VIDEOS: Iowa City Parents, Community Members Speak Against Closing Schools

There were several speakers at Tuesday night's school board meeting-- all opposed to the proposed closing of Hills, Lincoln, and Hoover Elementary -- and I managed to capture a few of them on video. Here is a quick gallery on what they had to say.

Catch my full coverage of the facilities portion of the meeting on Twitter.

Not much new came out of Tuesday night's discussion of the plans recommended to the school board by the district facilities committee.

Unless you were under the impression that the Iowa City School Board would be able to close one to three elementary schools without anyone raising a protest.

The board was formally presented with the two final plans developed by the Facilities Committee, which was shepherded through by BLDD Architects. The final two plans for submission to the board have now been dubbed Plan A and Plan B, but were actually reached after multiple iterations. These plans are available in their finalized form at this link (go to page 333).

What had parents, including those in the videos above, crying foul about the plans is that both featured plans that would close elementary schools for theoretically for operational and maintenance cost savings purposes (in the case of Lincoln and Hills Elementary Schools) and also to provide room for City High expansion (Hoover Elementary). In Scenario A, Hoover Elementary would be closed, in Scenario B, all three would be closed.

Jeff McGinness, the school board member who served on the facilities committee, attended the meeting by phone. McGinness urged the board to make a decision quickly, even that night, to avoid the decision being affected by the upcoming school board election.

McGinness, however, was overruled. Although they did agree with McGinness that an accelerated timetable would be ideal.

"I agree that sooner rather than later would be best," said board member Sarah Swisher.

The board instead decided that it would hold a work session on July 16 to discuss the elements of the scenarios in question, then to put the decision as an action item on the July 23 formal board meeting.

"A week would allow us to get our questions answered if we have them," Cook said.

Swisher also said that the board should take the extra time to digest the feedback from the parents who spoke during the evening, all against the closing of the elementary schools, during a public comment section that lasted more than 45 minutes.

David Dude, who oversees the facilities for the district and helped lead the facilities committee, told the board that they were free to mix and match the two plans as they like in order to reach a scenario that they can support.

McGinness said his primary concern is that he doesn't want to approve a scenario that will result in high operation costs that will leave the district with either fewer teachers or higher class sizes, or both.

"The decision I think is going to come down to whether or not we close elementary schools," McGinness said. "Everything else about the plans is very similar."

Board member Tuyet Dorau argued that while she agreed that operations costs is important to know for future budgeting purposes, it's very difficult to get an exact figure on operation costs for a district just based on a facilities plan when there are so many other variables.

Dorau repeatedly tried to ask Superintendent Steve Murley for his opinion on the best scenario, but Murley demurred, instead saying that the administration could make either of the two scenarios work.

"We can make it (either plan) work, but we may not be able to make it work to satisfy all of the expectations that people have." ~Murley