Our Teachers Union
My view is that a strong teachers union is an important way for teachers to improve their work environment (which is our students’ learning environment). Each year I was a teacher, I was a dues-paying member of the teachers union. I served as a representative on the state-mandated discussion committee, which is a monthly meeting of school administrators with the…
Transfer Student Policy
Our school board has not set a transfer student policy to govern how many transfer students to accept and how to select which applicants will be allowed to enroll. Decisions are left to the discretion of the superintendent with no oversight. An optimal policy would probably accept some transfer students in order to balance student numbers across grades in order…
Small Town School Board Campaigns
I was elected to the WLCSC school board in November 2022 and before that I was one of 15 candidates for the WLCSC school board in 2020. Participating in the 2020 election helped me to better articulate my beliefs about how school board campaigns in a small community like ours ought to run. These are my views:
Our Community Needs Representation
One of the great insights of Nobel laureate George Stigler is that regulatory bodies, like school boards, tend to end up serving the interests of those they are supposed to regulate at the expense of the public. He called this “regulatory capture.” It is common for elected school boards to favor the priorities of school administrators and teachers union leaders…
Financial Transparency
In a series of town halls in 2015 and 2016, school leaders presented plans for $50 million in construction (with donations expected to cover some of that cost) to build WLIS and renovate portions of WLES and Jr/Sr HS. But, then the school board quietly borrowed $95 million between 2017 and 2020 for these construction projects, leaving our district with…
Debt Payments
In 2023, the school corporation will make debt payments of $6.15 million. This is about $800,000 more than the projected tax revenue to the debt service fund. This means that funds that had been intended for other purposes will be diverted to pay the debt on the recent construction. The school board already transferred $1.4 million from the referendum fund…
Access to Information
What is the single most important thing I want to change about our school board? I want to bring community input back into school decisions. This cannot happen if the school board “gag order” is left in place. Current school board policy is to not release any information until after the school board has voted on the issue: “Prior to…
Community Engagement
Years ago, when I first attended a WL school board meeting, I found it uninviting. The unwelcoming tone started right at the top of the agenda which said that the school board “will not entertain questions during a board meeting.” The school board also seemed to be intentionally obscuring what was being done. Items on the agenda had vague titles…
School Rankings
Our school district paid niche.com $9,900 in 2020 to promote their rankings of our schools. My opinion is that Niche is not a particularly reputable ranking site (facebook scandal, company renaming and rebranding, pushing schools to pay for a “premium profile”) and I think that whatever benefit is gained from the online advertising is likely outweighed by the stigma from…
No Name Calling
On Monday, I had the opportunity to talk with Sadie Harper-Scott, the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Tippecanoe School Corporation (TSC). Sadie is passionate about changing the culture of what type of behavior is acceptable at school. She is leading trainings for students and teachers to put a stop to name calling. They are making it possible…
School Social Workers
When I was teaching at WLES, there were several instances where students, as young as 5, were taken home by the school resource officer in the back of a police car. In each case the child was having a very bad day and the classroom teacher called the vice principal or dean of students for help. If the situation with…
Prioritizing Teachers
Our school district has recently struggled to attract and retain highly-effective teachers. It didn’t used to be this way. Just a few years back, we would have several highly-qualified teachers apply for each job posting. Many of these applicants were experienced teachers in neighboring school districts. Some teachers would apply year after year, trying to get a position in our…
Class Size
As a parent, I value smaller class sizes for my children. This has been one of the distinctive characteristics of our elementary school that attracts families to our school district and keeps our property values high. Small class size is something that was highlighted during the campaign to ask our community to vote for the referendum. From 2007 to 2018,…
Subscribe for post updates
Dacia Mumford 