Dr. Jorgensen March Highland Highlights
March 1, 2021
Highland Highlights
I became a Superintendent for the first time in the 1998-1999 school year. I served 12 years as Superintendent at the Southeast Webster-Grand CSD, a district that was very similar in size and composition as the Highland CSD. I concluded my full-time service as Superintendent for the Washington CSD for five years. I came out of retirement to serve as a part-time Superintendent for Highland for 1 year and as an advisor to the district the last three. When I first became a Superintendent in Iowa, there were over 600 school districts in the state of Iowa. Now there are a little over 300. Iowa was consistently considered to be the model for quality education throughout the country and was consistently in the top two or three states in the country for average ACT scores. People took pride in the small rural school districts and the quality education students received.
Throughout my 17 years as a full-time Superintendent, I watched efforts in the state to reduce the number of school districts because someone seemed to think they were inefficient. Open Enrollment was originally passed because the thought in Des Moines was that parents would opt to have their kids attend larger districts that they perceived offered more advantages to the students. Ironically the exact opposite happened. Open Enrollments out of larger districts to smaller districts exceeded 2:1 rather than the other way around. Parents knew and understood the value of smaller class sizes and individualized attention to students.
School districts regularly received 4% growth in funding and this was determined two years in advance, by law by the Iowa legislation. The economy tanked in 2008 and as a result, we saw a 10% across the board cut in 2009. Since then, Iowa school districts have rarely seen allowable growth figures over 2-2.5% and many years less than that. Districts sometimes are unable to finalize budgets as the legislature determines the budget, sometimes in late April or May. Many small districts were unable to survive as they were slowly starved to death and mass consolidations occurred with state encouragement. Incentives like operational sharing and tax relief were approved. Fortunately, school districts like Highland were able to take advantage of these funds without having to force reorganization. Iowa’s standings as a model for education has declined in direct correlations to the changes that have occurred through legislation.
Discussions on vouchers has been around in the Iowa legislature for the last decade or so. There seemed to be a desire to blur the lines between public funds and private funds with current leadership. The discussion has gotten very real and serious in 2021. A new voucher proposal which would allow public funds be used for private purposes for parents who choose to enroll their students in an alternative to public education is likely to be in place next year.
I can’t help but reflect on the past. It seems the more involvement that the legislature seems to have in public education the worse things seem to get. What was a model program across the country has now become a political pawn in the use of public money for private purposes. Apparently Separation of Church and State no longer applies, even though it has been a legal interpretation for over 250 years and a Supreme Court ruling in the 1960’s.
