Why I Voted in Favor of the Preliminary Budget

(Editor's Note: this letter is in part a summation of school board meeting by Dr. McLoughlin. For more information on the April 30 meeting, or , please click the links embedded in the article.)

I organized my thoughts around 4 key areas:  Leadership, Taxation, Laptops, and Governance. 

I emphasized my belief that true leadership includes collaboration and compromise.  Steadfast and unwavering declarations that one has never and will never vote for tax increases is not leadership, and in the setting of a real estate taxation system that goes 21 years in between reassessments, such a position is nonsensical.  Similarly, blind support for the highest levels of tax increase is not leadership.  Leadership involves considerations of balance between needs and reality, and finding workable consensus.  I was especially angered because our budget process had evolved in transparency with a process that allowed input by all Board members for a period of months, and received six votes in favor one month before as a "test vote" to assure adequate support going forward.

For our Board to , potentially placing our District at risk of failing to pass a budget by our year-end deadline and risk loss of state financial support, was inexcusable in my view.  It suggests the opposite of leadership, that people's individual posturing was more important to them than the function and reputation of the District.

On taxation, I emphasized that our ongoing operational deficit cannot reasonably be corrected with cost reductions alone.  I further emphasized that in recent years our millage increases have been 0, 1.5, .25, and now a proposed .5.  That sums to 2.25 mils over four years, or approximately 5% - hardly runaway tax increases.  In dollars to the average taxpayer in our district, these millages translate into $0, $141, $23, and $47, or a total increase of $211.  However, when one goes further to include the mitigation to taxpayers from the credit derived from gaming revenues, the actual dollar increase over that span reduces to $96 (due to $115 in gaming revenue credit to the average taxpayer bill).  With this gaming revenue correction, the four year taxation increase (assuming adoption of the 0.5 mil proposal) averages to 0.58% per year. 

I made the point that this represents very respectful concern for the stewardship of our taxpayers money and the pressures they are feeling, and also that clearly the actual impact to our taxpayers of our millage levies is dwarfed by the coming impact of county-wide re-assessment, which we have absolutely no control over.

  I emphasized that the administration had done an admirable job finding a way to increase a resource at a reduced cost.  In other words, to do more with less.  This is EXACTLY what we should be hoping for our administrators to seek throughout the district, and hardly what they should be criticized for. and numbers are distracters from the above bottom line facts, and are fueled by personal beliefs about brand and about technology's role in education. 

The support of the administration and teachers was sufficient for a majority of the Board to support the proposal.  Increasing technology resources was supported as part of embracing concepts of 21st century education and curriculum, which has been discussed broadly and explicitly in the reports given publicly by Ms. Christman for months, even years.   It is time to move on.

Finally, regarding governance, I emphasized the important distinctions between governance, which is the role of a Board, and management, which is the role of the Administration.  We cannot reasonably expect our administrators and teachers to develop a coherent theme from the individualized input of nine different bosses, some of whom rotate out of the job every two years.

We should not be individually telling administrators and teachers how to do their jobs.  There are proper roles of governance vs. management and the world is full of dysfunctional manifestations when these boundaries are not respected, and when one group or the other does not seriously execute their distinct roles.  At a Board level, we should oversee, provide for and assure resources, stay informed, offer guidance, and ask probing, high level, questions that assure due diligence has been exercised in recommendations coming from administration.

With the above, I cast the deciding vote in favor of the preliminary budget.

Dr. Thomas M. McLoughlin, Jr. 

President, Southern Lehigh School Board