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Dacia Mumford for WL School Board

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My Views

About Me

Board Meeting Summaries

Public Documents

Why I’m running for the WLCSC School Board:

Community Engagement: I want the community to be informed and have an active voice in our school district. School board meetings should be inviting and responsive. We need to develop a meeting culture where board members interact respectfully (both with each other and with community members) and enthusiastically welcome community recommendations for improvement. Rather than wait for people to come forward, I want school board members to seek broad community input before voting on important issues.

Access to Information: The only way to get good community input on school decisions is to provide the public with access to school board documents. Until recently, the school board refused requests for even basic public information. In Mumford v. West Lafayette Community School Corp (February 2022), the school board was ordered to publicly share the documents considered at board meetings (the board packet), which is a huge step in the right direction. But the school board still routinely votes on issues without having publicly shared anything in advance. The board packet should be posted before each school board meeting and information about each issue should be projected or given as a handout so we can follow along during the meeting. I want the school board to adopt a first/second reading structure where information on an issue is presented with discussion at the first meeting and then a month later there is another discussion and a vote. This would allow a month for community input. The school board should prioritize providing public information to help bring the community back into the West Lafayette Community School Corporation.

Financial Transparency: The school board publicly announced $50 million in construction projects, but then quietly borrowed $95 million, leaving our district with the 2nd highest level of debt per student in the state and without any additional ability to borrow for the next 15 years. School board members should have sought community input before deciding to borrow nearly twice as much as they said they would. In addition, the recent audit found deficiencies (see 7:59) in our school corporation’s internal financial controls that resulted in accounting errors and made it difficult to detect fraud. The school board had announced plans to renovate Happy Hollow into an early childhood development center and promised upgrades to athletic facilities, but now there is no money left. I want an independent investigation of the construction spending before the school board asks the community to vote to renew the property tax referendum funding that is so important to our schools. Inaction by the school board without financial accountability could lead to a lack of community support for the referendum funding, which would be disastrous for our schools.

Better Support for Teachers: The average class size at WLES was 19 students when my family moved here in 2007 and the average kindergarten class size was just 17 students. Today, some of our elementary classrooms have 24 students. It used to be that many excellent teachers from our neighboring districts would apply for each job posting, trying to get a position in our schools. Over the past few years, the rate of teachers leaving our district has increased and the number of applicants for our open teacher positions has declined. It is true that there is a state-wide shortage of teachers, but as one of the best school districts in the state we should have one of the highest teacher retention rates. Unfortunately, our teacher retention rate is no better than the state average and is lower than that of our neighboring districts. Many of the teachers leaving our schools are now teaching in our neighboring school districts. This suggests that we are doing a particularly poor job of supporting our teachers. In April 2019, when the school board voted to fire all first-year teachers in grades K through 6 (while also starting another expensive construction project) it caused widespread distress among teachers. When a group of teachers asked school leaders to conduct a climate audit to identify and correct issues, they were told that all is well and to stop complaining. We need to do better. I want a greater fraction of the budget to go towards reducing class size and supporting teachers because I believe that having happy and engaged teachers is far more important to our students than having state-of-the-art facilities.

My Story:

Our family moved to West Lafayette when our oldest started kindergarten at WLES (then called Cumberland) fifteen years ago. My husband and I have four children who have all attended WLCSC schools. From the beginning, I was heavily involved in the schools serving as: Parent Council President, Vice President, Treasurer, Articipate Chair and Instructor, Book Fair Chair, Grant Committee Member, Teacher Appreciation Chair, Lego Robotics Coach, Math Pentathlon Leader, and Room Parent. During my years serving on the WLES parent council, there were volunteers in the school nearly all the time, helping in the nature center, volunteering in classrooms, running the winter carnival, and preparing materials in the copy center. The parent council had monthly meetings during the lunch hour which allowed a large number of parents and teachers to attend our meetings, and we provided snacks and activities for the little ones who tagged along with parents. We worked hard so that parents and teachers would be heard and valued.

I missed teaching and so started working as a substitute teacher and then took a long-term substitute position for a teacher who was on maternity leave. In 2016 I was hired as a teacher at WLES and taught first grade and then kindergarten until resigning in 2019. The teachers I worked with were amazing and the families and students were supportive and incredible to work with. However, I was surprised at the level of teacher dissatisfaction. It was much higher than a few years before when I was working behind the scenes as a student teacher supervisor for Purdue. I began to meet with school administrators to offer suggestions of how to improve the work environment. My school principal seemed unable to make any change without the superintendent’s authorization and was very hesitant to suggest recommendations to him. So, I met with the superintendent on my own and was shocked at how firmly he pushed back at any suggestion for improvement. So, I turned to the school board for help and described several issues that our teachers were facing and suggested ideas that could help. The school board’s response was that everything is great in our schools, why are you asking questions? They claimed that by raising issues I was going to harm our school’s reputation. No one would listen. 

I also turned to the teachers union to see if they could negotiate better working conditions for the teachers at WLES and WLIS. The union leaders listened but did nothing. In April 2019, when the school board voted to fire all the first-year teachers at WLES and WLIS, the union leaders should have jumped into action and defended those teachers’ jobs. Class sizes were higher than ever, the school corporation had millions saved in the referendum fund that was supposed to be used to support teachers and reduce class size, and yet the union sat quietly and sided with the school board.

I loved teaching, but the work environment in our schools was poor and administrators put tons of unnecessary stress on the teachers. After finishing the school year in 2019 and after realizing that the school board had no interest in making any improvements, I resigned my teaching position along with 22 other teachers who left that year. I decided that I would try to help students by working to change the school board and it turns out that there were a lot of people who wanted our school board to change. In 2020, I was one of 15 candidates to run and came very close to winning a seat on the board. It was shocking how contentious that election was. The school board’s PAC caused community outrage by receiving its financial support from the teachers union and from several companies and consultants that earned income from the recent school construction. The greatest community outrage was caused by the PAC’s election campaign communications including an offensive letter claiming that electing a new group of outsiders to the school board back in the mid-90s was what had caused the havoc associated with hiring Dr. Stella Batagiannis as superintendent. The letter didn’t mention that Karen Springer (she is running again this year) was on the school board then, hired Batagiannis, and was her supporter. The letter concluded by implying that outsiders running for the school board were disgruntled and were only running because of their own personal agendas. 

One of my plans if I had been elected in 2020 was to provide a summary of school board meetings to the community. I had seen this done in other places to help the community be more informed and feel more connected. It would have been far easier to write a meeting summary if I had school board member access to information, but I decided that I didn’t need to be on the board to try. Initially, it took a lot of effort to figure out what was going on in school board meetings which seemed to be intentionally opaque. I posted my monthly summary to my website and shared it with those I met volunteering in the schools, at my church, as a softball coach, and leading activities for the University Farms neighborhood association. My monthly school board meeting summaries became very popular (my website averages over 1,000 visits each month) and as the community became aware of school issues, they started putting pressure on school leaders. This community pressure has already produced several positive changes:

  • The school board is now posting its meeting packet to the school website after each meeting. They had previously denied requests for these documents and when I elevated this issue by taking a case to the Indiana Public Access Counselor, the school board fought to keep these public documents confidential. They lost the case and had to start sharing information (full story in my post: Access to Information).
  • The school board switched to a different legal firm for representation which will improve the way the board interacts with the community and will likely save our school district hundreds of thousands of dollars each year (November 2021 7:19, June 2022 8:03).
  • School board meetings were changed to the second Monday of each month. They had previously been held on the same day and at the same time as city council meetings in what seemed to be an attempt to limit community participation. Incumbents and current candidates Witt and Springer had both voted to move meetings to this conflicting time in Dec 2015, but changed their minds thanks to community pressure (June 2021 7:38 & 7:42, February 2021 Responses, January Responses 2022 #1). 
  • School board meetings now feature questions and discussion to a much greater extent than was the case two years ago. Prior to this, it was possible to listen to the entire school board meeting and not have any idea what they were voting to approve (December 2020 7:00, January 2021 6:42, February 2021 6:49). 
  • The official school board meeting minutes have been improved and now contain more useful information. For example, the minutes now list which school policies were revised or approved (December 2020 response #2).
  • The school board toned down this abrasive warning on their meeting agenda to be more welcoming: “the school board will not entertain questions during a school board meeting. All questions should be referred to the superintendent’s office during normal school hours” (April 2021 responses, October 2021 6:32).
  • School board meetings are now all broadcast on youtube to allow those not in attendance to watch the meeting (December 2020 7:27).  

Without my monthly meeting summaries and community pressure on the school board, I don’t think any of these changes would have happened. These changes have made us a better school district, but just think about how much better things could be if the school board was actively seeking input rather than resisting it.

Please vote for Dacia Mumford for the School Board of Trustees of the West Lafayette Community School Corporation. Voters in our school district can vote for up to 3 candidates for the school board in the November 8, 2022 election.