Has our school district become a little like that?

Don’t get me wrong. In New York City recently, I read stories of the local administration removing five superintendents and closing or taking over 56 schools.

Compared to New York, Iowa City looks like educational nirvana. Moreover, most of our students, parents, and teachers are mostly satisfied most of the time.

Yet every human group, from the smallest family to the largest global corporation, has to deal with the occasional dissatisfaction, complaint, suggestion, or inquiry. Including our school district. The question is, how well are we doing?

The answer, I’m afraid – for which I take my share of responsibility – is not very well.

Too often what we do (or fail to do) is perceived as – pick your pejorative – arrogant, bureaucratic, defensive, duplicitous, inflexible, insensitive, irrational, manipulative, reactive, secretive, or unresponsive. In fairness, such perceptions are often inaccurate. Fair or not, we need to deal with them.

The very first column in this series, “Impact of Decisions Should be Considered,” Oct. 12, argued the School Board needs to be a good citizen. Because it’s right, it’s civil, it’s “Iowa.” Still not persuaded?

OK, it also costs less.

Remember the City High tennis lights? Not the merits, the procedure. The School District may have the legal power to shine bright lights into our neighbors’ back yards. But when we exercise that power with insularity and arrogance, it can create a costly backlash. As it did in staff time and further erosion of trust.

No district employee is to blame for the fiasco. The board’s failure to create a policy, insist on, and model good neighborliness, is uniquely our responsibility.

Tennis court lighting should never require three board meetings, our participation in neighborhood meetings, newspaper criticism, citizen complaints at board meetings, and risk of law suits.

Not only should it never have made it to a Board agenda. It never should have come to Superintendent Barb Grohe’s attention, or taken up Assistant Superintendent Jerry Palmer’s time.

The Board should have a policy in place that neighbors are, as a matter of course, participants in such projects from the outset.

Does that mean they will always get their way?

Of course not.

What it does mean is that, by genuinely involving stakeholders from the beginning (not just “going through the motions”), potential future conflict can often be compromised – as ultimately was done in this case with “light shields.”

Not long after the Board exercised its new-found expertise in lighting engineering, an elementary school parent complained in open board meeting.

He had written the superintendent not once but twice, the board president once, and never received an answer from anyone to a legitimate request. Board members explained they haven’t the time to respond to all communications.

In fairness, that’s true. We all have jobs. We have neither pay nor staff as Board members. But that’s not the end of the matter.

Lyndon Johnson also had more mail than he could answer. But he didn’t consider that an excuse for ignoring it. When I worked for him, all presidential mail was immediately forwarded to the most appropriate presidential appointee.

We had to provide substantive answers within 24 hours.

I get dozens of communications from district stakeholders that call for what, in business, would be called “customer relations.” Some are real horror stories.

Do I assume all charges of wrongdoing are accurate in every detail? That all responses to charges are false? Of course not. Nor do I assume the opposite. I wait for independent fact finding.

What I do assume – the Board having rejected the proposed ombudsperson – is that we need some system.

We have many brags about our schools. Let’s add another: our leadership as a school district that puts high priority on “stakeholder relations” and civility.

Our public schools aren’t the monopoly they used to be. Home schooling is increasing. There are more private schools. Parents are transferring kids to other districts.

We’re a public institution with competition. Today public institutions all across the country are seeking out the “best practices” in customer relations from for-profit corporations and putting them to work.

What they’re doing, and why, and with what decreases in costs and increases in public satisfaction, will be the subject of the next column.

Nicholas Johnson is a member of the Iowa City School Board.