OpenCDA

April 30, 2009

Declaring An Emergency

Filed under: Probable Cause — Bill @ 7:22 am

schoolhouseI attended Wednesday night’s special meeting of the School District 271 Board of Trustees.  The first action item was “Patron Comment to receive input concerning possible solutions to the Financial Emergency.”  The meeting was reported in today’s Coeur d’Alene Press in Maureen Dolan’s article headlined Schools may declare financial 911.  Neither the meeting nor the article explained the process required by Idaho Code for schools to declare a financial emergency.  Here are two links to clarify that process.

This session the Idaho legislature passed House Bill No. 252, generally an act relating to financial emergencies in the school districts.   The bill was signed into law by Governor Otter on April 15, 2009, and took effect that same day.  The conditions that must be met before the Trustees can formally declare a financial emergency are defined in a new addition to Idaho Code 33-522, spelled out in House Bill No. 252.

The Idaho School Boards Association as made the key points available in its two-page document HB252 Financial Emergency FAQs.    The ISBA also made the bullet points available in a PowerPoint presentation titled Trustee Responsibilities in Financial Emergencies.  (Note:  This is a large PPT file.  If you have difficulty getting it to open, first save the PPT presentation to your computer, then open the file in PPT.)

Last night’s meeting was one step in the process which would allow the Trustees to declare a financial emergency if that becomes necessary.  There will be additional public meetings, and Superintendent Bauman stated the district intends to try and avert the need to declare a financial emergency.

4 Comments

  1. The Press article describes the teachers as upset by the possible emergency declaration. Did you get that sense, Bill? What do you think was their main concern—cuts in the classroom, ie: staff positions, student-teacher ratios, textbooks, etc. or were they most worried about salary and/or benefit reductions?

    Comment by mary — April 30, 2009 @ 4:59 pm

  2. Mary,
    I talked to a few teachers AFTER the levy had passed and it wasn’t til THEN that Hazel said that there were still gonna be cuts. She has got some pretty mad teachers.

    Comment by concerned citizen — April 30, 2009 @ 5:13 pm

  3. CC, Hazel has some parents upset about cuts in athletics and activities, too. They thought the passage of the levy meant those programs were safe.

    Comment by mary — April 30, 2009 @ 5:37 pm

  4. Mary and concerned citizen,

    I don’t know how faithfully and completely the teachers who spoke last night represented the views of all the teachers. I believe their underlying personal concerns were any faculty reduction in force and reduction in pay and that the emergency declaration could circumvent the collective bargaining rules. Their overall concern was that the quality of service to the students would be hurt.

    Concerned citizen, the teachers’ anger may in part be due to their own lack of understanding of school finance processes and the newly passed law. Hazel addressed that very issue last night, because more than one teacher raised it in slightly different forms. Going back over my notes and recordings of various meetings I’ve attended, I see and hear nothing that suggests Superintendent Bauman intentionally misled anyone.

    It is easy for the teachers to blame both the trustees and the district office administrators, but it seems to me that if the teachers are uninformed or misinformed, their principals and assistant principals are at least partly to blame as well. All of the questions and concerns I heard last night at the meeting ought to have been first heard and addressed by the principals in discussions with their subordinates. If the principals don’t know or aren’t willing or able to communicate accurate and complete information to their teachers, then the district needs to start correcting those principals. A principal ought to be knowledgable enough about district finance practices to be an effective communication conduit between the teachers and staff and the district office administrators.

    What I heard last night was mostly teachers who have a passionate commitment to teaching and delivering excellence in education, but who also have a profound ignorance of education finance and administration. In other words, school is the same as any other organization: The workers gripe about the bosses’ supposedly bad decisions, but their attitude moderates once they have enough accurate, complete information to understand why the decision was made. Last night, the teachers heard the “why.” They may not agree with it or like it, but what I heard Hazel Bauman telling them was consistent with what I had heard before the levy. At no time did I ever hear her say or even imply that if the levy passed, there would be no cuts.

    The teachers last night said they have a “trust” problem with the administrators. Making sure the principals have complete, accurate information and that they are able and required to communicate that information with the teachers ought to go a long way toward resolving their perceived “trust” problem. I think the “communication” problem is larger.

    Comment by Bill — April 30, 2009 @ 5:47 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress
Copyright © 2024 by OpenCDA LLC, All Rights Reserved