EDITORIAL: The “Voice” Of The AAPS Board Of Education
THE AAPS 2012-2013 audit represents the best of times and the worst of times. When auditor Plante Moran delivered the audit to the Board of Education on November 13th the BOE discovered that the AAPS has a $9.42 million fund balance. Prior to the audit, officials had projected a $6.87 million fund balance. This means that the AAPS will not have to borrow to cover payroll. However, the $9.42 million dollar fund balance amounts to just 5 percent of the district’s total $183 million dollar budget. That’s a far cry from the recommended 15 percent fund balance recommended by the association of Michigan School Business Officials.
To mangle the saying, if fund balances were horses, BOE members would ride. Superintendent Dr. Swift ends her listening tour this month and when she goes back to Balas a cold reality awaits: her district has debt equal to its annual operating budget and a savings account that has dwindled from $36 million dollars to $9.42 million dollars over the past decade.
She’s not alone in her quandary by any means. In 2012, state officials calculated that school districts throughout the state had a collective $21 billion dollars in debt, most of it for construction projects. The state ranks 5th nationally in per-student amount of long-term debt. According to data from the 2008-09 National Center for Education Statistics, Michigan has $13,000 per-student in long-term debt. Lansing bears much of the blame: our state government does not provide any direct funding for school construction and other capital costs.
Be that as it may, school districts in Michigan that post consecutive deficits trigger review from the Michigan Department of Treasury’s Local Audit and Finance Division. Should the Ann Arbor Public Schools run through its present $9.2 fund balance and fail to balance subsequent budgets, officials from Lansing will come knocking and evaluate whether Ann Arbor’s school district needs an emergency financial manager.
Serious times demand serious thinkers, people willing to wrestle with the serious issues facing our public schools. The Superintendent, in visiting all of the schools in her district and eliciting feedback on priorities has shown herself willing to face the district’s notoriously demanding parents and her district’s challenges. On the other side of the conference table sits Deb Mexicotte, the President of the Board of Education. While Dr. Swift listens, Ms. Mexicotte pens blog posts for the AAPS School News site that can only be described as puerile. Her second undated post, titled “On Being the Spokesperson for the Board,” is a single paragraph that begins: “So one of the main reasons I had to really think long and hard about doing regular blog posting for the AAPS News is not that I don’t love to talk about education or district issues, — because I do, ask anyone! It is because as Board President I am, technically, the official spokesperson for the Board.”
It’s as if Mexicotte resides in a world apart from the realities that confront the district she has been charged with leading. In her most recent blog post she explains how Board Committees work. She writes, “It may be helpful to understand a bit about how items get on the agenda for Board review.” It would be interesting to understand how the BOE is measuring the success of policies intended to close the achievement gap implemented under the last superintendent, or what the BOE plans to do to increase revenues. A blog post about how the district’s structural deficit impacts the annual budgeting process would be immensely instructional.
While it’s unreasonable to expect Ms. Mexicotte to hit the mark every time she writes a blog post, her blog posts thus far have been so far off target as to be alienating.
The AAPS 2014-2015 budget could require a further draw from the fund balance and bring us that much closer to the brink of deficit. Even if Ms. Mexicotte can’t share all of her opinions, information and ideas about that in a blog post, we’d like her to broach the subject in some meaningful way, to initiate the same kind of dialogs with parents that Dr. Swift has initiated over these weeks on her listening tour. It is Mexicotte, not the other members of the BOE who pens the public blog posts, and so she is speaking for the Board, if only tacitly. She has chosen to serve as the public face and voice of the BOE. She has chosen to write blog posts for the AAPS School News site. We urge her to compose posts that are more thoughtful—blog posts that address the educational, financial and demographic realities that currently face the AAPS.