Improving Efficiency & Streamlining New Trier Township School Districts

This past week, the Rose Friedman Society women met to discuss a report on School Districts Consolidation in the New Trier Township. After an insightful discussion, we decided to launch a project to paint a picture of what streamlined districts could look like based on best practices and to build a case that will engage all residents. Rollup your sleeves and join the District Streamlining team – simply post a comment at the bottom of this post.

We were about 23 women from Northfield, Glenview, Wilmette, Winnetka, and even from Oakbrook to discuss this topic . As always, the discussion was informative, positive, and thoughtful. We challenged ourselves to look at this issue through the lenses of running a business:  how would we go about building the case and planning the merger of 7 organizations, 136 state employees costing $12 million? That’s a medium size business.

The roundtable discussion model highlighted the deep expertise and experience of the women participating. We discussed the impact of streamlining school districts from the perspective of real estate/property value, winners and losers in mergers, teachers, principals, parents, retirees and residents who are empty nesters.

First here’s the Illinois Policy Institute full report . Look at page 11 for the New Trier Case Study, and then review at Appendix A and B for a full list of salaries of district employees i.e. titles and salaries of people not working in a classroom or a school.

Everyone agreed that streamlining school districts will not be done successfully and happily if it is pushed down on us by state legislators as proposed as a path to implementation.

Some key points that were brought up:

1. Build the case: we need to define the scope of responsibilities of school districts and the cost to all tax payers. For instance, Kenilworth may think that they function as a private school, when the pensions of their administrators is in fact paid by tax payers in Palos Hills.
2. Paint the picture of the future: we need to involve women in our community who have expertise in Organizational Design to help define what an integrated and streamlined district administration could look like and if there would be actual savings — not just in salaries but primarily in pensions payments.  Superintendents salaries vary between $200-340K; the pension payout to each superintendent is around $5 to $6 million during the course of their retirement years.  The average administrator salary is around $60,000, again we need to think of pension payments. The numbers are small, 136 employees, 7 schools – a district administration redesign should save in management efficiencies, but that needs to be verified.
3. Define the stakeholders and the constituencies: in every merger there are winners and losers, we need to understand the impact of streamlining on the administrative staff and what it will mean to them, as well as who is affected by a district level merger.  Other constituencies such as teachers union contract may be affected. We suspect that unions would actually be in favor of administrative streamlining.  There are also various constituencies in our township: young families, empty nesters, retirees each who may have a different perspective.
4. Show success elsewhere:  present how district streamlining has been done successfully in other states such as Fairfax, VA, or in Florida and that reducing the administrative cost burden has a positive impact on the individual schools.
5. Find Allies: principals are likely to be ally as they want more independence and funds for their schools instead of administration, residents who want to see management efficiencies, empty nesters who want to maintain school quality (which impact property value) but want their tax dollars to go to the classrooms.
6. Messaging: there was some confusion about the impact on the schools. We need to stress the fact that currently only  25% of our tax dollars go to the classrooms. Streamlining will only impact district administrators not individual schools.  Also the message needs to be focused on positive outcomes  and take into account all constituencies.
   • Curriculum alignment for students;
   • Empower the principals to have more independance and lessen their administrative burden;
   • Incentivize the teachers – more money for the teachers to innovate in the classroom;
   • Savings in management efficiency (did you know that D39 full time plumbers are paid more than technology managers?);
   • Message should be: we love our teachers and we don’t want all of our money to go to administrators;
7. Survey the population – we would want to test residents reactions to the idea, identify their preoccupations and how to best message to them.

We ended the conversation on a very engaging note.  A project, for which people signed on to do some work:

1. Build the case & Paint the picture of a streamlined district – Ted Dabrowski can get the data, Molly Ervin volunteered to assemble a team of Organization Designer. To define the vision and plan the transition.
2. Find Allies – try to get a sense of who in the system may be supportive of streamlining.
3. Find Best Practices: Jasmine Hauser volunteered to get information on how Fairfax County schools merged: steps, outcomes, lessons learned.
4. Messaging: Annie Kaup, Lisa Finks and Ted Dabrowski would together work on a messaging strategy leveraging social media and constituency surveys.

We need some dates to get this done, with summer starting it will be challenging, but not impossible given the scope.  Who wants to be involved? Post a comment.