Teacher Salary History

As readers of this blog well know, the labor agreements between Hilliard City Schools and the unions representing most of the employees will expire on December 31, 2010. The compensation terms negotiated into the new agreements will be the major factor in determining the size and timing of the next operating levy. Actually, because our labor agreements typically span several years, they may well determine the size and timing of the next two levies.

It may be worth a moment to review the compensation structure defined in these labor agreements. I'll focus on the agreement with the teacher's union – the Hilliard Education Association (HEA) – as it has the simpler structure of the two agreements (click here for a discussion of the OAPSE agreement).

As the illustration above shows, the compensation structure can be thought of as three-dimensional. For each year, a base salary is set: in 2008 for example, the base teacher salary was $36,160. This represents the salary that would be paid to a teacher with a Bachelor's degree and no experience.

From there, a grid is developed in which the columns represent greater levels of education for the teacher, and the rows represent years of service. The HEA agreement has columns for Bachelor's Degree, Bachelor's Degree and 150 total credit hours, Masters Degree, and Masters Degree plus 15 additional credit hours. As one works across the columns, the 2008-2010 HEA Agreement specifies that the salary goes up 6% for each educational level.

So in 2008, a teacher starting with a BA and no experience would have been paid $36,160 – the base salary. If that teacher had a BA with at least 150 total credits hours, the pay would have been 6% more, or $38,330. If that teacher had a Masters degree, the salary would have been another 6% more, or $40,499. And finally, if that teacher had a Masters degree plus 15 hours of additional credit, the salary would have been $42,669 – another 6% more.

Note that the degree requirements for each column are not uniform across all school districts. Some have more columns, and some grant additional compensation for higher levels of education, such as Masters plus 30 hours, or a PhD/EdD. Nor is the size of the increase granted for each educational level uniform. Ours happen to be 6% for each level, but other districts have smaller or larger increases specified in their contracts.

The rows specify the additional salary paid to a teacher for years of service. These are customarily called the step increase. As is the case with the columns, step increases are uniquely defined in each school district. The HEA contract is pretty simple – an additional 4.15% is granted each year through 15 years of service, then again in the 20^th and 23^rd years. After the 23^rd year, there are no further step increases, meaning that the only way for our more senior teachers to receive a salary increase is to add to their educational level, or to have the base pay increase. Currently, about 65% of the HEA members receive step increases – the other 35% are in a year of service in which no step increase is specified.

As far as compensation is concerned, the practice here in Hilliard has been to change only the base pay from year to year, and to leave the steps and education increases alone. The amount that gets negotiated for the base pay increase is typically all that has been communicated to the public in the past. Here is what those increases have been for the past several years:

2003: 3.75%
2004: 3.75%
2005: 3.50%
2006: 3.65%
2007: 3.65%
2008: 3.00%
2009: 3.00%
2010: 3.00%

It is important to note that the base pay increase and step increase compound to arrive at the final salary for any particular year. For example, a teacher with ten years of experience in 2003 became a teacher with eleven years of experience in 2004. Using the historical numbers above, a teacher with ten years of experience in 2003 would have been paid 8.06% more in 2004. Taken directly from the contracts (available here), the 2003 pay of a ten year teacher with a Masters degree would have been $51,187. In 2004, that same teacher – now with eleven years of service – would have been paid $55,310, an increase of $4,123.

One more example: A teacher with a BA and 7 years of experience in 2002 would have been paid $38,991. In 2010, that same teacher would have 15 years of experience, and would be paid $70,598. This is equal to annual raises of 7.7% in each of the years between 2002 and 2010.

Ohio's current teacher licensing requirements mandate that a teacher must begin graduate studies no later than the fifth year of teaching, and must earn a Masters degree by the tenth year. So let's modify this scenario to take the educational level into account as well. Assume once again that the teacher in 2002 had a BA and 7 years of experience. Then in 2004, the teacher would reach the BA+ level. That would have meant that in the 2004 the teacher would have received the 3.75% base pay increase, the 4.15% step increase, and the 6% increase for advancing in education. This would put the teachers' 2004 pay at $46,333, or 14.5% over 2003.

By the 15^th year of service in 2010, this hypothetic teacher would have a Masters degree, and the salary would be $79,072. During the span of years between 2002 and 2010, this teachers' salary would increase at an annual rate of 9.24%.

Because the entire pay grid is derived from the base salary, when the base salary increases, so does the maximum salary. In 2002, the maximum salary was $69,092. For 2010, the maximum salary is $90,362.

The chart below depicts the base pay, maximum pay, and two scenarios. The line labeled "Typical" is for a teacher who would have had a BA and 7 years of service in 2002, and reached MA+ level in the 15^th year, 2010. The line labeled "New" is for a teacher who began the first year of teaching in 2002 with a BA, and reaches BA+ in 2010.

click to enlarge

One other compensation change which needs to be mentioned relates to the cost of health insurance. In the 2008-2010 contract, the union employees agreed to pay part of the premium for health insurance. Prior to 2008, the employees made no contribution at all to the cost of health insurance. For 2010, their contribution is 10% of the actual premium, or $122.10 per month (capped at $135.52/mo) for family coverage.

Teachers do not participate in Social Security, and instead have their retirement benefits paid by the State Teachers Retirement System. Contributions to fund STRS are made by both the teacher and the school district with the teacher is working. Currently, the teacher contributes 10% of their salary, and the school district contributes another 14%. The fiscal stability of STRS has been called into question, and the proposals being made to 'fix' the system include an increase to the contribution rate for both employers and employees. The timing and amount are yet to be worked out, but the proposals suggest that the employer – the school districts – and the teachers will each be asked to contribute an additional 2.5% of salaries on a schedule to be phased in over five years.

Overall, the benefits for employees add another 34% of salaries.

In May, Treasurer Brian Wilson updated our Five Year Forecast. In constructing this forecast, he assumed that there would be no base pay increase for the years 2011-2013. However, the total salary expenditure for  the current employees would still increase 2.3% each year due to step increases, assuming the current step formula is used. In 2011 - the coming school year - he assumes there will be a net reduction of $700,000 in salaries - presumably through layoffs. For 2012 and 2013, he is assuming that we will add a net $200,000 in new employee salary dollars each year. In 2013, an additional $1 million in new salaries are assumed to be required to hire sufficient teachers to provide full-day Kindergarten, as mandated by state law.

Adding on the cost of benefits, and Mr. Wilson forecasts that our total cost of compensation, which was $131 million in 2009, will rise to $155 million in 2013 - an increase in annual spending of $24 million.

The levy math is straightforward: Each additional mill of property taxes generates $2.4 million more money for the schools, and costs $30/yr for each $100,000 in home value. If our spending is going to increase by $24 million/year, then by 2013 we'll need 10 mills of additional property tax income - or $300 more for each $100,000 in home value - to fund it.

However, we can't wait until 2013 - the Five Year Forecast shows the District running out of cash in 2012, and so as has been reported in the news, an operating levy request is very likely to be on the ballot in 2011.

On top of this, there are real concerns about the stability of our funding from the State of Ohio. We already know that the State will be reducing our funding by $12 million/yr as they phase out the reimbursement for the elimination of Tangible Personal Property tax. Replacement of that alone would require 5 mills of new property taxes. Our FY10 and FY11 revenue includes close to 1 mill worth of funding each year from the Federal stimulus money. That too will have to be replaced if we want to spend at forecasted levels.

There has been no time in recent history when the fiscal future of our school district was less clear. As a community, we need to figure out how much we're willing to pay in additional property taxes to fund the operations of our schools.

If your answer is zero, then please offer suggestions for what needs to be cut to reduce spending. Opinions without basis in fact or understanding don't help. For example, one thing I hear often is a variation on this theme: "What about all those big school buses that run past my house carrying only a few kids?"  I tell people who say this that if they followed those buses a little further, they would be completely empty!  Designing a transportation system that moves thousands of kids from their neighborhoods to all the various schools in a reasonable period of time while keeping costs minimized is a complex task, and I think our transportation team is pretty good at what they do.

To be sure, there is always a way to reduce spending in a budget as large as this. But when nearly 90% of the spending is for salaries and benefits, any real cost reduction has to come from reducing pay increases and/or employing fewer people. This is why the upcoming union contract negotiations are so critical to the health of our school district.

Adding to the challenge, the State of Ohio may yet surprise us with further funding cuts. We should begin to think now how we will apportion this risk among the stakeholders of our district, including students, employees, suppliers and taxpayers. No one group - e.g. the taxpayers - should bear the full weight of this risk alone.

Unsustainable

The opening presentation of this year's annual Board Retreat was that of the Board's Audit & Accountability Committee.

The Board established the Audit & Accountability Committee in the Fall of 2008, during the period leading up to the vote on the 6.9 mill Permanent Operating Levy, which was passed in November 2008. The members of the Committee were named in February 2009, and they have been working very intently on their assigned mission, meeting much more often than is specified in their charter.

The Committee's latest report touched on five areas:

1. Assessment of the 2009 State Auditor's Report and Management Letters
2. Benchmarking Analysis of Costs – Update
3. 2010 Five-Year Forecast – Review and Recommendation
4. Strategic Performance Objectives and Measures
5. Compensation Expense

Three times in their report, the Committee said that the past rate of operating expense growth in our school district is "not sustainable" going forward:

Page 2: In conclusion, while the Audit and Accountability Committee commends the District for reducing costs per student for 2009, the past expense growth rate significantly above CPI rates is not sustainable.

 Page 3: The rate of growth in costs is simply not sustainable nor supported by current economic factors.

 Page 5: As we indicated in our previous report and again in this report, the current rate of expense increases is unsustainable.

 They closed their report with this statement:

In summary, compensation expense is the driving force of education costs in all districts. In HCSD compensation currently comprises over 87% of total District expenses. While it is important that the Administration continually watch all costs, compensation expense for Administrators, teachers and support staff is the only expenditure that "moves the needle". As the District works through the difficult economic circumstances and the strategic matters raised in this report, we recommend that all employees of the District participate in the development of solutions. Equitably sharing the duty of implementing solutions, financial and otherwise, will be important to community acceptance.

This is a wise and accurate summary, in my opinion. There is no single cause for the fiscal challenge in which we find ourselves, nor is there an easy solution. While it is indeed true that compensation costs make up most of the budget, and that our costs have been going up at a rate much greater than is typical in our current economy, there are other significant factors at play as well.

The most significant of those 'other factors' is the fiscal maelstrom in which the government of the State of Ohio finds itself. Ohio is not alone. The cover story of Time Magazine this week (Vol 175, No. 25) is titled "The Broken States of America." The writers examine the growing number of states that, if they were private sector industries, would be inclined to declare bankruptcy in order to shed the obligations accumulated from a generation-long spending spree. Those obligations cannot be met without implementing incredibly severe cuts in current and future spending, and raising taxes to a point that could choke off our fragile economy.

Because so much of the State's revenues come from personal and commercial income taxes, when the global economy took a dive, the revenues of the State of Ohio fell dramatically as well. Regardless of the pro-education promises Gov. Strickland made as a candidate, there just isn't enough money coming in for the State to honor all those expectations. The State must cover the ever-growing cost of Medicaid, as well as run the corrections system, which are also primary consumers of State funding. The result has been a manipulation of the public school funding formula such that districts perceived to be 'wealthy,' as is ours, have been left to fend on their own.

In plain English, that means that 100% of the incremental costs of running our school district are being fully borne by the property owners of our community – homeowners and businesses alike.

There are those who argue that the solution is obvious: radical reductions in the rate in which salaries and benefits are rising. The A & A Committee report says it clearly – only the compensation cost component of our budget is large enough such that a change in the rate of growth will make a real difference. I have certainly saying this for a very long time as well.

But we must acknowledge that there are other viewpoints. As one of the School Board's representatives to the A&A Committee, along with Dave Lundregan, I observed their discussions on this point, which are summarized in this statement on page 2:

"The District and community must remain cognizant, however, of the effect on the quality of education provided to students in taking any measures to reduce the growth in costs."

In other words, this isn't a dialog concerning only cost management. We are proud of what is accomplished in our schools, sometimes with national recognition, as was just recently the case with our being named one of 174 "Best Communities for Music Education" in the country. As we go about solving the fiscal problems that face us, few want that to come at the expense of the quality of our schools.

One of the key tactics Gov. Strickland has used to reduce expenditures at the State level has been to lay off one in twelve State workers, in addition to reductions in work hours and mandatory furloughs. This is hardly what one would expect from a Democratic governor, but like our schools district, it is just about the only real choice he has.

And so that brings us to the economics of our school district. As I have written here many times, there are only three knobs that we can turn to adjust our finances:

1. How much more do we want to increase our local property taxes?

As you can see from the following chart, we taxpayers have voted to raise our property taxes at a rate just over 7% per year - since 1975.

click to enlarge

However, as time has passed, the interval between levy requests has shortened. While through most of the 1970s and 1980s, levy requests were seven years apart, we have passed new Permanent Operating Levies in 2000 (4.3 mills effective), 2004 (8.1 mills effective), 2008 (6.9 mills effective) and will have another one on the ballot in 2011. The size is yet to be determined.

2. How much do we want to pay our teachers, staff and administrators?

I have written much about teacher compensation – this article might be a good place to start. According to the CUPP Report generated by the Ohio Dept of Education, our classroom teachers in 2009 had an average salary of $64,703, which ranked 29^th highest in the State among 614 districts.

Is that too much, too little, or about right? There will be no unanimity in the answer by any camp – neither teachers, staff, administrators nor the voters. Nonetheless, it will be negotiated this Fall, in secrecy, to a definite answer which will be expressed in new union contracts for teachers and staff, and individual employment contracts for administrators.

If you want to have any influence over this answer, you need to speak up now – right now – before negotiations commence. After negotiations end and the contracts are ratified by the unions, the only decision point remaining will be whether or not the School Board accepts the contracts.

3. To what degree will we accept cuts in programming, services, and staff?After the union contracts have been negotiated and signed, and the vote taken on next levy, the only knob remaining is how many people we employ.

As pointed out by the A&A Committee, the only class of expenditures we have that will 'move the needle' is personnel costs. There is simply no way of enacting millions of dollars in spending reductions without layoffs. And because the union contracts specify that employees are laid off starting with those with the least seniority – and therefore the lowest pay rates – it can require a large number of them to be laid off to reach a cost reduction target.

For example, my analysis suggests that to reduce spending by $1 million/yr, at least 30 employees would need to be laid off (15 FTE). To reduce spending by $10 million/yr would require on the order of 200 to be terminated.

At those levels, painful choices will have to be made. Which extracurricular programs and elective offerings will have to be eliminated? What services will be discontinued? How many more kids will we have in each classroom?

Reaching an acceptable balance of these three factors is quite frankly the most important task our community must undertake in the next few months.

In most ways, our schools define our community. The perceived quality of the schools is why we have chosen to live here, and is a significant factor in the preservation of our property values. Simultaneously, the compensation level we agree to for our school employees is the primary determinant of our property taxes, and every increase makes it harder for people to afford to live here.

I suspect that for things to work out, the school employees will have to accept less than they might like, and the voters will need to accept that they might need to pay more than is comfortable.

We can reach a reasonable agreement if the people of the community engage in the dialog, and the conversation remains respectful and empathetic.

Do you think we can do that without work stoppages, threats of strikes, name calling (on both sides), punitive program cut lists, and all those things which draw our children into the fray?

If it's really "all about the kids," let's show them how the people of one of the best school districts in the country figures out these tough problems. Wouldn't that be a wonderful gift to them – to show them how a community successfully deals with these situations, versus the 'scorched Earth' outcome we see in so many other places.

After all, we're going to leave them plenty of tough problems to solve when they grow up…

A Tale of Two Districts

The Columbus Dispatch published an article in its June 2, 2010 edition, reporting on the signing of new collective bargaining agreements between the Boards of Education and the teachers' unions of Dublin City Schools and Gahanna Jefferson City Schools. Those agreements are quite different, and I thought some investigation was merited to see if we could understand why such differences exist.

Update: on June 11, 2010, the Dispatch reported that the union representing the support staff of Dublin City School (the "Dublin Support Association") radified substantially the same deal as the teachers' union.


The new deal between the Gahanna Jefferson School Board and the Gahanna Jefferson Education Association (the formal name of the teachers' union) is – according to the Dispatch – a one year extension of the current agreement with no increase in base pay. In their contract for the prior three years, the G-J teachers received 3% base pay increases each year.

However, as Dispatch reporter Charlie Boss correctly points out, the G-J teachers will continue to receive their "step increase," which is an additional raise given for years of service – in those years for which a step increase is specified. In the case of the G-J teachers, step increases for a teacher with a Masters degree are paid in years 0-15, then 17, 19, 21 and 27. The size of the step starts at 5.25% for brand new teacher with a Bachelor's degree, and diminishes to less than 3% (of a larger salary) for teachers with higher degrees and more seniority. The G-J Treasurer indicates in his assumptions for their last published Five Year Forecast that overall, step increases would average 1.66%. That suggests that half or more of their teachers have many years of experience, and are in the sparse part of the step grid.

So by agreeing to freeze their base pay at 2010 levels, the G-J teachers will average a 1.66% increase for the 2010-2011 school year, with their most junior teachers receiving around 5% and the most senior teachers generally receiving no increase at all. Because this is a one year extension, the G-J School Board and the GJEA will be negotiating another contract next year. 

One year agreements are usually signed when one or both of the parties feel the deal shortchanged them, and want the opportunity to get back to the bargaining table sooner, hoping economic and political conditions will favor them more next time.

Contrast this to the contract just negotiated between the Dublin School Board and the Dublin Educator's Association. In their case, a new three-year agreement was negotiated, with base pay increases of 1% this year, 1.25% next year, and 1.5% in the final year. Their prior agreement was a two-year contract, with a 3% increase in the second year. As is the case with the G-J salary schedule, the step increase schedule for the Dublin teachers is non-linear, with the newest teachers receiving 5.2% increases and more senior teachers getting smaller percentage increases.

So why is there a one year deal with no base pay increase for the Gahanna-Jefferson teachers, and a three year deal with growing base pay increases for the Dublin teachers?

I have spent a good deal of time trying to correlate a number of school district statistics to teacher compensation, and have come to believe that the single greatest influence over teacher compensation from district to district is simply the wealth of the community. In other words, the higher the income of the people of the school district, the more they pay their teachers. Let's look at some comparative numbers:

The average classroom teacher salary in Gahanna-Jefferson was $67,493 in 2009, according to the CUPP Report published by the Ohio Department of Education (ODOE), while in Dublin, it was $66,885, a difference of less than 1% (for Hilliard, the average classroom teacher salary was $64,703). The statewide average classroom teacher salary was $55,581, and it ranged from $30,810 in Bettsville (Seneca County) to $78,624 at Orange City Schools (Cuyahoga County).

In those same school districts, the average community income is: Dublin = $90,715; G-J = $75,060; Hilliard = $66,602; Orange = $240,582 (!!); Bettsville = $38,445.

One might think that teacher experience plays a part in compensation, and that it should be relatively consistent across districts. Here is a chart that shows the fraction of teachers with 10+ years of experience plotted against the average classroom teacher salary, for each district. The slope of the red line is an indicator of how well these two statistics are correlated, and the near-horizontal nature of this line suggests that there isn't much correlation between these two statistics at all.

(note: the yellow triangles in these charts indicate values for Hilliard City Schools)

(click to enlarge)

How about compensation vs some measure of workload? One of the most used measures of workload is the student/teacher ratio. The notion is that the more kids there are in the classroom, the greater the burden on the teacher, and therefore, the more the teacher should be paid. As this chart shows, there does seem to be some positive correlation between these two statistics, in that the higher the average number of kids per teacher, the more the teachers get paid.

(click to enlarge)

Then there is the most controversial of all measures – student performance vs teacher compensation. Again, the CUPP data shows that there is a positive correlation between classroom teacher salaries and student performance, as measured by the Performance Index on the State Report Card.

(click to enlarge)

But we have to be very careful not to draw cause-and-effect conclusions from these correlations. In other words, it would be inappropriate to say that test scores would go up simply by paying teachers more. Or conversely, that when the Performance Index is low, it is because the teachers aren't paid enough. Note that this correlation shows that some of the highest paid teachers are in the lowest performing districts. There are a huge number of other factors that need to be examined. 

In all the pairs of statistics I studied, two produced strong correlations. The first is the Performance Index vs Students in Poverty, and the correlation is strongly negative. In other words, the more kids that are living in poverty in a school district, the lower the Performance Index. In fact, no district with more than 5% its kids living in poverty has a Performance Index of 100 or greater. By the way, while most of the high-poverty districts are the big urban systems, a number of them are in the rural Appalachian areas of the state.

(click to enlarge)

The other strong correlation is the average income of the people of a community versus the average income of the community's teachers. In this case, the correlation is definitely positive, meaning that as community income increases, the compensation of the teachers increases as well. In the case of Dublin, the average teacher salary of $66,805 is 74% of the average community income of $90,715, while for G-J, the average teacher salary of $67,494 is 90% of the average community income of $75,060 (in Hilliard, the teachers average $64,703, which is 97% of the average community income of $66,602).

(click to enlarge)

So might it be that the Dublin teachers got the apparent better deal of these two negotiations simply because of the greater income of Dublin residents? I think so. 

If we compare Hilliard Schools and our neighboring school district, Jonathan Alder, we note that JA is rated as "Excellent with Distinction," the same as us, with a Performance Index of 100.9 compared to our 101.5. However, their average classroom teacher pay is $49,646 vs our $64,703, making our average pay 30% higher than JA's. I believe it is significant that the average community income for JA is $55,277, which means the average income in Hilliard is also 20% higher.

So here we have two neighboring districts with virtually identical performance, yet the teachers have significantly different pay. I believe the reason for the difference is simply the relative wealth of the communities, and how that has – over many years of negotiations and levies – allowed the Hilliard teachers to bargain for better deals than have the Jonathan Alder teachers.

How are we to make sense of all this? Smart people all across our country have tried to discover an algorithm that can be used to nail down what it should cost to run our schools, which is substantially the same as asking how we should determine how many teachers, administrators, and staff a school district needs to employ, and how much those folks should be compensated. Governor Strickland claims to have the answer in his so-called Evidence Based Model, but it has never been fully funded, and therefore never tested, so we don't really know if it works or not.

Meanwhile local School Boards and Unions continue to struggle year after year with how to answer these fundamental questions.

I certainly don't know the answer to these questions either, and therefore suggest to you that whatever other rationale one might like to apply, the most truthful answer is that teachers and staff members get paid what they can negotiate. Their union leadership will work hard to drive a good bargain on behalf of their members, and the school board will do the same on behalf of the people of the community. 

As with any negotiation, the outcome will depend on the relative strength, empathy, resources, skill and resolve of the folks on each side of the bargaining table. The union negotiators are good at what they do, and know how to bring the power of their membership to bear on the process.

How are the people of the Hilliard School community going to participate in the upcoming union negotiations?

Speaking for myself, as only one School Board Member, I'd very much like to hear what you think should be the goals of this negotiation. The leadership of the teachers' union is asking the very same question of its members right now.

Roundabouts

It is not my place to speak for the other members of the Hilliard School Board, but as a private citizen, I am most definitely not a proponent of the Hilliard Triangle Project as currently being implemented by the City of Hilliard.

I actually like roundabouts – when they are located in appropriate places and properly designed. Unfortunately, I do not believe either is the case with this particular project. I believe this particular design will make the traffic problems worse during peak periods, and more importantly, create much more danger for the children who need to cross those intersections, given that this area has the greatest concentration of school buildings in our district. Kids walking to/from Hilliard Station 6^th Grade Building, Scioto Darby Elementary, Memorial Middle School, Heritage Middle School and Darby High School will need to cross these streets, in some cases multiple times.

For those who have not heard about this project, here's the simple explanation: The two intersections at Main St and Cemetery Rd and Main St and Scioto-Darby Rd are going to be replaced by two roundabouts. At the same time, the "Y" intersection just west of there where Cemetery Rd and Scioto Darby Rd meet is being reworked to become a 90° intersection with a traffic light. The City of Hilliard has published a Frequently Asked Questions page that provides many more details, and a lot of opinion presented as fact.

What I write here is opinion as well, of course. My hope is to point out what I believe are legitimate and reasoned concerns. It is up to you to decide who makes the better case.

So, as I said, I like roundabouts. I believe the ones on Britton Parkway and Hayden Run Rd are generally good designs, and are functioning well. We got our first taste of roundabouts in England, where they are often used at busy and complex intersections, including as freeway interchanges.

One of the arguments in favor of roundabouts is that they're safer precisely because they force drivers to engage and think about what is going on around them, something that isn't quite so necessary when an intersection is controlled by standard traffic lights. While I believe this to be true, I suspect that this argument was made in the days before cell phones and texting, two practices which make driving in general more dangerous (especially for motorcycle riders like me!), and especially so at intersections where the traffic never stops.

I would be in favor of putting short-range 'cell phone signal killers' (and they absolutely exist) in roundabouts, except that I'm sure that if a person's cell phone suddenly went dead, he/she would become even more distracted while trying to figure out what was going on (although I once had the opportunity to observe an experiment with such a device, and while most people quickly discovered that their signal had been lost, one person spoke on for quite a while before realizing that the other party wasn't responding).

While not a traffic engineer, I have been involved in data telecommunications all my adult life, and the problems of auto traffic engineering and data traffic engineering are remarkably similar. The closest equivalent to a roundabout in a data network is a router. A router receives data from many incoming data streams, sorts the streams by destination, and sends them on via the appropriate path.

In most cases, routers work pretty well, but there can be problems. One of the major problems is congestion, when so much data traffic is coming to the router that it is unable to keep up. When that happens, one of more of the incoming streams has to be stopped until the congestion clears, causing users of the network to experience delays and sometimes interruptions. While working for the largest network operator on the planet, UUNET, we saw a couple of occasions when congestion became so bad that entire sections of the country had service disruptions as the congestion problem propagated out from the original source, just as happens when there is a big wreck on I-270 and lots of people bail out to the surface streets, congesting them as well.

This is one of the things which I believe will happen at the Hilliard Triangle roundabouts during times of peak traffic flow: morning rush hour, afternoon school dismissal, and evening rush hour. The situation is entirely predictable: traffic entering from one of the directions will become dense enough to completely congest the roundabout, forcing traffic from the other three directions to stop and wait until the traffic from the first direction subsides. Because roundabouts have a counter-clockwise flow, the traffic from the next counter-clockwise direction, which has been backing up while waiting for a shot at the roundabout, will jump into the roundabout and fill it until that line empties, and so on around the circle.

This phenomenon will be further exacerbated in our case by the fact that there is another roundabout right next to the first, where the whole congestion scenario happens again. Take for example that it is evening rush hour, when there is a lot of traffic which has exited I-270 and is heading westbound on Cemetery Rd. Some of that traffic will need to go south on Main St, as evidenced by the number of cars which today jam up in that intersection. A car traveling this route will enter the Cemetery/Main roundabout at the eastern portal, travel 270° around the roundabout to go south, exiting on Main St, only to be immediately dumped into the second roundabout. There the driver will need to go to the opposite exit to continue south on Main St. If that roundabout becomes congested, traffic could back up into the other roundabout, bringing traffic at this key junction to a standstill. Tempers will flare, and accidents will happen.

Which brings me to my greater concern: pedestrian safety – in particular the safety of the children who will be crossing those intersections on the way to and from school. You may recall that we've already had one death near there – crossing guard Dianna Sharp, who is credited with saving a child by putting her own body in the way of a dump truck westbound on Scioto Darby Rd.

The views expressed on the City of Hilliard website include this:

"The pedestrian environment is much safer with roundabouts. Intuitively this may not initially make sense because pedestrian WALK/DON'T WALK signals are removed at roundabouts; however, large intersections with wide pavements to cross, many turn lanes, and higher speeds do not provide an environment that is inviting or conducive to pedestrian mobility and safety."

But it seems to me that with appropriate traffic light sequencing and WALK/DON'T WALK signs, you can create periods of time – just during school hours – when all traffic is momentarily brought to a stop, and you can safely maneuver kids across the intersection, especially with the supervision of crossing guards. With the roundabouts, traffic does not come to a complete stop, except to yield to pedestrians – if they are noticed.

So let's go back to the argument that roundabouts are supposed to be safer because they force drivers to think. In reality, when you come to a roundabout, there is a significant amount of information to process, and you get all of that information visually. You will be primarily looking for opportunities to weave your 3,000lb vehicle moving at 25mph or so into a traffic flow of other 3,000lb vehicles also moving at 25mph. How likely are you to be looking for a 4ft tall, 60lb kid about to cross the street at your exit point? No very likely, I fear. Especially so for drivers yapping and texting on their cell phones, and remember, we'll have lots of teenage drivers from both Darby and Davidson high schools using these intersections.

The opportunity to have cars mowing down kids is unacceptably great, in my opinion.

Both of my key concerns are solvable. It just takes money. Instead of two small adjacent roundabouts, a larger roundabout could have been constructed, providing a single sorting point for Cemetery, Main and Cemetery traffic. It would almost certainly mean buying the Donatos property, which the City of Hilliard has the power to do through eminent domain even if Donatos is unwilling to sell, but the cost would have been much greater. I think this is an incredibly short-sighted decision on the part of the City's leadership. Once built, these double-roundabouts are apt to be a nightmare long after they leave office (although, we no longer have term limits in Hilliard!)

The pedestrian concerns could have been easily solved as well. At many roundabouts in the UK, pedestrian crossings are built underground (they call them 'subways'), allowing pedestrians to get from one side of the roundabout to the other without crossing vehicular traffic at all. I understand that our neighbors to the north, the City of Dublin, has implemented a number of these underground crossing for precisely this reason.

And on this point about money, please understand that articles you may read in the papers about the City of Hilliard and Hilliard City Schools arguing about money is simply this: there is a significant cost associated with this project, and the City of Hilliard wants to minimize its expenditure, and the less they have to spend on school stuff, the better it is for them. The City of Hilliard is getting a good chunk of money from the US Government to underwrite some of the cost, but not all.

The rest has to come from local taxpayers, either via the City through income taxes (paid by people who work in the City), or via the School District through property taxes (paid by everyone who owns property in the School District). Both entities want to preserve their tax revenue for other purposes, and get the other entity to pay for as much as possible.

Most of those costs have to do with the construction of the actual roundabouts. Other sizable amounts have to do with the changes that will have to be made to Hilliard City School facilities to accommodate and replace the property features that will be lost (e.g. the parking lot in front of Hilliard Station 6^th Grade School). The conversations going on between the City and the School District have to do with how much those costs will be, and who should bear the cost.

It's just a negotiation, which is always a mixture of motivation and opinion – and sometimes a little emotion.
On Thursday, April 29, at 7pm in the Central Office Annex, you are invited to one of our Community Conversations to hear from and ask questions of representatives of all the municipal jurisdictions affecting our school district (Hilliard, Columbus, Dublin, and Franklin County). If you have questions or concerns about these roundabouts and other development plans in our community, this is a great opportunity to have them addressed.

Win-Win: Decision Time

The Columbus Dispatch recently ran a story reminding us that the so-called Win Win Agreement between Columbus City Schools and most of the suburban school districts is coming up for its sexennial renewal this Spring.

I have discussed the Win Win Agreement at length in prior blog articles, so will distill it to simply this:

In exchange for the sharing of property tax revenues, Columbus City Schools agrees not to petition the State Board of Education to align the boundaries of Columbus City Schools to those of the City of Columbus.

In other words, without the Win Win Agreement, Columbus City Schools might petition the State Board of Education, the entity which sets school boundaries, to transfer some or all of the homes and commercial properties in the Hilliard School District that lie within the borders of the City of Columbus to Columbus City Schools. Apparently the belief among suburban school leaders is that the inclination of the State Board of Education to grant such a petition is sufficiently high to take the threat seriously.

Remember that these parcels have always been in the Hilliard School District. These parcels used to be part of various townships, mostly Norwich, but were annexed into the City of Columbus in the late 1970s and early 1980s by developers in order to gain access to water and sewer services. It caught both the developers and new homeowners by surprise when in the early 1980s, Columbus City Schools began threatening to petition the State Board of Education to realign its district boundaries with the Columbus municipal boundaries, as had been the custom in prior years. The developers thought their booming new homebuilding market was going to dry up, and folks who had already built homes in suburban school districts were horrified that their kids might be shifted to Columbus City Schools. I know. As one of the original homeowners in Golfview Woods, my wife and I were right in the middle of the battlefield.

Lawsuits, politics and general ugliness ensued – to the point that the Ohio General Assembly passed a law enacting a moratorium between the parties until a deal could be worked out. That deal is the Win Win Agreement, first signed in 1986, and up for renewal every six years. In the prior renewal years, all parties have continued their participation, except for Reynoldsburg. According to the Dispatch story, Groveport-Madison is giving consideration to not renewing its participation this year.

So where does that put the Hilliard Schools community today, twenty-four years later? Should we renew or not?

First, let's be clear what parcels we're talking about. The Win Win Agreement contains exhibits that spell out with precision the boundaries of the area that Columbus City Schools agrees will be left in the suburban districts. In the case of Hilliard City Schools, this represents roughly the large swath of land between I-270 and the Scioto River, and another couple of large hunks on the southern border of the district.

These areas include neighborhoods such as Golfview Woods, Highpoint, Westbrooke Park, Crosscreek Village, Thornapple Grove, Saddlebrook, Hilliard Green, Western Lakes, Scioto Trace, The Glen, River Place, and Bayside Commons Apartments.

It also includes substantial commercial properties, such as the Boehringer-Ingelheim-Roxanne Labs facility, the shopping centers on Hilliard-Rome Rd at Trabue/Renner, and the Buckeye railroad yard.

One way to make this decision is to look at the pure economics of the Win-Win Agreement today. According to data from our district's Finance and Operations departments, we currently have a few more than 7,000 kids in our school district who reside in the City of Columbus – about 46% of our student population. If it costs $11,000/yr to educate each of these kids, then the total cost to our district is $77 million.

The total amount of property tax we collect from residential, agricultural, commercial and industrial properties in the City of Columbus is $53 million/yr, or $24 million/yr less than it costs us to educate those kids. The $1 million/year in revenue sharing (I prefer to call it a ransom) we must pay to Columbus City Schools under the Agreement just adds to the spread – making the total economic impact about $25 million/yr.

Therefore, one way to look at this is that this $25 million/yr is the added cost all of us in the school district bear to keep these Columbus neighborhoods part of our school community. Realizing that $25 million is 16% of our total operating budget, this is a significant number.

So does that mean that if we bail out of the Win Win Agreement, we can save $25 million/yr and shed 7,000 kids from our school district?

Not exactly.

First of all, even if that were true, we're not talking about 7,000 kids in abstraction here. These are our neighbors and friends - people who are every much as part of the Hilliard Schools community as the rest of us. They have paid the same property taxes, voted on the same levies (and for the same school board candidates!), been part of the PTOs and worked the concession stands during competitions. They aren't they, they are us!

Secondly, our state funding is based almost entirely on the number of kids we have enrolled in our school district. While it is true that the Transitional Aid Guarantee has kept our funding relatively constant as the number of kids has grown (another long conversation), and presumably works the same way if there is a decrease in the number of students, the wholesale transfer of 7,000 kids from one school district to another is bound to cause the State to reallocate funding from Hilliard Schools to Columbus Schools, even if it requires special legislation. The net is that we would not gain the full $25 million/yr. I could see our State funding of $60 million/yr cut in half, making this choice generate a net loss for our district!

But here's the factor that, I think, makes our continued participation in the Win-Win Agreement a no-brainer: as Treasurer Brian Wilson pointed out to me, it's not an all-or-nothing deal for Columbus City Schools. They could theoretically petition to have only the commercial, industrial, and high-value residential property reassigned to Columbus City Schools. The outcome could be that Hilliard Schools keeps nearly all of the 7,000 kids and loses most of the revenue.

That would be an unmitigated disaster.

This is a complex, multi-dimensional question. In addition to the recommendations of the Administration, I'm hoping the smart folks on the Audit & Accountability Committee will take on the challenge of examining the situation, and giving their advice to the School Board as well.

And certainly, the thoughts, analysis and opinions of fellow community members are much appreciated!

Nichter: Resignation

Dan Nichter has resigned from Hilliard City Council after being indicted by a Franklin County Grand jury for passing bad checks.

I hope this brings an end to the saga of Mr. Nichter in the Hilliard community.

Now the question is who will be appointed to fill his seat on the City Council? Will it be another developer-friendly politician, or will the Council seek someone who will strive to do what is best for the greater Hilliard community?

I'm hoping the next Council member will be a stronger supporter of the Big Darby Accord than the Mayor and other Council members have been. Saying you support the Accord is different than actually abiding by the Accord principles.

And I hope the new Council member believes that a strong Hilliard community means a strong, healthy and cooperative relationship between the City of Hilliard and Hilliard City Schools.

Time for eTextbooks?

This week I cancelled our subscription to The Columbus Dispatch. For whatever reason, the publishers of the Dispatch decided it was time to increase the annual subscription rate for 7-day home delivery from $181 to $337, up 86%. Frankly, I didn't even take the time to consider whether the Dispatch is actually worth $337 per year to me. The size of the increase was insulting.

The truth is that I'm a bit curious why the publishers of the Dispatch felt they needed to raise subscription prices so aggressively.

To an outsider, the business of a newspaper seems pretty straightforward. You get revenue from subscriptions, retail purchases, and advertisements. The costs include the editorial staff, subscriptions to national and international news feeds (e.g. Associated Press, comics), and the printing and distribution operation. I'm sure there's more detail when you peel the onion, but these seem like the major components. As long as revenue exceeds cost, and appropriate profit* is generated, all is well.

So what has changed to warrant such a large price increase?

I sense that the newspaper industry is going through the same gut-wrenching changes that blew up the music industry a few years ago. The music industry actually thought they were in the record business, and that their role was the manufacturing, distribution, and retail sale of plastic disks – first vinyl records, then CDs. Indeed, it was all but impossible for an artist to make it big without having a deal with one of the few record companies who had made the substantial investments required to manufacture, distribute and retail those plastic disks.

Then came the Internet. Suddenly the artist could be directly connected to the consumer. The record companies panicked. If the artists no longer needed their manufacturing and distribution networks, what role would the record companies have going forward? The more innovative record companies began to realize that they were in the music business, not the record business. Artists could benefit from the branding and promotion a music label can provide, and consumers could benefit from there being music labels that seek out new artists and package their material. The distribution and retailing of music has largely been ceded to companies like Apple, with iTunes, and Wal-Mart – companies that had virtually no presence in the music industry a decade ago. The major pain of reconfiguration is over, and we again have a viable music industry.

So what does all this have to do with schools?

I've spent a lot of space in this blog talking about the cost of personnel. It is, and will always be, the major cost associated with running a public school district, consuming nearly 90% of our operating budget. But guess what comes high on the list after that?

Textbooks.

Just before the opening of Bradley, I had a chance, thanks to Principal Dave Stewart, to walk around the building with my brother-in-law, who is a public school Superintendent. When we came to the library, all the tables were piled high with textbooks. He made the comment that he wished they could figure out how to attack the cost of textbooks, because it was the primary non-staff cost in his district. That had never occurred to me before.

It seems like the answer is obvious: technology. Just as Apple has been successful establishing iTunes coupled with the iPod as the way music is distributed and listened to, Amazon is hoping to make their Kindle the way 'books' are read. The Kindle still needs to go through some evolution, as did the iPod, but they're on to something. Wouldn't it just have to be cheaper to give a kid a Kindle when they're in the 1^st grade, and then simply load it each year with the textbooks required for that year's study?

Not necessarily.

A Kindle isn't cheap: today's retail price is $259. To equip every kid in our school district with a Kindle would cost nearly $4 million at that price. Presumably, we could negotiate a substantial discount for buying thousands of devices, but still we're talking millions of dollars.

Then there are the operational realities to think about. How often will they get broken, lost and stolen? What happens when a kid graduates, moves away, or drops out? Is that Kindle recycled to an incoming student? How much will it cost to get the 'ick' off of it?

Maybe we should just say that each kid has to come to school with his own Kindle, just like we have always expected kids to come equipped with pencils, paper and notebooks. It might make sense if we can show parents they'll save the cost of the Kindle or more in property taxes over time. This approach causes the responsibility to care for the device to be fully placed on the parents. However, we would also have to solve the problem of getting devices in the hands of kids whose families cannot afford to buy one.

Is that the end of the story? Of course not – we haven't addressed the cost of the intellectual material inside the textbook, or the cost of marketing the textbook to school districts.

The New York Times recently published a story on this topic. While the subject is retail books rather than school textbooks, the issues are similar. I thought the comments of author Anne Rice were particularly interesting – she had no idea who was making how much profit in this food chain. That probably means she has been leaving money on the table, but then I suspect she is more than satisfied with what she has been paid for writing a couple of successful books. Unpublished authors and would-be actors probably get paid about the same: whatever they pick up in tips waiting tables.

My brother-in-law says that in their school district, they're dialing back the technology in their quest for a viable e-textbook, using standard personal computers and the internet to access material. This presents some of the same problems as a Kindle approach, in that not every kid will have sufficient access to a computer to complete their assigned workload. Nor can you carry a personal computer around quite as easily as you can a Kindle. But this garners them some experience in an e-textbook environment.

The engineer in me wants to say that replacing hardbound textbooks with something like a Kindle is the obvious, elegant solution, and we should just make it happen in our school district as soon as possible, letting the economics sort themselves out later.

The business side of me says, no, the only reason to make the shift to e-textbooks is if the economics are so compelling that all those operational realities I've mentioned – and those we haven't thought of yet – can be handled and we still save money vs paper textbooks.

I think the way to reconcile these two perspectives is to ask our instructional technology team to design a trial that tests the feasibility of using both Kindles and online e-textbooks. It's worth the effort to understand these things now so we can shift gears when the technology and economics are better aligned.

NOTE: apparently some of our lawmakers believe the time is now for e-books at the college level. See this story in The Columbus Dispatch.

* I mean "appropriate profit" as seen in the eyes of the owners of the paper. In other words, sufficient economic incentive to continue to operate the business. How much profit that requires is their decision alone, however, the owners of any business have to figure out if its customers are willing to pay the price necessary to support the owners' desired level of profit. This price increase will give the Wolfe family, the owners of the Dispatch, some clear feedback in that regard.