by P.D. Lesko

TRUSTEES GLENN NELSON and Irene Patalan have said they intend to step down from the Ann Arbor Board of Education. In 2003, they ran as a part of a slate of candidates and have, for a decade, served. In that time, they have been members of a BOE which has gone through five superintendents and $35 million of what was once a $41 million fund balance. While the latest superintendent’s budget is not predicated on using money from the fund balance, and even projects replacing approximately $500,000 of the $35 million used over the course of the past dozen years, Nelson and Patalan leave the AAPS facing the same achievement gap it did when they took office and on the brink of insolvency. Trustee Susan Baskett, who has been vocal in her efforts to draw attention to the needs of the district’s minority students, as well as the long-standing achievement gap, has said she’s not sure she’ll run again.

Like Nelson and Patalan, Baskett would leave the AAPS in worse shape financially than she found it. As a member of the Board of the AAATA, Baskett has done little to address the inequities that face the students who use the city’s public transportation system to commute to and from school. While downtown workers pay $10 per year for subsidized bus passes, AAPS students pay $48 per month. Baskett has, in her time on the AAATA Board, neglected to represent the city’s school children and their transit needs. Had Baskett spearheaded a creative transit solution for the city’s students, it could have saved the AAPS money on its own transit system.

To be fair, BOE members don’t get paid, and suffered through a ridiculous kerfluffle in the media over food served at BOE meetings. While the BOE made a serious mistake in hiring (and then defending the hire of) second choice Dr. Patricia Green for the outlandish sum of $240,000 per year, who could have ever anticipated Dr. Green would quit in the middle of a BOE meeting much less in the middle of her contract?

Former BOE members are less forgiving in their assessments of the departing BOE members and while I won’t repeat those criticisms, there’s a lot of “I told you so” going around, particularly as the current BOE members used up millions and millions in savings to balance their budgets, a dangerous strategy.

The current budget is predicated, in part, on freezing wages for all employees and outsourcing janitorial services to save a projected $6.9 million. With additional revenue from students poached from other districts under the auspices of a schools of choice program, the budget will be balanced. However, the AAPS BOE has its back up against the wall and so does Superintendent Dr. Jeanice K. Swift. A deficit will result in swift and sure action from Lansing in the form of an emergency manager.

Such an appointment would result in the contract between the district and its teachers being voided. So while AAEA President Linda Carter makes the best of a difficult situation, she surely understands that another pay freeze is better than the bitter medicine Lansing would force her members to swallow.

Dr. Swift has focused on revenue enhancement. However, she must focus on what is a clearly inefficient budgeting system. Former BOE members point out that until the superintendent moves to a system of zero-based budgeting, overages will continue and so will waste and inefficiency. In other words, Dr. Swift needs to lead the AAPS into a new financial era in which incremental budgeting is discontinued. Whether she can tackle that remains to be seen. Without new BOE members who insist she do it, however, that item may never rise to the top of her to-do list.