather than resorting to it as a desperate response to the threat of school closures. These certainly should never have been placed as a consent agenda item when it first came to the Board!

Second, public school enrollment is a function of the number of recorded local births, plus the number of students having moved into the district, the number of students transferring from private or charter schools, and the number of students from out-of-district, minus the number of families moving out of the district and the number of students opting for private or charter schools. Thus, forecasting kindergarten enrollment from birth rate alone is problematic, at best.

Third, a decision was made to rely on an outside consultant for this analysis, rather than on the State Demographer for Colorado. The FLO Analytics population forecast of – 9.25 percent by 2026-27 is in conflict with that of the State Demographer, who projects a 14 percent increase in children ages 0-4 and a stable population with no growth nor decline among 5- to 17-year-olds in Larimer County from 2020-2030.

Fourth, for public credibility, the Facilities Planning Steering Committee should have been constituted with key local communicators, with staff members in support roles. Such a committee would have had independent transparency and recommendation validity.

Fifth, a decision was made to focus on observed birth rate decline alone, to the neglect of an opposing Flo Analytics’ own forecast that new housing developments, projected and already under construction, would bring in an additional 2,038 new students – in the same time period as the forecast birth rate decline!

Sixth, the school board and administration underestimated the quality and intensity of potential initiative backlash. Such dramatic changes made without sufficient input and advice from those most affected by them undermines morale for those who will be “closed and consolidated upon,” as well as confidence in district leadership.

Poudre School District authorized a “Debt Free Mill Levy* proposal for the November general election. Thanks to the work of interested citizens, District teachers, and Board members, the proposition passed in the November 5, 2024, general election, approving taxes for up to $49,000,000 annually and increasing with the rate of inflation. Therefore, more general fund revenue will be available to maintain and improve the quality of schooling – including teacher compensation, building maintenance, small school equity, and various supplies and materials. Within these parameters, however, a great many questions must be asked and answered before a sound decision can be made.

Formed by a proposition in the November 8, 1960, general election, the Poudre School District has enjoyed continued public support ever since, passing Bond Issues for school construction and Mill Levies to fund operations. Since the voters were asked to provide funding, the public has traditionally been heavily involved in planning and oversight, with staff providing support, largely in the form of background data needed for policy and operations recommendations. However, that changed in 2023-24, when a committee, predominantly of District employees, devised the School Closure and Consolidation Plan. Although the Debt Free Mill Levy ballot language specified, “... expenditures will be subject to an annual audit and citizen oversight ...,” this has not been the case; of the 20 in the membership of the recently convened oversight committee, only three individuals were local citizens who are not directly employed or otherwise directly involved as part of the district. A trend like this--which minimizes public input about such important issues--is problematic. Where is the public’s voice in such critical decision-making processes?

It gets even more complicated when confronting such uncertain federal and state policy environments as we are facing currently. The State legislature reinstates, then takes back, the long overdue Budget Stabilization factor, and who knows what will happen next at the federal level? Since the recent lawsuit settlement in PSD, which resulted in the district having to pay a $6.2 million settlement out of district general funds, many of us are scratching our heads at some of the issues we find ourselves facing. We must be very prudent about how we spend our Debt Free Mill levy funds, and we are accountable to the public which expressed its confidence in PSD by approving the levy.

As all parents and teachers know, our children grow and change in many ways throughout their lives. There are huge aspects of their growth and development that happen by the time they are young adults, both in schools and outside of them. Different kids grow in different ways at different times of their lives. They need a welcoming and supportive place in which to do this, regardless of who they are or how they identify themselves, in the process. It is a complex experiment in the balance between nature and nurture.

Kids’ families, the schools they attend, and the homes in which they spend the vast majority of their waking hours are important pieces in the puzzle of helping kids achieve success and satisfaction in their lives.

The “whole child” approach considers all aspects of children’s lives, personalities, and preferences to be as important contributors to understanding and promoting their overall individual development as does academic skill development. We place so much emphasis on academic development as the sole criterion when evaluating student and school success that it has become a clever but destructive way to justify school closures, rankings of schools, and unaccountable experimentation with public tax dollars.

Teaching kids how to be good citizens, respectful of others, as well as transmitting the academic skills they will need as they mature is essential to the schooling process. This became especially apparent in the wake of the pandemic.

As opposed to having student success be measured solely by their knowledge of traditional school skills and subject matter, the whole child approach goes beyond academics to focus on building a child’s character and exploring talents, requiring teachers to gain a deeper understanding of who the students are, as well as the community around them. This allows educators to help students reach their fullest potential, supporting families in raising confident, balanced, curious, thoughtful, and emotionally intelligent children. Obviously, available programming time in the daily and weekly school is important, but the whole child concept transcends math and verbal skills to include creative thinking, problem solving, critical thinking, emotional and interpersonal skills, and developing skills of independent living.

Regardless of how kids look, how they learn, how well they interact with their peers and the adults in their lives, the color of their skin, what language they speak, how they self-identify, and/or which cultures they identify with and embrace, they each deserve our best efforts. They need to feel that they belong in our community and come to see themselves as capable of learning, if we really intend to reach every child, every day.

This seems like an “All hands on deck!” moment in Poudre School District, to me, at present. Federal funding has been cut, a school closure and consolidation plan is up in the air, and recent legal matters have eaten into precious district resources. As an educator, a citizen, and a taxpayer, I am very concerned. The only way we will ever work our way out of this predicament will be to work together on it, from where the rubber meets the road to the “higher” institutional levels of policy and decision makers, as well as from top to bottom.

This may very well take an even greater amount of volunteer time on the part of board members going forward than it has in the past. No one knows for sure. What we know it will take, however, is leadership, leadership that is willing to ask difficult questions, follow through on getting legitimate answers, as well as putting in the time to do all this.

By the way, I want to state categorically that this last comment is not a criticism of anyone currently on the board nor of anyone in the District; it’s an evaluation of what the situation calls for. I have heard one knowledgeable person estimate that it’s a volunteer quarter time job - so, presumably, 10 hours a week. As I have attended recent school board meetings, I have begun to wonder if that’s not an underestimate of what it will take to be an effective board member.

Either way, I think this explains why only certain individuals are in a position to volunteer such a large amount of time. I happen to be one so fortunate, not because I am wealthy, but because, as one who is semi-retired, I am able to comfortably meet my needs and obligations and still commit to such a significant amount of work. Being effective as a school board member requires passion for the work, equanimity, compassion, understanding of how the school system works, a certain kind of tirelessness, and so much more. I would view it as an extension of my life’s work of the last 35 years to serve on the Poudre School District board.

As a former teacher educator who still works in the field occasionally, I often wonder what it is about teaching that only about 50% of teachers love it enough to stay in the profession for their entire careers, and/or seek different kinds of related professional opportunities in public school districts. Teaching as a profession has too often resulted in burnout, even if there are many legitimate explanations of why this might be so.

As a substitute teacher, I have seen various schools handle basically similar challenges in a range of different ways - some more effectively than others, as one might imagine. There is, of course, a large body of research available about the reasons for variations in the success rate in various schools. This ties very directly into my understanding of my role as a board member: bringing those most directly impacted by any changes being proposed in school closure and consolidation plans deeply into the conversation about those plans from the beginning, for example. Such plans must be closely scrutinized, developed, and adopted only with great respect for whatever is already in place that is working well and in ways which support continuous meaningful professional development that reflects the uniqueness of each educator and each school site.

This uniqueness may stem from individual educator profiles, from curricular focus and structure at a specific school, and/or from a strong focus on meeting the needs of the kids and families in the immediate neighborhoods where the schools are located. As long as we overemphasize test scores as the measure of student and school success, however, we will be missing the boat on opportunities to genuinely help the kids who need the most help when and where they need it. Doing the latter is likely to require that we adopt and adapt best practices from the fields of special education, second language education, and literacy education, for example.

Not surprisingly, not all teachers are equally well equipped to handle the range of learner differences and variability they are likely to encounter while doing their work. So, the idea of ongoing professional development that is manageable for them and that actually results in more educators being able to meet such diverse needs will lead to greater job satisfaction and greater schoolwide and districtwide success. This makes effective professional development a goal that is worth pursuing. I look forward to the opportunity to support and realize this goal.

Sometimes—and I am guessing less often than we realize—charter schools have been used to good purpose to create learning environments that kids would not otherwise have access to. When certain ones originally sprang up and to their credit, they filled gaps in the public system and some still do. But the use of the word “choice” as a marketing tool when no one knows what is being spent of taxpayers’ money to support them, is unconscionable in a system that never seems to be adequately funded to meet its objective of serving “every child, every day,” in the first place. It is hard to know whether the disappearance of that slogan from District stationery, website landing pages, and other places it belongs in publicity about the District signals surrender with regard to achieving an admittedly lofty aspiration, or possibly worse.

Colorado state law currently provides a two-track system for authorizing schools to operate using public funds that is systematically and fundamentally unfair to kids, their families, and local taxpayers. Charter schools that are funded through the state’s Charter School Institute can basically get away with having to address but a fraction of the accountability demands that are placed on traditional public schools. The deck is stacked in charter schools’ favor, at the general public’s expense. As so often happens, this lack of accountability and transparency is the main culprit.

Poudre School District has a great reputation as one of the highest performing school districts in the state, although anyone in regular contact with it knows we can always do better. It is heartening to see so many different schools recognized for excelling in one area or another, as happened at the Board’s June 10 meeting. It is also important to recognize all the amazing things so many different people in the District are doing throughout our schools and community, as we witnessed being done in a very extended way at the Board’s April 22 meeting.

In the end, though, very little changes if we don’t conserve and utilize our precious resources in ways that optimize what we can do with what we have, to serve those who are not being served fairly or effectively. Closing down existing effective and exceptional programs or consolidating them with others when such changes critically undermine the structure and thereby the effectiveness of them—at the expense of surrounding neighborhoods—is not the answer.

Relationships between school boards and superintendents require an effective balance, but that balance can be tilted toward board member micromanagement or toward superintendent’s authoritarian control. Thus, to formally balance roles and operations, John Carver constructed a model that clearly defined the collective board’s responsibility as envisioning “ends” or “outcomes,” designating superintendent as being responsible for determining the “means” for achievement the corporate “ends.” It is commonly termed “Policy Governance.”

The current governance and administrative structure for Poudre School District provides for some very specific limitations and requirements related to articulating the chain of command in the district. Policy governance effectively restricts the Board of Education’s official and supervisorial role over district staff to that of “supervisor of the superintendent.” The superintendent is the Board’s one employee, in this sense, and Board members aren’t allowed to interfere with the execution of any staff member’s duties by “jumping” the chain of command, in any way.

In 2006 the Colorado Association of School Boards pushed the policy governance model as the panacea for all governance ills, and the Poudre School District board unanimously adopted the new management process. At the time, a consultant conducted series of board and superintendent “ends” and “means” training, ending with board decisions to improve academic achievement, develop a system-wide student-based funding model, and address the ninth grade-high school problem.

Proposed to solve governance problems, the Policy Governance Model has now become a major governance issue. A national review found that the model tends to centralize authority, making the superintendent the sole operational agent of the board – especially if the board is passive or under-informed; its adoption nationally has declined and abandonments of it have increased.

Transparency tends to be reduced under policy governance, as critical information may be withheld under the guise of operating within policy. Further, rigid “ends” and “means” separation can limit collaboration where it might be useful between board and staff and undermine board oversight – as, by policy, board can only get information through the superintendent.

Despite its theoretical elegance, there is no strong empirical evidence that Policy Governance leads to better organizational performance. Actually, with its influence waning nationally and with two Poudre School District school closure disasters resulting partly from the Policy Governance Model in the recent past, it is time to consider a management model that better serves the community.