School Board Meeting Tonight (1/27) to Review Community Comment

Three minutes per person isn’t much time for community commenters to address all the issues that trouble taxpayers about the way Iowa City Community School District Superintendent Steve Murley and the Board of Directors are running the district, especially when it comes to hiring staff and spending money on executive pay, executive perks, and construction.

When Republican Gov. Terry Branstad and the Republicans in the Iowa legislature cut back on allowable school growth funding, Republican Representative Kraig Paulsen of Hiawatha said, “Quite frankly, I’d like to know where a good chunk of it goes because I know the teacher is not getting paid that much and they’re not buying that much curriculum. . . .”

Aspiring school board candidate Phil Hemingway could tell Paulsen where the money goes. Phil tells the school board where he thinks they’re wasting money with his three minutes per comment. Others tell the school board with their three minutes.

Tonight the school board is going to discuss ways to cut that three minutes back to less time or none at all. There will be a Power Point presentation on the subject on how to produce less transparency and openness in government by further limiting or eliminating community comment.

To be fair, according to Phil Hemingway, both school board directors Tuyet Dorau and Jeff McGinness do not want to take up the issue of community comment again. That does them credit, because it would be no great surprise to see the board come begging to taxpayers again for more money to finish the construction they’ve already begun. After the bait-and-switch tactics that preceded and followed the last bond, which passed, when the board and the superintendent said they wouldn’t close elementary schools because they needed all the elementary schools they had plus more, then -- after the bond passed and they got the money -- prepared to close Hoover, the board and the superintendent will need all the good will they can get to pass another school bond.

If the board suppresses community comment, it’ll be more “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” with no discussion and no protests as to how the board wastes taxpayer funds. We’ll have more expensive, cost-overruns construction and expensive salaries and perks like the administration’s private executive parking lot and their expensive new roof rammed down our throats.

Who is the top customer of the school district? Not students. Well paid school administrators with nice perks, their architects, and contractors are the top customers. The district does not put students first. Nor do teachers come in second. Customers are supposed to be the people who matter most in a system, but putting children first is just the district’s motto. Don’t believe what they say. Watch what they do instead. When administrators reviewed whose roof needed replacing first, it turned out to be theirs! What a coincidence!

Tonight’s school board meeting starts at 6:00 p.m. at the old Iowa City Press-Citizen building at 1725 North Dodge Street, Iowa City. If you have Mediacom, you can watch the meeting on TV on channel 21, also beginning at 6:00 p.m.

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