LaTasha DeLoach Betrays Low-Income Parents

Caption: In foreground, LaTasha DeLoach at an equity meeting downtown before the election, 2015.

LaTasha DeLoach reproached Iowa City Community School District administrators for not responding to her request for survey options to Thought Exchange, acknowledged that low-income parents might not be able to access the all-digital platform, and then voted for it.

Thought Exchange, a survey instrument on a digital (computerized) platform, is an expensive program purported to facilitate communication between parents and school district administrators. It will cost about $150,000 up front and about $30,000 a year afterward. School administrators will write the questions and parents who have computers or have access to one will answer those questions if they’re so inclined.

Latasha DeLoach asked at the last board meeting if alternatives to Thought Exchange had been considered and if she could get an answer on what alternatives exist. She was told that former administrator David Dude, now a superintendent in the Deep South, had evaluated various programs and decided on Thought Exchange as the best option. DeLoach emailed administration and asked for a list of alternatives. No one replied.

She complained that she received no reply at the 11/24/15 school board meeting. Board vice president Brian Kirschling replied in what I thought was a paternalistic manner that David Dude did the evaluation and could be trusted to come up with the best option.

Board director Phil Hemingway said that Cedar Rapids has a survey option that could be used with a computer at home, with a school computer accessible by parents, or with a paper survey mailed to the parents who prefer that option. Obviously, a survey like that would be more accessible to all parents than Thought Exchange will be.

DeLoach asked how many languages Thought Exchange can be offered in. Board director Lori Roetlin said that the district has parents who speak 40 different languages, but the language most spoken after English is Spanish, with Arabic following Spanish as the third language most often spoken by district parents. Four languages are the maximum that the district is willing to translate for parents.

Despite the fact that 91% of district parents have access to a computer and nine percent don’t, and despite the fact that DeLoach was asked to trust administrators’ decision instead of being given adequate answers to her request for a list of other options to Thought Exchange, she voted for Thought Exchange, a questionable expenditure and a questionable survey instrument that board director Lori Roetlin, board president Chris Lynch, and vice president Brian Kirschling also voted for.

Board director Chris Liebig made the excellent point that without evaluation from someone such as a statistician readily available from the University of Iowa, we have no idea whether Thought Exchange is a reliable statistical survey instrument.

Will the results be an accurate measure of what the community wants? Is there any evidence that the board and school district administrators respond to what the community wants regardless of how the community expresses itself?