Re-opening of Red Cedar Elementary will be focus of a financial advisory committee study

The East Lansing Board of Education, in response to concerns about the uncertainty of costs associated with reopening Red Cedar Elementary School, has created a financial advisory committee to be made up of citizens with expertise in educational finances.

The creation of the Financial Advisory Committee was moved by Board member Karen Hoehne and seconded by Kath Edsall. It passed five to two, with Board members Hillary Henderson and Kate Powers voting against it.

Board member Erin Graham said she had discussed the creation of the Committee with Schools Superintendent Robyne Thompson last week in order to address concerns from the community and “take some of the weight off the shoulders” of the administration in terms of coming up with a financial plan for the school.

The makeup of the Committee will be decided by Board President Nell Kuhnmuench. The idea grew from a suggestion by Mike Conlin, a professor of economics at Michigan State University.

Dr. Conlin brought his concerns over school finances to the Board’s December meeting, telling its members they should not move forward with the reopening without an independent cost-benefit analysis. To do so would risk losing the voters’ trust and causing another bond election to fail.

“You can’t make numbers up. That’s the rule,” he said last month.

In December, the Board voted 5-2 to reopen Red Cedar Elementary School as a pre-kindergarten through fifth grade school focused on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) programming. While a study group suggested reopening the school for just pre-K in fall 2016 and putting off other grades until 2017, the full Board decided to move forward with reopening the entire school for this fall.

A number of residents continued to speak out against the reopening Monday night, including former board member Nathaniel Lake Jr., who stepped down last year.

“Ready. Fire. Aim. That is what this feels like to me,” Lake said. “Why are we adding an additional elementary school to East Lansing? That doesn’t make sense to me… We already had a decision to reconfigure our elementary schools. Now that is only two years in the making. Have we evaluated the process of how that is going? Was that taken into consideration? I ask you to slow it down and get more feedback.”

Mindy Morgan also emphasized the unnecessarily fast pace of the school reopening process. As a professor of anthropology, she told the Board it was her professional opinion that 239 days is not long enough to evaluate what the community wants, what is involved in a STEAM curriculum, and how the plans will be paid for. She also questioned where the students would come from to attend Red Cedar Elementary.

Red Cedar was closed in 2013 with most of the students and all of the staff transferred to Glencairn Elementary School. Morgan stated that the changes currently taking place at Michigan State University’s international and family housing programs will lead to a reduced number of children in the Red Cedar catchment district.

Resident Jeffery Lapinksi also questioned the need for more funding information and suggested the Board needs to move forward with only the pre-K programming for this fall.

“You should err on the side of doing well instead of being fast,” Lapinski said. “You need to look at the impact on the general fund and the district as a whole.”

One of the reasons for the rush was a belief by the Board that they had to re-open the building within three years in order to avoid more stringent fire codes. But on Monday, Kuhnmuench said that they were incorrect about that and the fire codes have more “flexibility” than they realized.

Mark Becker questioned the rationale for the rush and asked the Board to reconsider reopening by fall.

“How much would it cost to wait an additional year? How much would it cost to go slow and carefully instead of fast? What is the cost-benefit ratio of trying to avoid a fire code? What is the rationale for that?” Becker asked.

Other parents also questioned which students would be assigned to Red Cedar. Brian Loomis does not believe there are enough students to fill all the grades at Red Cedar.

“There are not enough students in Flowerpot or Spartan Village to make this viable. Parents can choose permeable boundaries or the Board will have to redistrict. We are seven months out with no principal, no curriculum and not much of a plan. I am not sure of one parent who would choose this option for their child. This leaves us with redistricting,” Loomis said. “How do you draw the boundaries? Which ones will be ripped out of their current buildings? …. You are shaking up the entire elementary school population with no idea how it affect our students.”

Board member Edsall stated that there has been no discussions on redistricting students.