Board Member Matt Goodlaxson (MG): Considering 50 percent of our crowd is here to talk about one issue.

Board Member Don Jackson (DJ): If there’s anyone having the same question, you’re here to talk about --

Audience member: Central [the proposed new alternative high school].

DJ: Central. Be my guest.

LR: Right. But sort of in deference to our colleague -- I think we’re going to have a little presentation first from the administration on this topic. Is that --

Superintendent Lane Plugge (LP):  Ah, well, the only information that I have that’s in your enclosure, which would be Enclosure 10, and what we’ve included is an outline of the process that we’re using at our high school facilities that we’re already engaged in this process. We also have a timeline. It says “Draft” on it, but we are, at this point, on target to finish this study, as you would see in Report to the Board April 9th. We do have active committees going that were really in existence before we had Shive Hattery employed to help us with this study. So I think this is fairly self-explanatory. I really don’t have any more, unless you have specific questions.

DJ: I just had one question on the established steering committee at each school. It starts off as school administrators, which sounds like what’s the make up of committees is going to be, and then there are a number of different things. If you could just explain a little about that.

LP: Sure. We have, the steering committees are comprised, of course, of the administration of each school, we have staff members and then we have some, I believe, a parent-community member and a student. And then we will involve other staff members as the study unfolds.

Associate Superintendent Jerry Palmer (JP): I believe there’s between 12 and 16 members --

LP: On the steering committee.

DJ: And then what the committee is to do is to look at all of those things that make up --

JP: They will look at all of those areas.

DJ: Got it.

LR: I guess my question would be the first items, "plan the study process and identify ICCSD goals." Now are these goals that have come before us? Have we seen these goals, or are they yet to be determined?

LP: They are, we started with the things that we had, the work that we have done, even as a Boundary Committee, going back. And emphasizing before we even turned loose the professionals we have to work with us we’ve talked about a number of the issues that we’ve touched on the Boundary Committee, one being size, certainly of where we believe we’re going. We shared with them the demographic materials that we had. We talked about looking at, one of the items that we talked about was school-within-a-school, you know, a 9th grade family, to look at those issues as we started. So those were some, that was some of the information that we had. We also instructed people that, you know, we need to have ideas, but we need to be realistic as well as we pursue these ideas, and that we wanted what we did program-wise to steer what came out of the study as well.

JP: And the goals are tied right back to the report that you put out --

LP: Right. The white paper.

JP: -- to identify a space appropriate for the alternative school to house 200 to 250 students, the capacity that we said we had to have at West High School, as well as the capacity of renovation at City High. So I think those were the three goals that they started with in the committee.

LR: Is there some discussion here right now, or shall we have our visitor come?

LP: We are meeting about once a week.

JP: There’s kind of two different sets of meetings going on. The planning committees we have at each school, at each site, the three schools. Then, in addition to that, we bring in the principals of the facilities, of each of the sites to meet with Lane and myself just to go over what, where they stand, what they’ve discussed.

LR: Welcome, welcome back.

Nicholas Johnson (NJ): Thank you.

LR: Nick Johnson. It’s good to have you here.

NJ: Thank you for this opportunity to appear before you to talk about our high schools’ educational opportunities.

It is a pleasure to be back in the boardroom. Although I can report there’s also a certain pleasure to be had watching the board meetings from home on cable television.

I want to thank and congratulate and support you and the administration in the leadership that you are showing regarding what you call “boundaries and educational opportunities.”

And, not incidentally, I would like to take this, which is my first opportunity, to thank Jerry Palmer for his contribution not only to this endeavor, but for what has really been a lifetime of selfless contribution to the school children of this district.

There are serious challenges posed you by the demands of an increase in enrollment, coupled with a decrease in available classrooms. And so far, most of the community’s attention has focused on the elementary schools.

But now, in your February 19th document, titled, “District-Wide Boundaries and Educational Opportunity Proposal,” you are advancing innovations for our high schools.

• You are calling for “schools-within-a-school,” thinking outside the boxes in which we conventionally house high school students.

• You note that there are ways to decrease overcrowding while simultaneously increasing the quality of education.

• You specifically mention creative scheduling, job shadowing -- on which Iowa Public Television had a special program just before your meeting this evening -- and service learning programs.

• You cite the benefits of more collaboration between the District and Kirkwood and the University of Iowa and our business community.

• And you propose a creative approach to a third high school, an alternative school.

It contains six categories of suggestions, which I will very quickly review.

Space. Most of us, when we have to, can find extra space in a home or an office. Schools can, too. Washington High School in Cedar Rapids found it could take underutilized vocational space and turn it into not just one, but four additional classrooms in that building.

Schools-within-schools. There are many possible variations. They tend not to take less space, but they certainly take very different space. And this is one classic example of why these decisions need to be made, and to be made before rather than after, talking to architects.

Creative scheduling has been used by many high schools to reduce or eliminate overcrowding. It could virtually eliminate our need for any additional space. And once again, the possible variations that have been tried and worked well in other districts are almost unlimited.

Out-of-school education can simultaneously increase the quality of the education while decreasing the need for space. This has been a particular emphasis in the recommendations of the National Commission on the High School Senior Year.

Computer-aided instruction. Over one-half of this nation’s high schools offer online instruction. Some high schools today are exclusively online institutions. So if we haven’t looked at the dramatic changes in computer-aided secondary education recently -- changes which are coming fast -- we should take a look at them. Because they also have implications for space needs and building design.

Finally, there is your creative approach to alternative education. Much can be said in praise of the work of this Board and of your alternative high school advisory committee. But one byproduct of that is that with up to 200 high school students in a new school, there is going to be, obviously, substantially less crowding at City and West.

So I would ask you to ask the Superintendent to review this document and ask for his responses to the items it mentions, and to, hopefully, the many additional ideas that will be put forward by your administrators in the high schools and staff. Before anybody consults an architect, they need to know whether they want to build a courthouse or an outhouse. And that is a decision that architects can’t really help with. That’s a decision the user has to make.

Some of your innovations and those discussed in this document will require differently configured space. Other of your innovations will require substantially less space. But even if your administrators choose to resist any and all changes, it seems to me that then that decision should be clearly stated, supported in writing, and done prior to drawing up any plans.

I believe this document can be helpful to your process, and I hope you find it so. Thank you.

LR: Thank you.

MG: Thank you for your work, Nick.

LR: Yeah. Thank you for taking the time to put that together. And thank you for your brevity.

[Laughter]

NJ: I just want you to know that since leaving the board, I’ve reformed.

Member Dr. Pete Wallace (PM): Unaccustomed as we are --

NJ: Yes, unaccustomed as you are, indeed!

Member David Franker (DF): Did you sign the sheet to speak?

NJ: I certainly will. It’ll be valuable some day.

LR: Does anyone have any questions?

NJ: Any comments or questions?

Member Jan Leff (JL): I guess I’d like to make a couple of comments, and that is, that as we’ve met with people, certainly the focus has been on facilities, but we’ve also been overwhelmed with how many positive comments people have to make about the school that their child attends. And, while we haven’t met at the high-school level, I guess from experience I can say that I think that there is a fair amount of satisfaction with the education that students are currently receiving in the Iowa City Community School District.

I would shudder to think what would happen if we, as a board, said to some of the students in the Iowa City School District, “We’re going to have you spend your senior year in community service projects and learning.” We know that there are students that get scholarships for Harvard and MIT and the University of Chicago and Stanford. And you don’t get those by service learning or job shadowing or that sort of thing. And so I think we have not heard any dissatisfaction with character and the quality of education our students are receiving, and I don’t see any real reason to, at this point, start investigating alternative means of delivering it.

MG: I would have to say that we aren’t hearing that from a large mass of people. I would think that probably 95 percent of the parents and students probably are very satisfied. But I think a lot of what Professor Johnson has brought up, and what we have talked about in the past, is to make sure that we have the spectrum available for all of our students. And that’s how I view what was brought forward to us and some of this conversation -- especially from the alternative standpoint, job shadowing and whatever else -- is that it opens up that spectrum so that we can serve the majority, all of our students, if at all possible.

JL: Certainly. And I would agree that it does open the complete spectrum and there are all sorts of kinds of learners, and we know that they learn in different ways. But you’re not going to make a very large impact on the school population by saying we’re going to have job shadowing or we’re going to have community-service learning. I mean, we’re not going to free up 500 spaces in the schools.

LP: Right now in the area of job shadowing and mentoring, probably a new vehicle that we have at our disposal, our Chamber of Commerce has been gracious enough to help sponsor us as well as a Workplace Learning Connection. And they have actually an employee here, Nancy, out of the Chamber office. I was at a meeting today that we talked about it gaining some momentum. Now a job shadow is not something that will take someone out every day, but it will certainly be an experience leading to some mentorships. There’s certainly is that vehicle that’s in place, if we choose to fund it also and keep it going. Right now that’s funded about 54 percent, that office and that function of that office, by schools and about 46 percent by businesses contributing to it. We do not contribute on a per pupil basis. We are using it on a pay-as-you-go as our students are involved. But that’s something that certainly, you know, we’re looking at all the time to improve those types of educational opportunities to kids. Not just when we’re looking at a capacity issue, but I think those are issues that we need to look at all the time. And we can certainly provide the Board with more detailed information, how many kids we have involved in those type of activities.

DJ: I think that's important. I mean, I see it similar to Matt in the sense that I don’t see this as a major overhaul. So I agree, Jan, that I think for the most part, what we’ve got is working. And I personally think we’re serving the kids who are going to go to MIT, Harvard, Stanford, The University of Chicago very well. I’m not as convinced that we’re serving all of the students in the District as well as we’re serving that percentage of the students. I think we have a responsibility to continue to investigate and to do exactly what Nick’s saying, looking at what other things are out there. I don’t see it as a major overhaul. I see it as a what times are changing, we need to be changing with those times, and while we’re doing that we ought to be looking to make sure that, to the extent that we can, we serve every student in this district and provide them the best education that we can. And that’s a continually changing process. We need to be doing that.

JL: Absolutely.

PW: So the emphasis would be to create programs, not to free up space, but to serve unmet needs. That’s a big difference.

NJ: And a point simply is that many of the things you can do to improve the quality of education, have as a byproduct benefit, they also take a lot less space.

So far as the kids going to Harvard and MIT, etc., are concerned, the National Commission on the High School Senior Year is primarily focusing on them, and think -- that commission, which was a very distinguished body, believes -- that the high school year is largely wasted in high schools, and that the kids that do want to go those kind of schools would be much better served by many of the alternatives that the commission has laid out in its report.

But the particular example you picked is one I simply took from the report of the Board on February 19th -- I believe you [JL] voted for it as well -- and simply expanded on that.

I think any one of the dozens and dozens and dozens of options that have been talked about by those who look at best practices in innovative high schools, you can pick any one of them and ridicule it and cast it aside and say, "Therefore, we don’t want to look at any changes." But I think that would be silly. There are dozens of examples in this document. There are many, many, many dozens more in the thousands of pages that have been written on these subjects.

And, I guess, basically all I’m suggesting to the Board is that at least you take this as a checklist and go down it. And, as I indicate, if at the end you conclude, “We don’t want to change a single thing” -- which certainly speaks the attitude of Iowa City: “We’re in favor of progress, but we don’t want change” -- if it’s your position that you don’t want to change a single thing about the way City High and West and the alternative school are now doing it, fine. Then say that, and make that clear to the architect.

But before you talk to an architect, you have to know what kind of structure are you building. And if you’re building schools-within-schools, you need a different design. And you are the ones who called for schools-within-schools, not me. If you’re going to build schools-within-schools you need a different design than if you’re going to have a conventional high school going from 1,500 to 2,000.

LP: That’s something we’ve had the exact same conversation about now as we’re going through the study, for instance, also do you have all departments together or do you have science rooms throughout the school or -- and it’s just not classrooms. If it was just classrooms, we wouldn’t need to do this study. We could figure out how many kids and we could multiply how many more classes we would need, and we could give you that. But we’re also trying to think about how we serve kids in those schools.

I know we mentioned online learning. You know, the Florida Virtual High School’s been in existence maybe about four years now. We are looking at evaluating some online courses to supplement what we’re doing, certainly not to replace it, but to supplement it. To be a little more effective, maybe more efficient with our kids, so you know, we’ve talked about, one of the things that we’ve already talked about is, instead of in our alternative school, instead of building an extensive library, maybe we would look at laptops per student that would, your library would be online. So, I think those are the things you’re getting at, Nick.

NJ: I would say in regard to classrooms, I have a section in here dealing with the possible use of much smaller rooms, providing teachers individual offices. Again, there are dozens of opportunities here, but virtually everything I have in here are examples of -- there are many more things that would improve high school education. But these things not only improve high school education, they also take less space or differently configured space from what you’re going to get if you just expand the current high schools.

LP: Or, in some cases, as you’d stated, more space, depending on what you’re --

NJ: Yeah. Sometimes you’re going to need more. Absolutely.

Thank you very much for welcoming me back. It’s a pleasure being here.

DF: I would also like to ask as you go through this study, this facility study, that we keep an eye on and maybe get some figures back, if we might, Lane. For example, at West High we have an official capacity, we have an official enrollment of how many students are there each day. In fact, most juniors are not on campus two hours out of the day. In fact, most seniors are not on the campus two or three hours out of the day. I’m wondering if we can get some kind of a figure to show how many students, not just are enrolled, but how many are actually on the scene, because that would, I think, at least play some role in determining the facilities.

MG: Is that "open campus" that you’re referring to?

LP: There’s open campus at both West and City for juniors and seniors.

JL: When they’re on open campus, frequently they’re in the library, they’re in the commons, and I think it’s pretty rare that they would actually leave campus for two hours and drive around or do something else. I think their physical presence is still there, based on my experience.

DF: I guess my experience at City, and my experience with three kids going to West, I’m not sure that they would mostly all be in the library or in the commons. But I guess if the administration would try to get some feel for that, that would be, I think maybe just to help with a little piece of the big picture.

JP: The other thing that we do, we don’t consider seventh period of the day the normal schedule. We would consider that a student have at least one of those as a study hall or a free period.

DF: I understand for staff, but I’m saying for where people are and the facilities needs.

LP: Probably what you’d have to do though, too, and I consulted with my assistant, Aaron, here, in doing that, you’d probably want to look at your students also that are seven plus, because they’re getting in, I know Aaron’s involved in both vocal and instrumental music.

JP: The other direction that we did talk about is the fact of reclaiming space. And although reclaiming space can sometimes be more expensive than constructing new. We have talked about the difference in, for example the industrial arts program, the way it was offered back when both of those schools were built and the way it’s being offered now, and maybe being able to do some of the things that were identified by Nick as far as looking at making new, usable classroom space.

LR: I would be interested in following up on Nick’s suggestion that the administration go through the document and provide us with feedback on which of these categories you feel you are moving towards or not considering or, just to get some kind of --

LP: You’re requesting that we --

LR: Go through the document --

LP: Make a response to the document.

LR: Yeah. Is there support on the board for that?

JL: I’m a little uneasy with that as a precedent. Does that mean that anybody in our school district can then bring forth a document and we present it to the administrators and say they should go through it?

LR: No, I don’t think it means that. I just think this is a particularly, this is a follow through from Nick’s tenure on the Board, and he put quite a bit of work into it. I think it’s relevant. I think we haven’t had this conversation, and it should be had.

MG: I think it’s probably dependent on the document that’s put before us, too.

JL: Well, then, there should be some sort of a standard, I would guess then.

DJ: I believe, in this case, the importance is the relevancy. We have explored and said, “Gee, we want to think about some different things." The fact that we’ve called it "educational opportunities." And we’ve struggled with, "What does this term 'educational opportunities’ mean?" It’s the best document that we have currently around, laying out what are some of those different things. So, again, I look at it in the context of its relevance to the work that we’re trying to do.

LP: So that you understand how I’m going to go about this task, since I just have it now, I’m brainstorming, but I know one of the things that I will include will be staff input. I have a great deal of confidence in our teaching staffs at both City and West, and the administrations there, so I will enlist their help in responding to this. And there may be other things that, depending on how much time you want. You know, I almost feel now that I haven’t done a good job sharing with you some of things that we are doing that may considered -- I don’t know if you’d consider them innovative or "out of the box" or unique -- that what we’re doing, I would like then to add, not just be responsive, but to be proactive as well with some of the other things we may be doing.

LR: I think that would be tremendously helpful.

LP: Because I know we’re doing things, and I don’t spend the time that I should in our high schools as well.

DJ: An important point in terms of where we’re going with this, because it's all tied back to, as we think about this larger, long-term improvement plan. And I think part of our ability to sell to the community why we need to do this also needs the fact that we are talking about it in a long-term context. We’ve looked at these things. These are other things that we’re doing. It ought to include all of those things. And it’s more important now because we need the community’s support to be able to do what we need to do.

LP: And there’s some things that we’ll get into that aren’t real popular, also. You know, we’ve had the discussion of Work Keys here before. It’s something your community is very, very interested in. Every time I go to a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, they say, “How can we get that workplace connection going?" We think this is a key component of it, and so we will come back to you with this workplace learning connection. You’ve probably not heard of that term, not often, and what we’re doing, and hopefully to get some of the things that our kids connected to the world of work, somehow before they leave our schools. So I will try and include things that are in that document as well. I’m not going to promise you a timeline on it, but I will get working on it. I will include our teachers as well, and probably include them -- many, most of them, if not all of them are much more articulate than me, so I’ll probably enlist their help in presenting to you information as well. Maybe even bring these two guys [the high school representatives in attendance that evening: Aaron Brummer, City High; Kyle Coobs, Senior High Alternative Center (SHAC); and Hee Won Lee, West High] back with me.

LR: Thank you. Any further discussion or do we move on? Okay, moving on --