The EMID Board meets this coming Wednesday 21 December at 5:30pm at Harmabee. Actually, to be specific, the board will start its work session at 5:30pm and its actual board meeting at 6:30pm. You are welcome at both, though the public forum welcoming your input will happen at the start of the 6:30 board meeting.
The agenda, available as part of the board packet (PDF), includes the 2012-2013 budget and decisions about the continuing strategic planning process. If you would like to know more about these topics, read on!
The budget
This week Interim Superintendent Robicheau told the Crosswinds Community Partnership that he did no realize that EMID was operating in deficit until after the board decided to keep EMID schools open and he began work on the upcoming budget. However, we learned at last month’s board meeting that by design the current 2011-2012 fiscal year budget, submitted by Dr. Robicheau to the board for its approval earlier this year, is in significant deficit. Moreover, the budget submitted in the board packet for 2012-2013 shows a $3M deficit. The board is struggling with how to cope with this deficit.
It turns out that the way they coped with last year’s structural deficit was to simply use up a significant portion of the reserves that had been designed to support school operations during lean times. That reserve, once nearly $5M, is now below $3M. Since the schools need about $2M of that just to allow proper cash flow, covering late payments from the state, there is not enough left to deal with the structural problem the board created last year and the year before.
This means that the board now has a significant mess of it’s own making to clean up. To make matters worse, the uncertainty about our schools this fall led to a lower-than-expected enrollment at Crosswinds, which only deepened the hole the district now finds itself in. We have to find a way out of this predicament together.
The Strategic Planning Process
Even though Interim Superintendent Robicheau indicated at the last board meeting and in a communication to EMID Families that he would seek to have families represented on the “leadership” or “design” team that is being set up to guide the next phase of strategic planning, we have learned that the “steering committee” (made up of board members and superintendents) is recommending to the board that they only appoint administrators and educators from EMID and member districts to this design team. This team will seek public input but apparently not include any community members unless we convince the board to ignore the recommendation of the steering committee.
The board will also consider a “guiding change document” (PDF) that outlines assumptions about the strategic planning. We just got a copy of this document today and it is pretty stark in its tilt. It takes as a given that “Harambee and Crosswinds currently do not function as lab sites” for example, and though it notes that “Currently the two schools are the centerpiece to EMID” it does not include in its assumptions that year-round, IB, arts, or science will continue. Rather the focus of the guiding change document is to ensure “member districts see a greater direct mutual benefit” from EMID. The board must approve or amend this document in order to move the planning process along.
The Joint Powers Agreement
The board has yet to agree to changes to the Joint Powers Agreement and will be considering it for the third meeting in a row next week. A particular sticking point is that even though the board has twice rejected changes to the makeup of the board itself, this keeps creeping back onto the agenda. This time the board will be asked to consider three options: (A) essentially keep board membership as it has been; (B) allow former board members to serve on the EMID board even if they no longer serve on their home board; or © allow member districts to appoint either a former board member or another “community person” to serve as the EMID board representative.
Parents who have observed this debate at past board meetings are concerned that options B or C will make an already weak EMID board even weaker by removing even the tenuous accountability of elected board members from the EMID board. In fact, the way C is worded, the EMID board could be populated by member district superintendents or other administrators. The mystery is why the board’s rejection of this change at the last meeting didn’t “stick”.
In any case, you can see the board is still engaged in work that will have a significant impact on EMID’s future. If you can take the time to attend the meeting it would help the board know that we stand ready to serve as partners in this process. If you have opinions about the matters before the board, please also take the time to speak up during public forum. The work session from 5:30 to 6:30 will consist mostly of discussion of these same agenda items.