The Price of Democracy: What's a Councilor Worth?

City Councilors and the Mayor are paid employees of the City. Currently, City Councilors are paid $4,000 per year and the Mayor receives $7,500. They have not received a raise in almost a decade. On the one hand, we wonder if they should be paid at all. After all, the School Board, the Planning Board, and the Zoning Board of Appeals are not paid. On the other hand, if there are good reasons for a salary, we wonder what a fair wage would be.

By the end of 2008, the new Council had met over 40 times since being inaugurated on January 1, 2008. To put that in perspective, it’s about a dozen more meetings than the former Council had in 2007, almost twice as many meetings as were had in 2006, and over two times the amount Council met in 2005, when only 18 meetings were held during the entire year.

And not only has the frequency of meetings increased, but the overall time spent in meetings has increased as well. On a rough average, Council meetings in 2008 were about 4 hours in length. That means that City Councilors, assuming they attend every meeting, have logged about 160 hours governing the City, as body.

In addition to the Council meetings and work sessions, Councilors have numerous other responsibilities: e-mails, phone calls, interacting with constituents, attending meetings and events of other groups and committees, reading reports and preparing for meetings, and researching and studying various issues. These activities would fall under “engaged governance,” which was identified by Council as one of its new priorities, described there as what Councilors do “in between meetings.” A truly engaged Councilor, who does all of these things, is likely spending somewhere close to 20 hours/week on City-related business.

So, let’s say a Councilor does only the bare minimum--showing up at meetings (again, we’ll assume perfect attendance). For 2008, this means that Councilors received roughly $25/hour before taxes (none of the positions are eligible for retirement or health care benefits and therefore do not have those items withheld). Someone who makes $25/hour at a full time job would earn, at an annual rate, $52,000/year.

On the other end of the spectrum, someone who is very engaged, well prepared, and committed to serving the public whenever and wherever needed, is being paid at a rate of about $8/hour. That’s comparable to a full time job that pays less than $20,000/year. (But remember that Councilors do, in reality, only receive a total of $4,000 in annual compensation).

Now, let’s look back on 2006, a year when many interesting things were happening in the City, certainly not a bright spot for open and accountable governing. Again, assuming that each of the 20 meetings was about 4 hours long, that means that the ‘bare minimum’ Councilor earned about $50/hour, a rate that would pay over $100,000 as a full time job.

Not too long ago, the Finger Lakes Times reported that the governing board of the Town of Geneva gave itself a sizeable raise. Unfortunately the local paper created a great deal of confusion by stating “Town Councilors” had received an increase and were divvying up a one-time lump sum retroactive payment. The Town of Geneva is governed by a Town Board whose members are called Board Members. The City of Geneva is governed by a City Council whose members (8) are called Councilors and a Mayor who has equal voting rights. To set the record straight, that article was about the Town, not the City.

We’re NOT advocating for a pay raise for City Council. What we want to point out is the disparity in pay for activity and inactivity. Under the previous administration, Council gave most of its decision-making power over to the appointed Manager, and they didn’t even complete the annual performance evaluations that would have given at least a modicum of accountability to the post. This created what we termed an ‘inversion of power’ and it was bad business for Geneva. But with this inversion came less work for Council, and at the same rate of pay, it meant that Council was essentially earning more money for doing less.

It seems that the concept of engaged governance has brought back the notion of ‘public service’ in Geneva. The Councilors are not volunteers, but their compensation seems, for the most part, to be more of a token stipend than a salary commensurate with the work being performed. What do you think?

Geneva Board of Education Not Schooled in Trust

Whatever the criticisms of the Geneva City School District Board of Education (they, after all, signed off on the administration’s bogus realignment plan) may be, you can’t claim that they did not reward industriousness. The vote to proceed with the misguided plan for restructuring the City’s elementary education was passed by the School Board at 10:17pm on Monday, April 6th. Within 12 hours, a series of transition committees, meeting dates, childcare arrangements and other details were all set up and outlined in a six page memo which was delivered to each school by 10:17am the next day. A comprehensive community information piece and schedule of events put together in under 12 hours? Talk about burning the midnight oil!

'Cynics' might say that the School Board’s 5-1 vote after minimal public comments by individual Board members was simply a ‘rubber-stamping’ of a ‘done deal.’ (Former Board president Ford Weiskittel, the only dissenting vote, was the only member to dig deeply into the arguments pro and con in his public remarks). 'Cynics' might also say that the series of public meetings held by the administration in the weeks leading up to the vote was simply window dressing, that the District felt shamed into at least providing the appearance of community outreach, and that none of the questions raised at those meetings were taken seriously by any members of the review committee.

Those same ‘cynics’ might also point to outrageously exaggerated and ever changing projections of cost savings. (The initial claim was $1.2 million would be saved, $250,000 was mentioned, then $150,000, and by the final discussion, that figure was lowered to $50,000). There’s also the misstated research findings (supporting the realignment with data from a study that actually rejects the K-2/3-5 configuration), the professional concerns, the faculty and staff resistance, the negative parent reactions, the numerous changes of direction, and the rush to judgment for the upcoming school year as indicators of bad decision-making.

On that basis, one might conclude that the School Board (with one notable exception) lacks a commitment to community based decision making and the courage to follow up on hard questions with due diligence, that the Board resists being guided by research and data rather than being led by emotion, to put the educational needs of the children before the emotional needs of the administrators. Why not just admit it was all a big mistake?

So what can we say to these 'cynics'? Well, we could point out that the District, in addition to its six page letter has also embarked on an automated-phone-messaging campaign, a school-counselor-advised ‘transition planning’ strategy for children, and other means of getting the word out to the community that things they are a-changin’. This, we might say, is an indication that they do know how to get the word out and make people aware of what’s going on. But the ‘cynic’ would likely point out that the District is using all the methods now that it didn’t use before the vote was taken, all the methods that might have made a difference in letting people have a meaningful, informed voice in the decision. The ‘cynic’ might say that all of this work is direct evidence of all the steps the District avoided in order to keep the decision as low-key and the people as uninformed as possible. And the ‘cynic’ might ask what the District had to lose?

'Cynic' or not, the answer is clear: The District leadership (the School Board and the Administration) in its handling of this issue before the vote, during the vote, and after the vote lost the most important thing of all: the public trust. Which makes the District leadership the true cynic in the room.

School Board Members Are Still Accountable(Even If District Officials Don't Appear To Be)

When individual School Board members cast their individual votes on the proposed realignment plan, they owe it to their constituents, first, to engage in a public debate about the issue, and then, to give reasons for their vote. It is not enough to say that after a long process they simply support the administration’s recommendation, especially when, by now, the Board must be aware of how flawed the decision making process has been.

The series of district-sponsored information sessions about the proposed elementary school realignment is now complete. The jury is out; in other words, the decision whether or not to move from the current West Street (K-5) and North Street (K-5 plus Head Start) model to a K-2 plus Head Start (at West Street) and grades 3-5 (North Street) model is now in the hands of the School Board.

The decision the Board will have to make on April 6th is twofold: First, should the district adopt this change? Second, if the switch is to occur, does it have a reasonable chance of coming to fruition immediately (for September of this year), or does it warrant additional transition planning time (making the change in September 2010)?

While the District has grudgingly put out some information and half heartedly agreed to allow the public to comment on recommendations provided to the Board by an advisory group, we are left with the same fundamental question that we had when we the plan was first brought to our attention: What, exactly, is the problem that needs to be solved; and in what way is realignment the best solution to that problem?

Unfortunately, try as we might, we simply cannot divine an answer to those questions from the multitude of responses the District has dished out. Here’s our attempt to recap (for the benefit of District residents, our readers, the Board and our own sanity) what’s been said by District officials thus far:

1. They say: “The District is facing a budget gap of $2.4 million, and realignment will close the gap by saving $1.2 million in annual expenditures.

This was the first and most public reason given for raising the realignment question and the first and most public reason given for the conclusion that realignment was the best solution to the problem. It was also the projection passed along to the Budget Advisory Committee and subjected to serious scrutiny and questions.

Reality: In the course of public disclosures, savings alleged by the district have steadily decreased from $1.2 million to $250,000 (according to the Superintendent, March 25th meeting), and the specific whereabouts of any savings has never been given.
That is just shy of a one million dollar downward shift in projected savings. So, while it may have initially seemed that realignment was the best way to cut the deficit in half, that argument no longer holds water.

2. They say: The current elementary school model is outdated and not in keeping with the best educational practices of the day.

In other words, what we’re doing right now is not working and the District has found a way to fix it. The problem with this argument, unfortunately, is that it seemed to take the following form:

Claim #1: Socio-economic status (SES) is the most important limiting factor on student achievement.
Claim #2: North Street and West Street are out of balance when it comes to SES.
Claim #3: Realignment will neutralize the negative effect of low SES.
Conclusion: Realignment is the best way to improve student achievement.

Reality: The Superintendent is right about Claim #1, but wrong on Claims #2 and #3.

There is a large body of sound educational research that supports the conclusion that higher rates of achievement are associated with students from higher income households and lower rates of achievement are associated with students from lower income households.

And according to the figures presented in the Superintendent’s report (see page 10), 69% of students at North Street School qualify for free or reduced lunch while 50% of students and West Street School qualify, so while neither school is predominantly wealthy, North Street School has a larger number of students who, according to the research, would be at academic risk due to SES.

But the next page of the Superintendent’s own report states “There is a difference in student achievement on NYS assessments of ELA (English Language Arts) and Math, with North Street performing slightly better” and statistics to support that assertion.

And this is where the District’s argument outlined above breaks down. Given a student population that is at a greater economic disadvantage, and knowing that such disadvantage usually results in a lack of educational achievement, you might expect that North Street would be performing worse than West Street.

So, rather than supporting the conclusion the District seems to have been hoping for, the District’s own data endorses the current K-5 educational model at North Street School. Could it be that the only bearing this has on the realignment debate is to indicate that North Street students will likely fare worse with a change?

3. They say: In response to this concern about the data, and its tendency to
prove the opposite conclusion from the one that the District intended, the Superintendent provides the following new argument for the realignment proposal:

Claim #1: 24 students each year make a disruptive transition from Head Start (at North Street School) to kindergarten (at West Street School).
Claim #2: The transition from Elementary School to Middle School is difficult on the students who are meeting for the first time.
Claim #3: Realignment would allow all Head Start students to remain in the same building for Kindergarten.
Claim #4: Realignment would eliminate the difficulty with the Middle School transition.

Conclusion: Realignment is the best way to ease student transitions.

Reality: While we don’t doubt that the first two statements are true, we, again think it’s important to note that the research in education clearly states (as we have cited in previous posts) that any transition to a new building has a negative impact on student learning, at least in the short term.

Students have the guaranteed first transition from home to school (that may be Head Start or it may be Kindergarten). But under the realignment, students would have another mandatory transition, from the primary school (K-2) to the intermediate school (3-5). Then, they would have a third transition from the intermediate school to the middle school.

We question the soundness of a policy that increases a known negative condition for 160 students annually in order to avoid that same negative condition for a much smaller number of students.

This brings us to the main problem with this argument in general. While realignment might be one way of approaching the transition issue, there is no evidence to support that is the only, nor the best way to do so. In fact, the past two times this concept has been publicly discussed and rejected, several strategies for dealing with transitional issues were offered, yet none were adopted.

This makes us question the true importance of this issue in the eyes of the District, because we could understand looking at other options if none of the previously suggested strategies had worked, but when none have been tried, how does realignment again become the default?

4. They say: The last argument is to reduce the negative influence of older children on younger children. It goes something like this:

Claim #1: There is a large age range between kindergarten and fifth grade.
Claim #2: Under the current school configuration, older children are negatively influencing younger children, causing them to ‘grow up more quickly.’
Claim #3: Segregating ages allows each group to flourish.

Conclusion: Reconfiguration is the best way to protect the innocence of young students.

Reality: If this one feels like a stretch, that’s because it clearly is. After all,
in early discussions, the administration was stressing their commitment to
keeping older students in contact with younger students, citing research that supports the idea of mentoring between students as beneficial for both the older and the younger participants. So we not only see a change in the talking points on this issue, but another disregard for the data and the real consequences of the proposed realignment.

In addition to the data that supports multi-age interaction within elementary schools, there is also a mountain of evidence that ‘small schools’ where students are one of 90 or less students of the same age are much more successful at education children (especially children from a lower SES) than large schools where students are one of 100 or more. So, not only would realignment prevent that multi-age interaction, it would also create a greater sense of anonymity within grade levels, by making students one of over 160 students per grade.

There’s also that pesky detail of bussing. As we pointed out in a previous post, the staggered start times that would be required under this proposal would result in long bus rides for students of all ages, all together on the same busses. Whatever concerns there are about negative interactions within the school hallways pale in comparison to the real concerns of negative interactions on the bus where the driver is there to drive, not to babysit, and the District stated that it has no plans to hire additional monitors.

There are many additional concerns that have gone unaddressed, or only partially addressed as well as the concern expressed in our most recent post that the very evidence the District cites as support for a primary/secondary split is actually derived from studies on a District that operates on a multiple K-5 building system.

Reality : All of this leads us to a conclusion of our own, best summed up as follows:

Claim #1: There is no evidence that realignment provides a greater cost savings than other creative strategies.
Claim #2: There is no evidence that a realignment along K-2/3-5 lines is educationally superior to the existing model.
Claim #3: There is evidence that indicates that the addition of transitions at the elementary level is disruptive to education, particularly amongst students with educational risk associated with low SES.

Conclusion: Realignment fails to emerge as the best option for meeting the District’s objectives and, moreover, appears to present a direct threat to the educational outcomes of students with low SES which make up a majority of District pupils.

We don’t deny the legitimacy of the pocketbook concerns of District residents. After all, taxes are already high and most people’s income is not keeping pace. But we don’t just elect a School Board to cut costs without regard to the effect on education. Instead, we should expect from school district spending the same things we need to expect from city government spending: A reasonable return on our investment. That requires accountability.

And until this Board can say that it has trimmed every expense that does not have a direct negative impact on education, it must not proceed with a proposal that—by all objective measures and all data-driven analysis on the topic—will result in a net negative for the largest portion of the student population and no guarantee of a positive return for the rest.