Not District Dialogue

The school district has spent $3 per voter so far today

Citywide, there are 13 election superintendents and 73 deputies working today. The superintendents are paid $130 for the day and the deputies get $115, for a total cost $8,395.

They also get $10 per hour for training, a $10 stipend if they use their own cellphone and a mileage reimbursement for returning the ballots, but we’ll leave those costs out of this equation.

If we pro-rate, those 86 temporary workers made $4,897 through 2 p.m. for recording 1,639 ballots. That’s $2.99 per voter.

At Wesley United Methodist Church, where I voted, the cost through 2 p.m. was $8 per voter for 43 ballots and five election workers.

Problems welcome at a sleepy vote center

At 2 p.m., I was the 43rd person to vote today at Wesley United Methodist Church and the 1,639th to vote anywhere in the city.

The school district wasn’t expecting much action at Wesley. It’s one of three vote centers staffed with only five poll workers, although even that number feels like overkill.

Two women were scanning driver’s licenses, two taking receipts and handing out ballots, and one watching ballots get deposited and then handing out “I Voted Today!” stickers.

A fellow named Jon got there at the same time as me. When my driver’s license was scanned, his information disappeared from the other computer, so his had to be scanned a second time.

The workers then spent several minutes verifying that he was registered to vote, apparently because his real name is Jonathan.

“Thanks for the problem,” said one poll worker. “We needed something to wake us up.”

El Riad Shriners make a clown bid for Longfellow school

If you’ve ever been to a silent auction, you’ve probably been tempted to write down an initial bid of 50 cents for the $200 electric toothbrush.

Because you never know, right?

Maybe all the other bidders will overlook the toothbrush with the vibrating head as they fantasize about where they’d put their framed, signed Adrian Peterson jersey, or consider how they’d explain to their wives that they bought another shotgun.

Why not be that guy with the 50-cent bid?

Best-case scenario, you get years of super-clean teeth for the cost of two gumballs. Worst-case, the guy who wins the Sonicare for $165 rolls his eyes at your stupid-low bid.

Today, El Riad Shrine was that guy.

The school district this morning opened the sealed bids on Longfellow Elementary School, which closes in 2015. They were hoping to sell it for $1.3 million.

Several groups showed interest but only two ended up bidding: DakotAbilities and El Riad Shrine.

The Shriners’ bid was opened first. Base bid, $799. Alternatives 2 and 3, $100 each. Total bid, $999.

That’s like bidding 1.5 cents on a $200 toothbrush.

It’s 2 cents per square foot.

That would buy you 9 square centimeters of real estate in Paris.

DakotAbilities beat the bid by a multiple of 651.

Shriners, that’s a clown bid, bro.

Donations favor Alberty, Reiter for school board

The pre-election campaign finance reports are in for the Sioux Falls School Board race, and just two of the four have done any fundraising.

Kent Alberty received contributions totaling $3,175 and has spent $437 of it on printing. His donors include Kevin Kirby, Dave and De Knudson, Susie Blake, Doug Morrison and Rob Oliver.

Carly Reiter’s contributions totaled $1,915 and she spent $1,413 on advertising, printing, logo design, postage and a meet-and-greet. Donors include Rodney Parry and some familiar names from the Spanish immersion parent group she leads.

Matt Leedom has thus far financed his own campaign, spending $1,307 of his own money on advertising.

Joshua Schorzmann’s only gift came from his mother, who gave him $127 for advertising.

This is the only look voters will get at campaign finance before the May 21 election. Post-election reports are due July 2.

Fundraising has been a pretty reliable predictor of success in recent school board races:

In 2012, Kate Parker and Todd Thoelke were the only candidates to raise money, and they beat Debbie Hoffman and Ken Allender.

In 2011, neither candidate asked for donations.

In 2010, Alberty and Julie Westra won seats as they raised about $4,000 each, easily beating Jenay Hallickson, who got an unsolicited $75.

In 2009, Mike Deitschman finished last in fundraising and votes in a three-way race for two seats.

Reiter Pre Election by jrverges

Alberty Pre Election by jrverges

Leedom Pre Election by jrverges

Schorzmann Pre Election by jrverges

School board candidates on some issues, party affiliation, family

You can get a pretty good feel for the preparation of school board candidates by watching them on video.

Occasionally, they took different stances on a given issue.

If you don’t have an hour to kill, here’s a story I wrote on last week’s League of Women Voters forum.

And here’s one from Tuesday’s interview with the Argus Leader editorial board. (videos above)

Here are some other factors you may choose to consider when picking one or two of the four candidates:

Kent Alberty

He’s the only incumbent, having served six years on the board.

He is a Democrat (school board seats are non-partisan, but I won’t judge you if you care about party affiliation).

At 59, he’s a generation older than his opponents.

He was endorsed by the teachers union.

His children graduated from the district.

He likes the 1:1 Chromebook/iPad initiative.

He likes the Mark Twain/Longfellow/Jefferson consolidation.

Matt Leedom

He’s 30.

He is a Republican.

He was endorsed by the teachers union.

He has one child in the district.

He doesn’t like the 1:1 Chromebook/iPad initiative.

He likes the Mark Twain/Longfellow/Jefferson consolidation.

Joshua Schorzmann

He’s 33.

He is a Democrat.

He has one child in the district.

He likes the 1:1 Chromebook/iPad initiative.

He doesn’t like the Mark Twain/Longfellow/Jefferson consolidation.

Carly Reiter

She’s 34.

She is a Republican.

She has two children in the district.

She doesn’t like the 1:1 Chromebook/iPad initiative.

She likes the Mark Twain/Longfellow/Jefferson consolidation.

Video from the LWV forum will be replayed on KLRN cable channel 20 at the following times:

Wednesday: 3 and 9 p.m.
Fri-Sun: 2:30 and 8:30 p.m.
Monday: 3 and 9 p.m.

A candidate’s claim: Robert Frost a ‘diverse’ school: Really?

School board candidate Matt Leedom said a curious thing today.

During a Q&A with the Argus Leader editorial board, Patrick Lalley asked about de facto segregation in Sioux Falls public schools, whether it’s a problem and what the school board can do about it.

Kent Alberty said it’s true that some parents open-enroll their kids to more affluent/whiter schools, but some also open-enroll into more diverse schools.

Leedom was up next. He said he is one of those parents who chose a more diverse school for his sons:

“We’ve got parents — and I happen to be one of ‘em — that open-enrolled my child … in a school that I wanted him to experience, you know, the most culture that they possibly can because that is the world that we live in. And I think it’s very healthy to have friends and classmates from all parts of the city and from all backgrounds, to gain an understanding, I think, that creates more success in a student’s future.” [around the 17:50 mark]

His 9-year-old attends Robert Frost.

“They do draw from the north and from the south. It’s just a great mix there,” he said.

Great mix? The student population at Robert Frost is 89 percent white, and 24 percent are on free or reduced-price meals. It’s not exactly Hawthorne, which is 10 percent white, or Lowell, 11 percent.

Nor is it Horace Mann, which is two blocks from Leedom’s home, 68 percent white and where 68 percent are on free or reduced-price meals.

Gotcha! Right?

Well, no, it’s not that simple.

I asked Leedom about his open-enrollment decision after the editorial board session. He bought the house near Horace Mann last year. His third-grader has been going to Robert Frost since kindergarten, and at the time he and his ex-wife choose a school, he was living near 57^th and Sertoma Ave.

That would have put him in the boundaries for R.F. Pettigrew Elementary, which opened the same year his son started kindergarten. Pettigrew is 88 percent white, and 20 percent get meal subsidies.

Leedom said his step-sister, who teaches at John Harris, was hoping he’d send his son to her school. With 16.4 percent on meal subsidies, that’s the district’s most affluent elementary, and 88 percent of the students are white.

Ultimately, he and his ex-wife settled on Robert Frost. He said he liked that it was centrally located, pulls students from north and east of there and seemed like it would offer a good level diversity.

It had, he said, a “nice range of students from various cultural backgrounds and” family situations. “I think it’s terrible when a Caucasian kid sees a kid with darker skin and thinks, ‘Oh, that’s weird.”

He adds that his children’s mother had a good deal of say in the matter as well – they share custody 50/50 – and he’d love to have been able to start his 5-year-old at Horace Mann next year.

So, it’s probably unfair to tag Leedom as a parent who open-enrolled out of a diverse school and into an affluent one. But neither does he deserve a pat on the back for doing the opposite.

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For what it’s worth, Carly Reiter today described her kid’s school, Rosa Parks, as “a very diverse school.”

Rosa Parks is 76 percent white with 29 percent on meal subsidies.

The school district is 70.5 percent white, and the median elementary school here has 46 percent of its students on meal subsidies.

In Reiter’s defense, most of the kids there are learning Spanish.

Weird mail: Lunch trays and the ‘idiots’ at New Tech High School

I wrote here about a piece of mail I was happy to receive.

Below is mail of a different sort. It came from somebody in Missouri, who must have read a brief in his local newspaper referencing a story I wrote last month.

It seems this person was unimpressed with the students at New Technology High School, who suggested sugarcane lunch trays in place of Styrofoam:

For the record, plenty of schools use throw-away sugarcane trays, and I think the quote is supposed to be “not so common.”

Four weeks later and the teachers contract remains a secret

It’s been 27 days since the Sioux Falls Education Association voted in favor of a new five-year employment agreement with the school district.

The school district and teachers held a joint press conference, and the school board voted to approve the agreement.

You’d think by now that the document, which explains how the public school district is going to spend roughly $640 million in salaries and benefits over the next five years, would be public.

Alas, it is not. The district’s web site continues to link to the old agreement.

What makes that particularly troubling is that what we were told at the press conference was not entirely true. I asked board president Doug Morrison then whether there were any changes to the salary schedule, whether there were winners or losers among new or veteran teachers. He answered:

“The schedule won’t change except the base of all those numbers on there will go up by 8.54 percent, and teachers will continue to move across those.”

“Every point on the salary schedule goes up 8.54 percent, and then it’s a matter of where they’re at on their steps.”

“The basic salary schedule stays the same, it’s just that all the numbers on it go up by 8.54 percent.”

I don’t think Morrison was lying, but what he said clearly was not accurate.

Someone, presumably a teacher, mailed me the new salary schedule with a note that read: “If you look at this you can easily see all teachers did not receive an 8.5 percent increase. Maybe you should do an in-depth story about this and see why the teachers are not all happy. Interview some!”

Without that letter, I couldn’t have written my Sunday story, which revealed that some types of teachers would receive far more than 8.54 percent, and some less than 2 percent.

In fact, the salary schedule was expanded, by two rows. Twelve positions on the new schedule are up 8.54 percent. But 14 positions are up 14 percent and 16 positions 19.7 percent.

The expanded schedule will benefit only new hires, who will make significantly more money than if they had been hired last spring.

“I was using the 8.54 percent in a general sense,” Morrison told me after I sent him a spreadsheet I put together comparing the two pay schedules. “We did change the structure of it.”

It struck me as a pretty big deal that starting pay for new hires with experience was going up 14.7 to 19 percent. You’d think the school board and administrators would be happy to talk about it, right?

So why didn’t they talk about it during their press conference? And why did Pam Homan and Sue Simons refuse to meet with me or take a phone call about it, insisting I submit questions by email?

I have to wonder too whether the teachers knew what they were voting on. Would an experienced teacher hired last year have voted for the agreement if she knew a new hire with the same experience would be making as much as $7,333 more in year one?

The agreement puts a lot more money into teacher salaries. Maybe that’s enough to overcome the inequities that come along with it.

But it would have been nice if the administration and school board would have been upfront about what they were doing, and at least a little transparent after the fact.

And the teachers union has a new president

The Sioux Falls Education Association has a new president.

Members of the teachers union demonstrated their continued preference for leaders with short first names and tricky surnames by electing Pam Oberembt to replace a retiring Deb Merxbauer.

Regular readers of the Argus Leader’s Voices section might recognize Oberembt as one of our advisory panelists, who opine on demand on a range of editorial topics.

She’s 53, a Scorpio and lives in Brandon. For now, she works out of the main district office as an instructional coach for high school language arts teachers.

If the state’s teacher qualifications site can be trusted, Oberembt majored in English and education and minored in Spanish at Mt. Marty, then obtained a master’s in education at the University of Minnesota.

School board election: Teachers union endorses Alberty, Leedom

Early voting starts today for the Sioux Falls School Board election, and the teachers union has made its recommendations.

The key network committee of the Sioux Falls Education Association has endorsed incumbent Kent Alberty and Matt Leedom over Carly Reiter and Joshua Schorzmann. Two seats are open.

In past elections, the favored candidates have received $500 each from the union.

You probably know very little about the candidates. That’s OK. Election Day is May 21.

The annual rapid-fire Q&A is at 6:30 Thursday night and I’ll be writing about it. The event is always a good opportunity for the candidates to tell us about their families, praise the administration, claim that the school board doesn’t communicate well enough with the public, and generally fail to differentiate themselves from each other on any substantive issue. Good times.

Our Voices section and editorial board will do some things with the candidates before the election as well.