Q&A Superintendent Steve Murley: Part Two, Trust Within the District, the Diversity Policy, and the Omaha Job

Iowa City School Superintendent Steve Murley sat down with Iowa City Patch for an interview Monday evening, and discussed the future of the Iowa City School District, today's Revenue Purpose Statement vote, why enrollment projections could be low, a lack of public trust for the district, on him applying for the Omaha superintendent job, and his thoughts on the controversial diversity policy.

Part one of the interview focused on the Revenue Purpose Statement, up for vote today for voters who live in the Iowa City School District attendance area. Part two will focus on the lack of trust between the public and the district, the diversit policy, Murley's application for the Omaha superintendent job, and his thoughts on future enrollment projections.

Editor's Note: The following Q&A is an edited and abridged version of the original interview. 

Iowa City Patch: So if the RSP does fail (or even if it passes) it would seems that there needs to be some trust building that needs to be done between the school board and the administration and the public. 

Murley: Yeah.

Iowa City Patch: What is from your perspective, what is the problem, what has caused this divide?

Murley: I think that different people may feel that they have been promised things (by the district) in the past, and those things have yet to occur, and that's related again to the original SILO vote. Whether people thought they would have a third high school by now, even with the SILO money still halfway through in accruing to the promised $32 million by 2017, there are a lot of people I've spoken to that are up there who feel that they were promised a third high school, and there is obviously not a third high school up there yet. That there was money the board has spent on other things when they could have spent it on a third high school.

Conversely, there are people who feel like they were promised other things in the district, that haven't been done yet-- such as renovation and remodeling of old schools, ADA work, or other things they were told that were going to happen. So those people look at the money that is being aggregated for the third high school and say "wait a minute, those dollars could be used for something else, that's something that we were promised."

In the absence of a document to prove their claims out there, you have a lot of people out there that feel that there were promises made to them that were not kept.

Iowa City Patch: So as a result of feeling jilted by the district, voters might feel compelled to vote against something that could fulfill their interest because they have been disappointed by the district on one or more occasions in the past?

Murley: Correct.

Iowa City Patch: I wanted to ask you about a few other things that have affected the tenor of the district that may have come at a bad time in terms of building trust: one of those is the debate over the diversity policy, and the other is your applying for the job as Omaha Superintendent.  Do you feel either of these things will ultimately affect the vote?

Murley: I would say probably more so, at least from the feedback that I'm getting, it might be affected more by the diversity policy than by the application piece, although I'm sure there are people who are hung up on that.

Iowa City Patch: What do you feel about people who might resent that you applied for a different job outside of the district?

Murley: I think people make career choices. It's similar to what I deal with all the time with my staff: we want to hire good people here. And I think as new jobs come up it's my job to be supportive if they are looking to find a situation that fits their career path. Obviously you'd like employees to stay for a long time, but I feel it is my responsibility as superintendent to try to help them make good decisions and reach those decisions.

Iowa City Patch: Well what about the Omaha job appealed to you?

Murley: It's a very large district, 50,000 students, much the same as Iowa City in terms of some of the demographics and some of the challenges they face there. Maybe a little further along than we are in terms of looking at alternative methodologies to try to address some of the issues -- they have a large number of magnet programs there. Mainly the challenge.

Iowa City Patch: I'm not familiar with the pay situation, would it have been a bump in pay for you?

Murley: Yeah. but I guess I looked at it more from the perspective of what was the job, what were the opportunities, where were the possibilities for me to deploy my skills.

Iowa City Patch: Is that what you like about the job in the first place is to solve these complicated problems?

Murley: Oh yeah, yeah. 

Iowa City Patch: So I guess Omaha then would be an even bigger arena for those challenges.

Murley: Yeah.

Iowa City Patch: So speaking of challenges, that brings us back to the diversity policy. Before we get into it too deeply I wanted to ask a question, there has recently been a legal question about using free-and-reduced lunch rates as a primary reason for redistricting. But I remember when Borlaug opened, you did redistricting, because then you don't have to use free-and-reduced lunch as the reason, it's sort of like an accessory benefit. 

Murley: Right.

Iowa City Patch: So would another benefit of being able to build elementary schools faster be that you could redistrict more easily without running into these legal questions?

Murley: Right in the center of the target there. 

I'll just using the Borlaug example, because it's an example I often use with people who find this current discussion intimidating, or they're scared about what the ramifications might be.

So we had about about a 50 percent (free-and-reduced lunch) spread in between Weber Elementary at 15 and Roosevelt at 66 percent and Horn at 20. The board has a whole list of parameters that they use when rezoning was done, and they picked four to be primary guides when we went about redistricting. One of those included improve socioeconomic balance.

We started looking at those and thought what do those mean as contiguous attendance zones. We had to go through several iterations until we had to get something that would go to the public, and then we had to go through several public iterations until we could get something to take to the board, but in the end we wound up with Weber at 35 percent, Horn went from 20 to 29, and Borlaug open at 26 percent.

Iowa City Patch: And I think at the elementary level for the diversity policy, what they want to do, or the logic behind it, is to try to get schools into that 20 to 50 range rather than having these huge outliers below 20 percent and as much as 80 percent.

Murley: Right, so we went to that 50 point spread down to a 9 point spread, and we did it through going through the logical iterative process of opening a new building. And that's where the Revenue Purpose Statement and the diversity policy have some nexus, because given the opportunity to expand our elementary capacity and hopefully pull all of our kids out of portables, we will also be tasked with rezoning those elementary attendance areas where we place those schools. And we can again look at those board parameters and look at our current population and projections and do a better job of balancing these various factors that the board and the community find important.

Iowa City Patch: Plus with using the new schools as the occasion for redistricting I would think these moves would be more sustainable. I think one of the feelings within the district is that people have had to go through redistricting over and over again and there's a sense of apprehension that it will keep happening.

But if you opened a new school at a needed location, and the logic behind it is based on sound neighborhood school principles, I guess you could say, then there wouldn't be a need to redistrict again as often.

Murley: That's a piece of the puzzle for us when it comes to the revenue purpose statement. If you're going to have to build a new elementary school every three years, and you're going to do this for nine years, you're going to have a level of turmoil every other year while you're going through a new attendance zone, and that's going to stretch out over a decade. But if you can do the schools all more or less at the same time, you can limit the number of times you do redistricting.

Such as when those two elementary schools open in the Iowa City area, it would make more sense for those schools to open at the same time, and handle redistricting then, then to open one school, do redistricting for it, then three years down the line do redistricting again.

Iowa City Patch: And if you could plan for the schools at the same time, you could do it in a way where you wouldn't be pulling kids out of schools, you would allow them to be populated by projected attendance areas.

Murley: Correct. And there is some fear factor out there (for students being moved multiple times). So I think that's why there's some merit to the idea of building two schools at the same time on the east side of Iowa City.

Iowa City Patch: To move to the high school level, because that's a shorter time period, and I would think that the third high school is probably way out there in comparison to when these new elementary schools could be built. Whereas with the third high school you'd probably start planning in say 2015 for a 2018 opening, with the elementary schools you'd probably want to start this spring if you could.

Murley: Yes.

Iowa City Patch: So you don't have that natural lever of opening a new school. And although the margin is lesser, you don't have an event to prompt it. So is this something that is doable in two years?

Murley: Well the first thing we want to do is get our capacity study back, so we can see from an educational standpoint how many kids can we place at each high school. And then the other thing we are going to look at, what's the carrying capacity for the other components we have at the school: lockers, bathrooms, the cafeterias, libraries, the athletic facilities, the parking. Once we know the capacity of the schools we can look at the school and say, "Is this school overcrowded?" and "If it's not can we rezone students in to take advantage of those empty seats." And if it is overcrowded what are some of the creative solutions we can come up with that at least in the short run will need to do until we can get another school opened up.

We've already started some more early bird classes, and there are certainly more opportunities to look at to continue flexing our day, so there are more periods available. Utilization of the classrooms, are there more efficient ways we could use the classrooms, while realizing that we have to recognize there are those infrastructure pieces that are components that are part of students succeeding in a school.

Iowa City Patch: But that's all a capacity thing, they're looking at free and reduced lunch rates in the schools with this policy. Besides just swapping kids based on their socioeconomic status, which would be the most blunt and quick way you could achieve balance, what is another method you could use to achieve this balance?

Murley: Well one of the thoughts people have had is we could do it with magnet programs. The biggest part of the problem is that magnet programs work best when there is space in the school, because if they are interested in the school and there are no seats, they aren't going to be willing to move there. The problem is until we get the capacity study done we won't know if there are rooms in the schools for those magnet programs to be placed.

I think this is important to note, because at minimum with our enrollment projections, we aren't going to have space anywhere in any building in the district. Everything is going to be full.

Iowa City Patch: So it seems to me from what you described, is that the elementary disparities, although they are bigger, will have more straightforward solutions than the high school for you.

Murley: Yeah elementary students are in classrooms all day, and if we don't have the classrooms we will need to build more classrooms. High schools tend to be more complicated with their scheduling.

Iowa City Patch: Would there be any other things that you would want the public to know that there have been misconceptions about?

Murley: Maybe the only other thing would be that about our demographic enrollment projections. We are going to get some new numbers on this soon, but if you look at where we're at and see where the trendiness are right now, you will see that we may be short in our projections of how many kids are going to be in the school district in the next few years. Because of the way our economy has weathered the recession and come out the other side, we're in really good shape, and that will just mean more and more kids. I think we should go into this with our eyes open and consider that there might be more than 200 kids coming to the district in the next few years.