Thoughts on the Hoover candidate meeting

People concerned about the potential closure of Hoover School met yesterday with all nine school board candidates, and I just wanted to post some quick thoughts about the meeting here.

The meeting pretty much confirmed the impressions that we already had. Of the nine candidates, there are five or six who express varying degrees of doubt about whether it makes sense to close Hoover. Phil Hemingway, Gregg Geerdes, Sara Barron, and Tuyet Dorau all spoke persuasively about why the case for closing Hoover is so unconvincing. Chris Lynch was also supportive of keeping Hoover open, and Jim Tate expressed his own doubts about the decision.

Three candidates supported going forward with the closure: Karla Cook, Brian Kirschling, and Jason Lewis.

It was striking to see how unpersuasive the pro-closure arguments sounded when they had to share the stage with arguments that made sense. Karla Cook repeated all the flawed reasoning that I’ve been responding to here, arguing that there are simply not enough kids in Hoover’s attendance area to fill its capacity. She seems to think that the school, which last year had two temporaries and held almost 400 kids (including general education, special ed, and preschool), will suddenly sit half-empty if it loses the kids who transfer in from SINA schools. (Though the district hasn’t specified, there are probably about 70 or 80 such kids; the rest being ordinary open-enrollment transfers that every school has – another fact that is constantly misstated.) Cook even said that Hoover would have only enough students to fill one classroom in each grade, which is preposterous, even without the inevitable redrawing of boundaries. Iowa City isn’t Hills.

Lewis’s argument was, in effect: now that we’ve already decided to build all this new capacity, we have to close a school or it will all be too expensive. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. It’s a good thing Lewis hadn’t already decided to build six new elementaries; then we’d have close three more older schools — to save money! It doesn’t seem to occur to him that it would be simpler and cheaper to build only as much new capacity as we need above and beyond what our existing schools provide.

Lewis also distributed a map showing the overlapping radiuses of the schools in the central Iowa City area. We have a lot of schools in central Iowa City, the argument seemed to go, therefore we have to close one. Of course, we have a lot of kids in central Iowa City, too. Without a discussion of whether there are too few kids relative to the capacity of those schools, the map is meaningless. Though Lewis thinks we won’t be able to fill Hoover’s capacity, he simultaneously favors adding 330 seats of capacity to two other nearby schools (Mann and Longfellow). If there aren’t enough kids to fill those central east-side schools, why are we adding capacity to two of them, to the tune of about fifteen million dollars? But for Lewis, building new capacity comes first; then the need to tear down a school follows. You might as well light your money on fire.

I couldn't understand what Kirschling's argument was, other than that "the decision has been made," so the board should go ahead with it.  So much for elections.

None of the candidates who support the closure made any attempt to explain how the land would be used for City High. They acted like they would close Hoover even if it weren’t right next to City, which is disingenuous. Neither enrollment nor cost considerations are actually motivating the closure. It is all about getting that land for City, probably to put a parking lot on it.

At some point, I expect the Save Hoover organizers to make some recommendations about which candidates to choose to maximize the chances of reversing the closure. In the meantime, it’s nice to see so many of the candidates expressing opposition or doubts. (Interestingly, two-thirds of the candidates questioned the closure, which is very close to the percentage of the public who opposed the closure at the community workshops.) Each voter can cast only three votes, and it’s going to be hard to narrow those good choices down to three. I’ll be talking out my own thought process here and on my other blog over the next week or so.

Chris Liebig blogs about local and national school issues at A Blog About School, where this post is cross-posted.  Comments are welcome at either site.  You can also follow him on Twitter.