Running a campaign includes managing an overwhelming array of details. One detail that got away from me is my response to the Patch Questionnaire sent earlier during the campaign season. Please read my responses to the questions here. And please consider entrusting me with your vote tomorrow!

(Remember that all School Committee seat are at large so you can vote for one candidate from each ward).

Best regards,

Steve Siegel
Candidate for Newton School Committee, Ward 5
www.stevesiegel.org
steve@stevesiegel.org
617-901-4959

Q: Why are you running for election?

I am running because I am convinced that I can make a strong difference in advancing the work of the school committee. I have the skills, energy, curiosity, and engagement with others to be effective at dealing with our biggest current challenges. These include fixing our broken school buildings, changing the funding model for our classroom and administrative technology so we can provide equal access for all, and strengthening our STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) offerings and student interest.

Q: What is your background in local government or community involvement and how will it help you in this seat? Do you have other experiences that will help you in the position?

I am an elected member of the Oak Hill School Council that advises the principal. My daughters attend the 7th and 10th grades at Oak Hill and Newton South. I am a volunteer elementary school math tutor, and I have been active on a variety of PTO projects. These experiences give me an intimate exposure to what is happening today within our classrooms, and provide me with valuable perspective to bring into School Committee deliberations.

In addition I have worked directly with Mayor Warren, leading a team that studied the state of maintenance in our school buildings. I served on search committees that resulted in the hiring of our building commissioner, DPW commissioner, and director of maintenance.

I have been a period guest op-ed writer in the TAB on topics ranging from getting our school lunch program in the black to lessons learned from the NNHS process.

Q: With Newton facing several tough budget seasons in the recent past — and likely several in the future — what do you feel needs to be cut, added or changed in the budget to keep the city’s finances balanced?

Education is Newton’s brand, and cuts will erode it. We must work better with the resources we have, and try to enhance our budget using whatever means are available.

Innovative approaches to be more efficient such as the co-taught classroom model may reduce SPED costs. Night-shift maintenance crews may help extend scarce maintenance dollars. More intuitive elementary math curriculum may reduce the need for expensive math coaches. We must constantly identify creative approaches to do more with the same dollars.

Simultaneously, we must look to increase resources from non-traditional sources, such as private donors following institutional fundraising models. Partnering with area institutions and businesses may provide funding, staff, and expertise into our classrooms. Aggressive pursuits of grants can be beneficial if they are well-managed to prevent program stops and starts.

Q: What is the most important issue Newton faces today?

Now that we have a new teacher’s contract, the most important issue we face is the fixing of our school buildings. Twelve of 15 elementary schools are in need of repair, renovation, expansion, or reconstruction. Our 2007 school Long Range Facilities Plan effectively inventoried our building conditions and recommended four buildings for replacement. But there was no funding plan, and no full context for citywide projects, making citywide support unlikely. The Mayor’s 5 year capital plan, being introduced for the first time on November 7th, should begin to address some of these critical deficiencies for the first time.

One of the two main city charter responsibilities for the School Committee is to make recommendations regarding school facilities. Facilities issues are discussed at pretty much every public meeting and they are the subject of much private discussion as well. My 30 year career as a structural building design engineer gives me knowledge, perspective, and insight into design, funding, and construction issues that can be an invaluable contribution to the knowledge base of our Committee when engaging in facilities discussions.

Q: If elected, what is something you are going to focus on in your position for the next two years?

• Facilities, per my above answer.
• Strengthening appropriate technology funding and use in our classrooms.
• Reinforcing offerings and increasing student enthusiasm in STEM careers.

Q: Name one thing the residents of Newton may not know about you.
I am a strong advocate for life-long learning. I support my employees by paying for their continuing education, and I am a student myself, having taken up piano for the first time when I was 44.

Newton’s FDK task force, working under past superintendent Jim Marini, suggested steps to advance this discussion a couple years ago but no further action has been taken. So step one is to do followup.

If I recall correctly, a determination of effective class size in FDK is one of the task force’s followup recommendations. But in advance of this, I believe that the current model, which keeps class size low in the afternoons (presently by releasing half the class) should be one of the objectives.

Low class size will come from more teachers and well-qualified aides in the classroom. How do we pay for this? There are many ideas out there. Here is a scattering of what Newton folks have been suggesting:

• Pass an override. A hard sell right now but this would certainly work.

• Seek funding from Title I, Race to the Top, and Kindergarten Grant programs. The work is to identify the sources and to figure out how to get money into our program.

• SILOTS. SILOTS (Service in Lieu of Taxes, with education majors coming from area universities) have been spoken of as a means of providing desirable staffing levels. I’d like to see if any college/school district pairing has been able to run an effective program with this funding/staffing approach. I would not have confidence in this without excellent aides, receiving excellent supervision by college faculty — otherwise the aides become a hindrance and not a help to the kindergarten teacher.

• Fees paid by parents for the last few hours of FDK. This could cover the cost, although this will not help parents who even now cannot afford quality, educationally-focused afternoon programs.

• Cost shifting. Findings indicate that early student support (via FDK) can reduce needs and required services of students in later grades, so FDK payment might come from cost-shifting. The numbers on cost-shifting will likely take some years to develop by monitoring students along their academic journeys. We may do better by finding other districts that have shifted to FDK and have monitored its cost along with the cost changes of later interventions.

I am not the education expert and will not presume to know more about FDK than those who have begun to study it at length, including David Fleishman, his staff, the task force, and others. But I and the School Committee can advocate for really good process. Good process means the investigation of a promising program does not stop simply because of uncertainty around how it might be funded. Funding is a critical detail but let’s agree upon shared values and program objectives first.

Three things have changed:

• The needs of Day have come into clearer focus as its population growth continues greater than projected. Newton Public Schools (NPS) is starting to speak of 8 new classrooms, well above the 4 or 6 that were being asked for last year;

• A very good program with some flexibility has been developed that strongly responds to present and anticipated space needs;

• Regardless of initial firm budget limits given by the Mayor, he long ago signaled his flexibility to fund the right plan. His decision to strip the sprinkler work from the short-term space budget, and his lack of comment as Sandy Guryan (NPS-CAO) presented plan after plan that exceeded the original budget target, served to make this point.

I have considered the Mayor’s early firm budget limit as pushing the designers to be as resourceful as they could be, to find out what was truly possible within an inflexible budget. I think they found that, and it represented a fairly incomplete resolution of Day’s needs. One response of his could have been “do it anyway”. Another response, which I think we are seeing, is “take the emerging scheme further down the design path, and let’s see whether we can justify and afford it”.

Our needs have grown measurably in a year and this plan should not be called “short-term” in impact. It may well represent an adequate medium to long term solution, and its value must be reevaluated in that light.
I would have preferred for the City and NPS to have laid out this situation as clearly as I just have, but the basic argument for flexibility remains the same.

Finally, I think there is value and need to work within budgets. NNHS demonstrated that. The Day situation is different than NNHS however, in that we will see a legitimate plan and a legitimate price (albeit with contingencies) before giving a final go ahead. When forced to balance need, program, budget, and timing, this project (so far) appears defendable. The Mayor offered 5 million dollars to solve Day and elementary school space issues last year. With greater need and a clearer program, this cost of some very reasonable problem resolutions is looking like 5.5 to 6 million. I may be able to get behind that.

1. Grades – (hard data and surveys) Analysis does not show statistically significant grade improvements, but students consistently report that they are getting better grades.

2. Tiredness – (surveys) Both students and teachers report a decrease in student tiredness during first and second period classes. This is reported by both parties as lower incidences of students falling asleep at their desks! Students also report that they have greater clarity of thought and get through their class- and home-work more quickly.

3. Irritability and stress – (surveys) Students report notably lower irritability and stress.

4. Sleep duration – (surveys and data) Students get more sleep when classes start later, as they generally go to bed at the same time as before but sleep longer. In some surveys they report going to sleep earlier since they complete their work in less time.

5. Car accidents – (hard data) Students in districts with later start times have a lower rate of car accidents!

Communities that have considered and rejected later school starting times for high schoolers generally attribute this to broader context issues within the community associated with later start times. These issues include higher bus transportation costs if scheduling cannot be cleanly worked out, exacerbated student/commuter travel congestion, less time for after-school activities and sports, day care conflicts when high schoolers are no longer home before their younger siblings and are not available to care for them, and others. These issues are community and situational specific, and some may have resonance in a community like Newton while others may not.

I strongly support the concept of later start times for high schoolers but will advocate for an assessment of the Newton community context issues before making start time changes. It matters that we understand and accept the impacts that later start times have on both students and the greater community, prior to implementing a new start time plan.

Barker Op-Ed on Early Release

Comments from a followup TAB blog thread were recently lost in a technical glitch, but these provided additional commentary from the community on this topic.

Because early release days are part of our teacher contract, getting rid of them will cost money. Many in city government argue against changing this based upon the pragmatic matter of strained finances, rather than the principled matter of how we can best serve our student population. This shouldn’t be. Not even the teachers who are the direct beneficiaries of early release claim that early release serves the students in any way other than indirectly, to facilitate the scheduling of parent-teacher meetings, etc.

Newton administrators note that our student’s schedules meet the classroom hours mandated by the state. But both of my kids (now in 7th and 10th grades) report that many classes during early release days are at least somewhat wasted, with students being shown non-educational movies or doing other educationally-non-intensive work, since individual classes are shortened. At the elementary level classes remain more focused but the release days can be chaotic for working families.

Work and childcare schedules can be built around weekly Tuesday early release days, but many of us are much more challenged by additional early release Thursdays that come once every 6 weeks.

For starters, if we find it too politically and financially difficult to eliminate the hours associated with professional teacher development, I would be interested in exploring changing 6 early release half-day Thursdays into 3 full days off from school. This will eliminate the “wasted half days” that so many students experience as part of early release days. But I think we need to make changes to our teacher contracts over time, with the goal of granting some PD time during workdays but eliminating much of the lost student classtime and parent worktime associated with early release.

1. Completion of a fair and sustainable teacher contract. Signs are that we are close, and a contract that is long-term affordable while respecting our teachers as bargaining table partners is a very good thing.

For years, contract growth has been the largest cost driver in the school budget; keeping this in check leaves more money to maintain student/teacher ratios, pilot and finance technology initiatives, strengthen early learning, and preserve breadth-of-program, for starters.

2. Advance our long-range facilities plan so we can properly upgrade and then maintain our school buildings. Completed in 2007, our current plan needs to be updated with current enrollment and projections, expanded to include lifecycle costs of building systems, made realistic by tying planning concepts to financing strategy, and integrating it with the Mayor’s (pending) capital plan. Then it must be sold to the public through a deliberate marketing effort.

The alternative: more years of deteriorating, inadequate school buildings along with piecemeal efforts to repair one or two schools of perceived greatest need, without considering the city’s full planning needs and funding capabilities.

If new construction creates increased tax revenues for the City, don’t we end up coming out even or ahead? The answer is more complicated than that, relating to resources, timing, and planning. I’ll start an explanation of why with an example:

Build 10 new 3- or 4- bedroom homes and sell them for Newton’s market rate of $923,000 each. Tax them at $10.90 per thousand of value and $100,607 per year goes into city coffers. Based upon recent history, perhaps 60% of that money, or $60,400, is allocated to the schools.

Look around you. Who moves into new houses on the market in Newton? Overwhelming, families with school-age or soon-to-be school-age children. Say that 7 of the 10 households have 2 children who will go into NPS in the fall. At an average cost of $14,500 per student, the cost “burden” of these 14 new children is $203,000, or more than 3 times the tax money their homes create for our schools.

Eventually, as school children grow up and their households join the other 80% that have no children in our schools, these new and renovated homes (homes that turn over) more than cover their cost to our city and to our schools. But the immediate impact of each new home that is sold to a family with school-age children is to create a resource deficit in their local school district.

These deficits can be quite uneven. Add one child to a school and the incremental resource burden may be unnoticeable. But add a new third grader when each of the existing third grade classrooms are at a population tipping point, and suddenly another classroom and another teacher may be necessary.

This is why many speak of charging developers impact fees when they build new housing, as a means of offsetting this sudden resource deficit. But an impact fee likely does not help a neighborhood school this fall, when and where the new kids hit; rather it will flow gradually through the machinery of government decision-making and allocation. How many years have more and more kids been crammed into Burr and only now (this December) is a modular coming for some space relief? So it is no wonder that many parents reflexively cringe when a new housing development, regardless of what broad social goals it may be meeting, appears in the neighborhood.

This is a challenging problem, responding to organic needs (variable student enrollments) with inorganic, resource-rich, time delayed solutions (school building additions and renovations). We have a better idea of how many kids will be in the system each year as a whole than of how these new kids will be distributed within our individual schools.

How can we respond flexibly? One idea is to build our new and renovated schools with slightly oversized core facilities (gym, library, bathrooms, admin offices, etc.) and extra perimeter classroom spaces that can be sectioned off and used as city offices during lower enrollment times, and used as additional classrooms during higher enrollment times. City departments such as Health, DPW, and Public Buildings all occupy remote sites around the city now, and would be well-suited to occupy end wings of school buildings. When pushed out by higher school enrollments they could occupy other city space or rental office space elsewhere within Newton.

This sort of idea doesn’t help us in the very short term, but remember, had we been thinking this way 10 or 15 years ago we would be in a very different, hopefully better space situation right now. And parents wouldn’t be balking at the sight of every new house going up on the next block.

I don’t know the present MSBA reimbursement rate, but let’s call it 50%. The state then picks up $16 million in Angier/Carr cost, and Newton pays the other $16 million. If there is no debt exclusion, we’ll borrow the money and pay back the debt service from our annual operating budget.

If the cost to borrow is at the same rate as the debt service on this year’s Modulars/Day money, we’ll have to divert $1.44 million annually from, say, teacher pay. If each new teacher costs the City $70,000 in total compensation, this $1.44 million will pay for 20 new teachers, or enough to staff an entire elementary school.

This is the consequence of school building construction without a new revenue source. Assuming that we are not ready to begin to draw down funds for construction during FY12-13, the Mayor’s decision to keep a DE off of the ballot in 2012 may not hurt. But when we are ready to spend, using operating funds to do so will have deep, deep impacts, as we can see from the $6 million in annual debt service our operating budget is now paying for NNHS debt service.

The facilities management industry would call for at least $20 million each year to be spent on maintenance of Newton’s school buildings based upon replacement value. Yet the $1.75 million provided by the CIP is less than 10% of the amount recommended to simply keep our schools from physically deteriorating.

Now, some in our city government are calling for any shortfall in our short-term infrastructure construction budget (covering 4 elementary school modulars, upgrades and additions to Day Middle School, and sprinkler upgrades) to come from the CIP.

To me it is unconscionable to divert even a small portion of what little maintenance funds we have into creating new space. An irresponsible lack of maintenance has plagued our city buildings since Proposition 2.5 came into effect in 1981, and since the excellent analysis of the CAG in 2009 it seemed as though we had recommitted to maintenance.

So how can our smart elected officials propose tapping the CIP for new space construction? Might they believe that the available pot of maintenance money is so hopelessly small, that the deterioration of our schools so inevitable in the face of current under-investing, that it makes little difference if we spend even less on maintenance? To me this must be the belief behind this proposal.

School Committee members Matt Hills and Margie Ross Decter both have maintained that CIP money, as little as it is, must remain available for maintenance — Matt, by refusing to vote “yes” on approving the modular expenditures budget until the figures for Day are available, and Margie by suggesting a friendly amendment to the modular vote that would preclude tapping the CIP to cover any budget shortfalls. Her amendment (not taken up) would mean that the Day scope would have to be reduced if the budget came in high.

The school operations department has stated that their budget barely allows them to tackle work order backlogs, and that the bulk of their efforts are for urgent or emergency matters. Two thousand workorders are passed unfilled from one year to the next. Mike Cronin has stated that if he had just one small team in addition to his present staff and subcontractors, and this team was assigned exclusively to chip away at old work orders, he could make significant progress on so many modest items that matter to building occupants.

We can and must do better at maintaining our school buildings, and I believe that we should start by protecting the CIP money from being spent on new infrastructure projects.

Anecdotally the quality of the coursework they have taken is uneven, with some great and challenging courses, and others that are not as rigorous as they might find within the walls of a classroom. But what intrigues me is the model of online learning, which, for the right student, gives them access to classes not otherwise available, and at low cost relative to hiring full-time classroom teachers.

Now is the time for Newton to consider piloting virtual learning in our high schools, and there may even be some minor application at the middle school level. We can take this incrementally, with offerings of classes that are otherwise being cut due to budget pressure. We are scheduled to lose Russian, some high-level math, science and business classes, and others starting in the fall of 2011. Before we start chopping away at the celebrated breadth of course offerings that is Newton’s hallmark, we should create a modest virtual learning pilot.

How do we pay for it? First, as can be derived from the FVHS model, costs per course are relatively low. And why not ask for support from area corporations and institutions who have an interest in developing virtual learning? The Needham software firm PTC has provided seed money for Newton’s FIRST Robotics program and for the new NNHS Innovation Lab. I wonder what Raytheon or EMC might help us with if asked?

The challenge for us here in Newton is to get past some of the potential negatives, and to modify this model as necessary to make it work for us. In other words, let’s not shoot this idea down – instead we should recognize that virtual/online learning is growing in the educational world, and Newton should lead in innovating the best structure.