School board wants to create legislative priority holding lawmakers accountable

Newton school board members held off on approving next year’s legislative priorities, and it is in large part because they want to establish a new priority that would direct lobbyists to hold lawmakers accountable for passing bills without providing districts with timely and comprehensive guidance.

Superintendent Tom Messinger said his biggest pet peeve when politics affects education is not so much the individual pieces of legislation, it is more so how they are handled. He suggested when schools are given legislation intended to take effect the first day of a new school year, then they need guidance.

“(Senate File 496) was in effect this whole last school year,” Messinger said of the bill many have referred to as the parents rights law or the book ban law. “The Department of Education came out with the guidelines for it last week. That’s the kind of stuff we have to tell legislators this just is not acceptable.”

Messinger added that legislators in state government should not put a law in place that districts are held accountable for and then wait until the school year is over to tell them how to do it. To him, this priority is as important as the ones approved in the past.

“It’s my license that’s on the line, and it’s other people’s licenses that are on the line with this,” Messinger said, referring to the punishment that violators of the education reform bill face. “You want to give us the guidance on how to do it well after you’re held accountable for doing it.”

Every year the school board submits its legislative priorities to Iowa Association of School Boards (IASB), who then lobby for those issues on behalf of public school districts all across Iowa. Oftentimes the priorities are already expressed in detail by IASB, but it is up to individual school boards to select their favorites.

However, the school board was not given the new list of priorities to choose from. Instead, they could look at the priorities selected from the previous school year — dropout/at-risk, mental health, teacher professional development and retention, preschool and supplemental state aid — and add anything new.

Perhaps what started as a rant about the legislature’s failure to provide schools with concrete guidelines soon turned into a serious discussion about whether that could be a feasible priority for IASB to push for Newton schools. Messinger said reasonable timelines should be implemented when these laws are approved.

Furthermore, he said the development of those timelines deserve input from people who actually work in public school districts.

“It doesn’t do us any good to have somebody setting me timelines that’s never once stepped foot inside of our school,” Messinger said.

School board member Travis Padget expressed his frustration over the lawmaking process of Iowa legislators, suggesting they are more concerned about getting the votes to pass the law outright without working out the kinks and realizing the implications it has on school districts and communities.

Lawmakers got their hands caught in the cookie jar, Padget said, but went ahead and passed laws because they had enough votes. He and fellow school board member Kristi Meyer suggested lawmakers wanted to pass laws quickly and not worry about the details until later. Messinger agreed with their sentiments.

“We’ve had two meetings with AEA folks about the fee-for-service model we’re going to be using this year,” Messinger said. “Today was our second one and the interesting piece of it is that we still don’t know what we’re going to be charged for and what we’re not.”

As a result, the Newton Community School District is following the law but cannot make plans for the upcoming school year. Messinger said last year’s priorities are issues that districts have lobbied for every year. School board chair Robyn Friedman said it sounded like Messinger wanted to make a new priority.

“Which is something that happens,” Friedman said. “That’s not out of character. You see that from other school districts.”“I really do,” Messinger said. “In the end, they’re going to vote on what they’re going to vote on and we can list the points that play into it. But we’re still always going to be playing the hand that we’re dealt.”

Overall the Newton school board seemed to agree with Messinger’s idea, so much so that they voted to table their legislative priorities until this new priority could be created. Messinger noted he wants the district to comply with the laws given by the state. But this past year the state failed to give schools direction.

“Sometimes I feel like we are told what the speed limit is after we’re given the speeding ticket,” Messinger said. “In the end, we’re just like everybody else, we have to follow the rules and the laws of the state. And I completely understand that and appreciate that. That’s my full intention.”

Messinger does not want to guess what the rules are, especially when it is his license — or another teacher’s license — that could be on the line.

Friedman said, “It puts an administrator in a difficult position because people below you are asking for guidance but you don’t have the guidance to give them.”