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School District Invites the Community to the Table, Part Six |
Bill Hudson | 1/23/12
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Read Part One
Archuleta School District 50JT is directed, according to state law, by a board of five elected or appointed volunteers. (Replacement board members are appointed by the board itself, whenever there is a vacancy.) These five volunteers are legally responsible for a budget of about $25 million each year, much of it spent on salaries: teachers, custodians, bus drivers, administrators. Some of it is used to maintain our publicly owned school buildings. Some is kept in savings accounts, to be used “for a rainy day.”
You can download the District’s 2011-2012 budget here. You will find the budget totals summarized on page 33. (In the PDF file, it’s the 39th page.) Those totals show “Non-appropriated Reserves” of about $2.7 million, but I can’t at this point report the exact purpose for which this $2.7 million is being "reserved".
I sent out emails to our five school district directors on Thursday and Friday, asking them to please contact me about access to school financial information — after being told that the District’s finance director Janell Wood is no longer allowed to give out specific financial information to taxpayers without the submission of a CORA (Colorado Open Records Act) request. I have not yet heard back for any of the five school board members.
On Tuesday, January 17, the five members of the Archuleta School District board of directors invited the entire community to attend a discussion at the Middle School Library. The agenda had one item listed:
“Open Forum for Community Input on Facilities.”
No additional information was included in the agenda, except the time and place.
 As far as I can tell, the agenda itself was the only information officially distributed by the school district. A multi-part article about the upcoming January 17 meeting was posted in the Daily Post beginning on January 13, and a short article was printed in the Pagosa Springs SUN on January 12, written by reporter Jim McQuiggin.
The school board, as far as I know, never sent out a public notice about the meeting via the local media — nor to parents of their students. So the only thing we — the public — knew about the purpose of this “open forum” was whatever we had heard with our own ears at the January 10 meeting a week earlier, or read in the local media.
In spite of the lack of communication and transparency on the part of the School District, about 30 people showed up for the Tuesday night meeting, ready and willing to participate in a public forum. Over the course of the two-hour meeting, most of those 30 people stood and offered ideas about our school facilities, and assistant superintendent Linda Reed wrote the ideas down on large white sheets of paper.
A few examples:
Jim Huffman: ”You need community input to find out what the local community will support, and what they won’t support. One thing you need to do is find a local contractor who has a really good reputation, a well-respected person who has absolutely no desire to do any work on your schools, to be the technical consultant to the board and to the superintendent.”
Linda Bunney: “At one of your meetings, there was a presentation about the mold that had to be mitigated at the Elementary School, and the fellow who did that presentation said that needed to be looked at on a regular basis so it didn’t happen again. And part of the problem was a leaky roof and part of the problem was leaky water pipes in the ceiling.. I think the mold problem in the Elementary School needs to be resolved as soon as possible.”
Brett Locke: “I’d like to speak in favor of a community process that will result in a plan that the community will support. If the community doesn’t support it, then the plan won’t work.
“Two things really jumped out at me, when I read through the 2008 Facilities Master Plan. One is the fact that when the Blythe Group started work on the Facilities Master Plan, they formed a citizens input committee. And that committee met once, to talk about vision and how it should go, and that was it. The committee never met again.
”And I thought, ‘Why is that?’ And if you read the report it tells us why. The school board came to the conclusion, and forgive me if I read this, but the school decided ‘they needed to complete the assessment and review a draft report, before spending more community members’ time, since we didn’t understand yet what the issues and problems were.’ Well, that makes a lot of sense. Why waste the committee’s time?
”And the other thing that jumped out at me, at the beginning of the report, it says, ‘The district plan should be considered a living document, for the district to formulate a long range plan, and to use as a tool for current and future facility needs.’ So this report was a starting point — it wasn’t an end point. And this should be a springboard toward a long-range plan.
”And then it all gets summarized at the end, on page 53, ‘The Blythe Group strongly encourages a re-formation of the citizen’s committee, and regular meetings between the Board/District, the Town and the County, to keep up an ongoing dialog focused on common goals as the district forges a long-range plan.’”
The Blythe Group’s Facilities Master Plan also noted that no school bond measures were necessary, nor were any being contemplated, although Mr. Locke did not specifically bring up this point. The Blythe report was produced at a cost to the taxpayers of about $64,000, right around the time a former intermediate school principal named Mark DeVoti was being promoted to district superintendent.
There was a rather popular book published in 1969, a somewhat humorous treatise written by Lawrence Peter and titled, “The Peter Principle.” The book suggested that people promoted from within any large organization eventually reach their level of incompetence and then become "stuck" at that particular organizational level — and this fact helps to explain why many large organizations are marginally dysfunctional.
Mark DeVoti originally came to Pagosa Springs to oversee a small, experimental high school program at the Education Center. He was later promoted to principal of the Intermediate School, where he seemed to be doing a reasonably acceptable job. Upon the resignation of former district superintendent Duane Noggle in 2007, Mr. DeVoti was promoted by the school board to the superintendent’s position — apparently in a subconscious effort to prove the validity of Dr. Peter’s organizational theory.
It appears that, in the four years since the publication of the Blythe facilities report, the school district consistently failed to reconvene its citizens’ committee, consistently failed to hold regular facilities discussions with other government entities, consistently failed to formulate a short-range or long-range facilities plan, and consistently failed to address the maintenance needs suggested in the $64,000 Blythe report.
Upon Mr. DeVoti's recommendation, however, the school board did purchase additional land — a rocky hillside near the High School — in spite of the conclusion published in the 2008 Blythe Report that no additional land purchases were necessary.
Following the purchase of this marginal, sloping property in December 2010, superintendent DeVoti convened a group of citizens as the ‘School Facilities Advisory Group.’ Invitations to join this group were never issued publicly, as far as I can tell. In June, 2011, the SFAC presented its recommendations to the school board — recommendations that were unanimously approved by our five volunteer board members.
Somewhat remarkably, the SFAC recommendations completely contradicted all of the conclusions found in the 2008 Blythe report, and focused upon proposing a $98 million property tax increase to fund a completely new school building on the slope behind the High School — complete with geothermally-heated tilapia farms and playing fields carved out of solid rock.
Although the SFAC plan was unanimously endorsed by our school board and school administration, it was soundly rejected by the larger community.
So now, the question facing Pagosa Springs: how to move forward with the proper maintenance of our schools — with a superintendent and school board who are largely out-of-touch with the community? |
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