Performance isn't policy

The City Council had questions; they just didn't know what

I’m careful about what I write about behind-the-scenes details. Knowing those details helps me understand and explain some public issues better, but expressing many of the details themselves would mean I don’t hear them any more.

That said, the events leading to tonight’s City Council meeting show a lack of coherence, comprehension, and cohesion that’s frightening in a public body voting on a multi-million dollar budget.

It began some weeks back, when council member Chris Jones asked that School Superintendent Michael Richards come to a council meeting to answer questions about the budget. The questions revolved around how to deal with the General Assembly’s failure to pass a state budget.

For those not following, the GA delayed their budget until after the primary where many of them face opposition. The primary election was more important to them. Local school systems will not know how much money they’re getting until after legislators know if they’ve been renominated.

Jones did not couch the invitation to Richards as needing information. He couched it as “him taking away from us,” with those pronouns referring to Richards taking money away from projects that council members could control and take credit for. Richards is not taking money away from Jones or from the city when he and the School Board request funding to educate the city’s children.

Jones changed his tune after a DUI arrest, and announced at an ensuing council meeting that he no longer needed to question Richards. Whether there is a connection between the public embarrassment of the arrest and Jones’s change of heart is unknown.

Even though Jones no long wanted to grill Richards, council member Laura Dent said that council member Dany Fleming had questions for Richards which she said she did not understand well enough to articulate. Fleming was not at that earlier meeting, so Richards’s scheduled visit to council’s 5/23 meeting remained intact.

Rumors began building before the meeting about what council planned to do to the school budget. One was that they planned to cut teacher pay. Another was that it was actually a School Board meeting. A source inside City Hall encouraged teachers and school officials to show up at the meeting in force.

At the meeting itself, there were few questions about the budget, and it was unclear why Richards needed to be there. Jones asked about educational outcomes for black and brown students, an important topic but one that can hardly be addressed through council’s action on the budget. By state law and state constitution, the council can vote only on broad categories, which include instruction, administration, transportation, food service, and others. Council has no control, by law, over the issues Jones addressed or over any but the most broad details of the school budget and operations.

Council member Monica Robinson addressed the issue of whether parents were fully aware of their options as far as their children taking algebra and following it up with geometry. This is not a budgetary issue. She later made a speech about educational outcomes and discipline for minority students. Again, not a budget issue.

And if Dent didn’t know what questions Fleming wanted to ask, apparently neither did he. He did speak about the city’s level of financial stress, and repeated some of his previous comments comparing city tax rates, but had little to say or ask about the budget for Harrisonburg City Public Schools.

Dent did have questions about the budget. The instruction category, which covers teacher pay and other classroom expenses, is the largest part of the school budget. The school budget is the largest part, by far, of the city budget. In her third year of approving these multi-million dollar spending plans, Dent asked what the instruction category is.

There was no need for Richards to be at the meeting. There was no need for other school officials to be there. That’s not trivial. The energy, effort, time, and opportunity cost that go into preparing for a presentation to City Council are finite resources that should be going into running the school system. The amount of preparation is even greater when the presenters have no real idea what it is the council members want to know.

The teachers who were encouraged to be there have to give SOL tests tomorrow. The School Board chair could have been home with her husband. That would be me. Judge me.

Tonight’s budget discussion could be dismissed as posturing or as theatre. But it comes at a cost. It costs time, it costs money, and it adds a layer of stress for educators. There are behavioral issues in the schools arising from two lost years of socialization. The people in those schools have enough stress without being subjected to performative City Council meetings.

It is possible that some council members originally planned to propose a cut to the school budget but backed off when opposition began to grow before the meeting. But that’s speculation, and may be an attempt on my part to inject coherence into the process. What’s not speculation is that City Council members wasted a lot of people’s time, including their own. One hopes they realize that, and that it will inform their future actions. One also hopes that council members don’t think they accomplished anything tonight. That would be the greater waste.