Des Moines School Superintendent Owes an Apology, Drake Student Deserves Praise

The other night, Drake Journalism student Holly Worthy stuck with a Des Moines School Board meeting until the bitter end. Having sat through many of these meetings in my life, let me assure you this can be a tedious, mind numbing task. But, Ms. Worthy deserves praise for something more than warming a seat in the audience when nearly everybody else went home. She knew the issues at hand and caught the Superintendent and maybe the Board playing a bit of a game. We’ll come back to Ms. Worthy in a second, but first let’s see what she discovered while many of the rest of us were watching something more interesting on TV from the comfort of home.

The School Board members, Superintendent Nancy Sebring and organizers of a proposed new charter school spent more than two hours discussing the school. They talked about a day in the life of a student at the new school, the educational innovation to be applied there, community-based learning systems, how team-based instruction would work, plans for involving parents and families, and even a plan for an entrepreneurial experiment with the Downtown Farmers Market. It is fair to say there was great interest, lots of information and in-depth discussion about the school. At the conclusion of the presentation, many audience members and parties interested in the new school left the board room with high hopes feeling they had been privy to a thorough presentation. Luckily, Ms. Worthy stayed behind to catch what happened next.

Three hours after the board meeting began the audience had dwindled to three district employees and Ms. Worthy. The meetings are televised on cable and, while there is no way to know, I am guessing there were not too many hardy souls tuned in at that point. In her routine superintendent’s report, Dr. Sebring proceeded to inform the Board and the audience, which consisted basically of Ms. Worthy, that the U.S. Department of Education had denied the district’s grant request for $478,345 for the charter school discussed earlier. The denial of these funds meant the school’s opening will be delayed at least one year.

Fortunately, Ms. Worthy wrote a story about this for thinkdsm.com. I was led to Ms. Worthy’s story, Des Moines charter school suffers setback, last week thanks to a friend’s Facebook update. Ms. Worthy and Think Magazine deserve our applause. Ms. Worthy’s reporting uncovered an unfortunate political game being playing by the Superintendent. Dr. Sebring purposely decided not to divulge the grant had been denied during the more public discussion in hopes the news would go unnoticed. That is just flat out wrong.

It is not up to Dr. Sebring or the School Board to decide when and what information is provided to taxpayers. More important, Dr. Sebring’s sitting on the grant’s denial during a discussion of the school only to reveal it when almost all of the interested parties were in their cars and on their way home is reprehensible. A public servant is not doing her job if she tries to hide the facts from the public. Dr. Sebring should have released this information during the formal discussion about the school. Dr. Sebring owes the Board and the public, especially those volunteering to establish the new school, an apology.

This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.