Looking at Board Behavior

Public schools superintendent Bill Gronseth’s annual salary is $168,000. The district is also paying him about $5,000 a year to get up to speed with his educational credentials. Few people are aware that the superintendent’s wife is also a district employee. She makes $66,853 annually as the district’s early childhood special education “Help Me Grow” coordinator. This couple’s combined annual benefit package is minimally in the range of $30,000. By June 30, 2017, when his current contract expires, Mr. Gronseth will have been superintendent for five years, four and a half months. He and his wife will have drawn about $1.5 million from ISD 709.
There are several pertinent points I’d like to make about this million-dollar expenditure (and the million dollar man), but I will confine myself to two. There is no question that Mr. Gronseth has fallen into a lush gig. Not that long ago, he was making a relatively modest living as an elementary school teacher, but has now managed to tap into a gusher of dollar bills raining down from heaven. Any person in such circumstances naturally has some incentive to get rid of someone else (say a curmudgeonly Board member) who keeps asking tough question about his or her job performance.
I would also like to point out that this power couple—the Gronseths—are not Duluth residents. They live in that wealthier little suburb called Hermantown. They have not paid a single penny of all the taxes raised by school district 709.
  

Merry Christmas from your board! The rest of us saw our taxes go up again this year, at the regular school board meeting: 12/16/14.

The first item of business of this meeting was the annual budget presentation during the tax certification process, by district Business Services Director Bill Hanson. Mr. Hanson dubs his yearly presentation “Truth in Taxation,” a phrase I think I recall from George Orwell’s 1984.
The bottom line for district taxpayers is that they will see an increase of 1.5 percent next year. Board members and administration fell all over themselves with pride that the increase was far below the 11 percent annual increases of the past few years. I don’t like tax increases any more than anyone else, but of course it is essential to pay for good schools.
There are a few things that annoy me, though, about the way the school board raises taxes: (1) The Board has been using its non-voter-approved taxing authority to nail us, year after year, for as long as I can remember. (2) I don’t like paying taxes if I suspect my government has been wasting money (read: Red Plan). Even the News Tribune had to stop ignoring the truth. The paper reported that much of the huge tax increases of recent years “were needed to help make long-term facilities plan debt payments.” The entire debt obligation of the 2009 Red Plan bond, which was originally being transferred out of the general fund, has now been moved to the tax base. (3) I really hate it when politicians try to play me like a rube. It is true that because of an expanded tax base in Duluth, a $150,000 home (provided it remains at exactly that valuation) is projected to see a $12.51 tax decrease despite the hike in district taxes.
But here’s some real truth in taxation: the people of Duluth are being denied the full benefit of their town’s prosperity. Their tax burden would drop even more if the school board hadn’t decided to take a half million more dollars a year from them.
?
And the million dollar man won’t pay one penny of that half million.
?
12/16/14 was a blustery evening. Duluth winter had reemerged from a preternatural December spring. Snow and a cold north wind meant considerable gumption had to be mustered to leave the comfort of home even for beer and pizza, much less the jejune ordeal of a school board meeting. I had to grab myself by the scruff of the neck and drag myself down to Old Central. Only a few other hardy souls trudged with me up the venerable old school’s marble steps.
The atmosphere in the auditorium that serves as the boardroom of ISD 709 was more subdued than many had anticipated, given all the Board strife of recent weeks. The relative quietude was partially due to Harry Welty, who was hoping for a Christmas miracle. Mr. Welty has been engaged in some backstage maneuvering, trying to head off the intense fight that is yet in the works if the Art Johnston melodrama proceeds. Part of the pre-negotiation agreement was a temporary truce for this meeting. Welty circulated a missive with a picture of a dove on it, asking speakers at the public podium to “stay away from commenting on feuding among school board members.”
A few anti-Johnston citizens had braved the chilly weather for one reason and one reason only, though: to step up to the podium and give him a piece of their minds. One said, “The superintendent is Mr. Johnston’s employee. How would it feel to have your boss shove you and speak angry words at you at a very public event?… Serving as a public official sets an example for all to follow… Board members following policies and procedures is essential, otherwise we may as well have a free-for-all.” Another said, “Member Johnston’s rude and bullying behavior, witnessed by me and others during Board meetings, has been unconscionable.”
Pro-Johnston supporters were largely a no-show at this meeting. These citizens may have backed off because of Welty’s request for one night of peace, or they were perhaps just bigger wussies when it came to the weather. I decided I had to disappoint Mr. Welty and keep some balance in the conversation. I walked up to the podium and spoke three minutes about the feud. I pointed out that Art Johnston had taken on the city’s political machine and won reelection. I said, “I truly saw his victory as a triumph of democracy. If Mr. Johnston is thrown off this Board, whoever replaces him will not be the fourth district representative. He or she will have no legitimacy.”
If you think facing a microphone and cameras and telling a roomful of people not particularly fond of you something they don’t want to hear is easy, try it sometime. My three-minute brush with leprous unpopularity was just a little taste of Art Johnston’s life.
?
Absolutely correct, but wrong.
?
We zipped through the Education Report, with our public officials dutifully setting an elevated example for us all to follow. As always, Education Committee chair Annie Harala regaled us with a lot of cheery, optimistic words. The only actionable item was a second reading of a new student transfer policy, which will now become law of the school land. The policy was enacted as one part of a multi-pronged strategy to eliminate overcrowding in some elementary schools, because of the inequities and demographic misjudgments of the overpriced boondoggle known as the Red Plan.
We soon sailed on to the HR Committee Report, where the Lone Ranger started giving the discussion a more interesting bent. He repeated a request he’s made several times to his fellow Board members, for some tougher standards applied to the annual evaluation of our million-dollar investment: “I would like to see more hard criteria when it comes to the continuous improvement plan, which the superintendent put forth and we accepted. Some of those things are: student enrollment, class size, achievement gap, and expulsion rates. I’d like to see all those referenced… in a future superintendent’s [job performance] review.”
That voice! Poor (actually, not exactly poor) Mr. Gronseth would do almost anything I think to get rid of that relentless, gravelly voice!!
The Board’s intrepid conscience of accountability never wavers. Somehow still giving a hoot (when his colleagues have already taken a huge step towards throwing him out), Member Johnston next looked at the teacher numbers: “We’ve increased 24 FTEs [full-time teacher equivalent positions] this year, which is absolutely fantastic. It’s something we’ve been looking for for a long time… but I do want to point out that we have a long way to go. This is a start, but we have to go further… [Again], we did gain 24 this year, but last year was the lowest number of FTE teachers that we’ve had, as least as far as I can go back—about 20-30 years. This increase [of 24] just brought us back to where we were a few years ago…”
“I hope this is a trend,” Chair Miernicki responded, trying to put his usual positive spin on things. “I hope this is something the Duluth school district can turn around and start moving upward.”
Superintendent Gronseth weighed in: “I would just like to remind you [Johnston] that we’d have to look at student/teacher ratios, and not just the number of teachers, because twenty years ago we had 25,000 students [20 years ago the number was actually under 15,000] and now we have 8,000. The number of teachers is going to be different, based on enrollment.”
“The superintendent is absolutely correct,” Member Johnston responded agreeably, his voice masking any hint of a double entendre. “I only have data going back twelve years, but the [student/teacher] ratio [also] went up from 13.4 to 14.6.”
After the meeting, I called Mr. Johnston to query him further about the numbers. He said he’d calculated 14.6 by dividing last year’s enrollment of 8,758 by the total FTE number of teachers, 600. I asked: if dividing enrollment by the number of teachers equals about 14 students, how come we have classes with more than forty?
He said it was a good question but he’s never been able to get enough information from administration to fully answer it. He pointed out that there are a significant number of teachers on payroll who don’t actually teach and that special ed classes also skew the overall picture, because those classes require fewer students per teacher.
“I wish I could give you a better answer, but I don’t know,” he said. “Of course the big disparity between the numbers may signal some mismanagement.”
?
Those darn numbers!
?
Anyone who thinks there is absolutely no connection between Mr. Johnston’s flinty, engineer’s obsession with the hard reality of numbers and the trouble he’s having with his happy-talk, pie-in-the-sky Board majority colleagues is delusional. During discussion of the Business Committee Report, Chair Miernicki sat with his hands cupped over his face for a long stretch of time while Johnston spoke, as though being forced to listen to the recounting of a grisly murder he could barely handle.
The Board’s lone ombudsman was undaunted. The first numbers he dissected this evening exposed some more Truth in Taxation. As the Board prepared to approve certification of the tax levy, he said, “I welcome a low 1.5 percent increase, but we do have to look at the history on this. This is the largest [total] tax levy we’ve had in the records I can go back through—about twenty years now. Back in 2001, which was the lowest we had, it was $8.1 million… We’re now up to $32.9 million… and that [money] hasn’t been going into the classroom. Since I’ve been on the Board—five years—we’ve averaged 20 percent a year increase.” He pointed out that Johnson Controls claimed the Red Plan would be done in a tax-neutral manner.
Mr. Gronseth protested: “…I know it wasn’t ever put down that [the Red Plan] was going to be tax neutral.”
Actually, in its project proposal, JCI did submit in written form that the revitalization of schools under the Red Plan would be done “both in a budget and tax-neutral manner.” The claim was of course a joke, but amazingly no one laughed at it.
The Lone Ranger next pulled some facts and figures from the latest district audit out of his saddlebag and forced Mr. Miernicki and company to listen to the very antithesis of happy talk: He pointed out that over his time on the Board, since 2010, the district has lost 700 students, its debt has soared as high as $28,000 per student (putting ISD 709 “in the top two or three districts in the state for debt service and construction costs”), and the reserve fund balance has slipped well below the required 10 percent of general fund expenditures.
Chair Miernicki, to his credit, restrained all audible groans!
Member Welty wondered if some of the money still lying around from the Red Plan could somehow be used in the classrooms, but no dice. Construction bond money can’t be used for operations, but operational money can be (and has been—millions, in fact) used by ISD 709 for construction. The remaining Red Plan bond money could however (but never will be) used for tax relief.
The Business Committee Report was approved 6-1, with Member Johnston voting against. During the final question/comment period, Judy Seliga-Punyko spoke a sentence best described as a declaration with claws: “We need to look at school board behavior. Whether it’s outside of the Board or in closed session, I do think it’s something we need to address because it is something that is concerning when we have… school board members that are misbehaving…”
“Ohhhh, I was hoping to end this on a positive note,” Chair Miernicki lamented.
“So was I,” Member Johnston agreed, glancing across the dais at member S.-P. “I certainly second what was just said by Seliga-Punyko. I think we’ve heard here many times that there is dissatisfaction towards us from the public… I’ve made requests for parliamentarians to come in, team builders—it’s always been rejected…”
This exchange did not bode well for the new year, but Mr. Miernicki’s positivity always bounces back, like a bobber to the surface. He simply would not be denied, especially right before Christmas: “I wish you all a blessed holiday season!” he announced in his deep voice, determinedly ending this evening on a happy note.

Loren Martell has been involved in Public School District issues for several years. He wrote the Red Plan report for the State Auditor’s Office and ran for the School Board office.