Grounds Crew Now; Teachers' Aides Next? School Board Meeting Wednesday

You might have noticed this MLive article from June 19, 2015:

Ann Arbor Schools May Privatize Grounds Crew

As noted in the article,

Ann Arbor Public Schools may privatize its grounds crew to save up to $300,000.
The district will have to lay off 13 employees if it hires four local companies to provide grass cutting, snow removal and athletic field care.
The Board of Education on Wednesday, June 17, reviewed a proposal to hire AM Service of Ann Arbor, Great Lakes Environmental Services of Whitmore Lake, JCC Design of Whitmore Lake and Superior Lawn Care & Snow Removal of Ypsilanti to do the work.
"We believe this model of using a number of contractors to deliver services to parts of the district will help meet real time needs and increase agility in keeping grounds in really good shape," said Superintendent Jeanice Swift. (Emphasis added.)

This item will be voted on at Wednesday's (June 24th) board meeting.

Side Note:

Another item on the June 24th agenda will be the "revised" Draft Policy 5060, which addresses parents who refuse to have their children take state tests.

Here is the amended policy--do you think it is better? It does not call out any particular students. But it still maintains that the tests are mandatory, and it says the board may take "any additional actions," which I think is pretty broad.

But back to my other point.

The rumor that I have heard floating around--I have not seen any written documentation (but also I haven't looked for any)--is that the district is looking into outsourcing all of the teachers' aides in the district. Presumably that would mean making it so that another company (possibly PESG, which does the substitute teachers) would hire all of the teachers' aides and supply them to the district.

UPDATED 6/24/2015--response to this rumor from David Comsa, Deputy Superintendent of Human Resources and Legal Services: "There is no chance of AAPS outsourcing teaching assistants. First, the district is actively bargaining with the Paraeducator unit, which includes teaching assistants. Second, state case law considers most teaching assistants to be protected from outsourcing."

Notice the trend? The goal is to make it so that the number of employees the district is directly responsible for is as small as possible. There is a strong financial incentive for this--for all school district employees, the district is responsible for retirement costs (I believe the costs are above 25% of payroll, and the district is unable to control the amount they are required to pay--that is set by the state). It also gives the district a lot more flexibility.

However, there is certainly also a very troubling aspect to this as well. People lose their jobs, and there is no guarantee that they will be re-hired, or that their pay rates will be similar...even if they are, they will lose the opportunity for a state pension. It also distances the district from tough personnel decisions (after the initial layoff)--the district just tells the other company to do X with Y amount of money--if that leads to difficult working conditions or less pay for certain people--it is separated from the decisions of the district itself.

I recognize that the district, per pupil, gets about the same amount of money as we got thirteen years ago--and there-in lies the conundrum. On the other hand--although theoretically the services should not change, in reality I hear people complain all the time about the decline in custodial services, the decline in food service...I don't really know if the decline is real or imagined.

Can you imagine a time where the district outsourced the teachers? (Just. Asking. I have not heard of any plans to do so--and I do not mean to start any panic about that--but that is what some charter schools do.)

If you have feelings about any of this, you should share them with the Board of Education: boe@a2schools.org (note new, shorter, email address!), ideally before the school board meeting on June 24th.



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We Deserve Better: Or Go Pack, Go!

By now you've probably heard about the layoffs at annarbor.com. If you haven't, well--there were layoffs. They cut their lead blogger (so much for engaging with the web), they cut their entertainment staff, they cut general reporting...you get the idea. (And they appear not to be able to report on themselves, someone else had to do it for them. But at the link above at least Tony Dearing reacts.)

Right now, they don't even have a higher education reporter, and wait a minute...isn't this a company town? How could you not have a higher education reporter with UM and EMU in your front yard and back yard respectively? That tells you how thin the reporting staff is right now.

And honestly, when it comes to news reporting, I feel that we the people of Washtenaw County deserve better. Annarbor.com cannot cut its way into prosperity when what it needs is more reporters. Sure there are Heritage Newspapers, which is set up with a small-town model and might be all that Milan or Manchester can sustain, but it's not sufficient for Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti. I love the Ann Arbor Chronicle, but they will be the first to admit that their focus is limited, and they are not trying to run a full service newspaper or news site. [If they did, though, I'm sure it would be high quality.] It's unfair to the people of Ypsilanti to have to rely on Mark Maynard's blog to report on the grapevine.

Yesterday, twitter was abuzz with news of the layoffs. (Digression: I find I really like twitter. I can follow breaking news about Madison, WI and Japan and Libya simultaneously! Follow me as schoolsmuse.)

Anyway, someone on twitter asked me what I was looking for. I said, "The New York Times, only local." What???? No, seriously, I mean that. There are still, excellent and viable local papers--and if you lived in New York, you would know that the New York Times really is also a local paper. Anyway--he said he didn't think Ann Arbor could support that. I think he's wrong. In part I am making the same argument that annarbor.com tried to make, "We're such an educated community." Exactly--so people want their news. But we're not dumb, either. We don't want dumb news, we want smart news.

On the other hand, he might be right that there is not a good for-profit model for this right now. I started thinking about nonprofit models--after all, that's basically the world I come from. I don't know that your classic 501(c)3 is the right model either.

But then, I started thinking about the most recent Superbowl. Now, I'm not really a football fan (although I do always read the sports pages), but this Superbowl attracted my attention. In it, we had two small-market teams--Pittsburgh and Green Bay--make it to the top.
Although the greater Pittsburgh area has about a million people, Pittsburgh itself has only around 300,000 (yes, you say, that's the size of Washtenaw County). But they've got major league football, baseball, ice hockey and even soccer. And Green Bay? It's slightly smaller than Ann Arbor, but it's got a professional football team.

So how, you might wonder, does Green Bay survive in the big bad world of the NFL? Well, their fans have faith. But also--they have the right type of organization. Their greatest fans are their shareholders. They are non-profit and community-owned.

According to the Packers web site:

Shareholders

Green Bay Packers, Inc., has been a publicly owned, nonprofit corporation since Aug. 18, 1923, when original articles of incorporation were filed with Wisconsin’s secretary of state. A total of 4,750,937 shares is owned by 112,158 stockholders —none of whom receives any dividend on the initial investment. The corporation is governed by a board of directors and a seven member executive committee.

One of the more  remarkable business stories in American history, the team is kept viable by its shareholders — its unselfish fans. Even more incredible, the Packers have survived during the current era, permeated by free agency and the NFL salary cap. And, thanks in large part to Brown County’s passage of the 2000 Lambeau Field referendum, the club will remain solvent and highly competitive well into the future due to its redeveloped stadium. Fans have come to the team’s financial rescue on several occasions, including four previous stock sales: 1923, 1935, 1950 and 1997.
To protect against someone taking control of the team, the articles of incorporation prohibit any person from owning more than 200,000 shares. 

Whether this is the exactly right model, I'm not positive. There are several slightly different model of cooperatives too. But there is a lot of flexibility in the way cooperatives work, and cooperatives have a long history in Wisconsin and Michigan. We've got credit unions. We've got food co-ops. We've got housing co-ops. Why not a news cooperative?  

The time for planning is now.
It's our county, let's act like it.


And in the meantime? Go, Pack, Go!