By Bethany Kohoutek

Nancy Stillians' posture seems to be lifted from a different era. The 76-year-old woman sits upright and motionless, her spine straight and pressed into the chair back, her shoulders squared, chin high. Her gray hair is swept gracefully into a rounded ponytail; a mass of unruly, silvery curls loop atop her head. Her subtle makeup compliments features that belie her years - a broad face, pale green, translucent eyes, prominent cheekbones, and eyebrows that seem perennially arched upward, exuding a countenance that could be interpreted as, depending on the situation, amusement, incredulity or skepticism.

Today, her set jawline indicates the latter of the three. Since last August, Stillians and several members of Save Our Schools, or SOS, the group she helped form to oppose actions by the Des Moines Public Schools Board of Education, have been working on two legal cases against the board. This afternoon, they will learn that one of those cases has failed. The SOS faithful line the back of the small meeting room on the second floor of the Grimes State Office Building, a nondescript state government structure behind the Capitol in downtown Des Moines.

A KCCI Channel 8 cameraman sets up his tripod three feet from Stillians' chair, tilts his videocamera downward and zooms in on her face. It's a face that some will recognize on the evening news as that of a tireless community activist, a crusader who keeps public corruption in check. (She was featured as one of Cityview's "People Making a Difference" last year.) Others, though, will likely see her on the television and roll their eyes. Or sigh. For to many, Nancy - or "Nan" - Stillians and SOS stand as a thorn in the side of progress for the school district, and the city at large.

The case, in which SOS claims the board did not adequately involve the public in its decision to shutter several schools, generates scant discussion among State Board of Education members. Half-an-hour after the proceedings began, the verdict comes in. All in favor? A chorus of "yay"s. All opposed? Silence. It's a unanimous decision against SOS, and in favor of the Des Moines School Board. Stillians presses her lips together, then purses them out. She gathers her papers and strides out of the room, ringed by her SOS compatriots. The KCCI cameraman is setting up his equipment in the lobby, and another reporter approaches key players as they stream into the lobby. Stillians and her team bypass them and take the first elevator down.

This defeat, to some, calls into question SOS' effectiveness and focus. Particularly, it gives fodder to certain Des Moines school officials and Board of Ed members, who've long claimed that SOS' arguments are baseless, and their tactics unproductive. The past year - which has seen board meetings devolve into shouting matches with SOS, angry emails and name-calling on both sides - has shown that there's no love lost between SOS and the district's elected leaders, with both groups claiming to know what's best for Des Moines' 30,000 public school children.

One thing is certain, however. If SOS' detractors had hoped today's defeat would get these seemingly indefatigable activists off their backs for awhile, they're mistaken. True to character, as Stillians exits the Grimes building into an unseasonably cold May day, she is already plotting the next step and strategizing a potential appeal.

"I think the decision revived energy, cleared one deck and helped us refocus attention," she says later, adding that winning legal battles is certainly "necessary," but is not the "linchpin in any victory over oppressive odds."

Talk to Nan Stillians for an hour, and you'll likely become convinced that the Des Moines public school system, as it stands, is headed to hell in a Pokemon lunchbox. You may also very well wind up confused. The initial controversy that spurred the formation of Save Our Schools has burgeoned and tentacled into literally hundreds of auxiliary issues that have taken on political lives of their own - from SOS' determination to expose scandal behind the district's singular interest in the Pappajohn Education Center, to the group's impact on the search for a new superintendent.
By most accounts, the brouhaha began in 1999, when the district realized it had a city chock-full of schools in serious need of repair. Pointing to crumbling infrastructure, outdated electrical and heating systems, and other miscellaneous wear-and-tear troubles, Des Moines school officials lobbied heavily for a 1-cent local option sales and services tax (LOSST). The resulting revenues, they said, would fund a massive, 10-year construction agenda, dubbed the "Schools First" project. Voters approved the tax increase in 1999, and the district hired local contractor Taylor Ohde Kitchell as its project manager, then appointed an oversight commission to ensure the monies were being spent properly.

The problem was, the LOSST revenue didn't exactly roll in, as the district had hoped. Student enrollment in the district was slumping, and, along with the rest of the country, Des Moines suffered through a post-9/11 economic recession. As a result, the long list of schools on the docket for repair far exceeded the amount of money available to patch them up, school board officials said. Taylor Ohde Kitchell, with the backing of administrators and the Board of Education, began to revise the 10-year plan.

One of those revisions was dramatic. Rather than merely mending creaky schools - as the original Schools First agenda had specified - the district announced last May that it would completely close, relocate or merge five schools: Moore, Edmunds, Cowles, Adams and Central Campus.

Perhaps just as dramatic, however, was the way in which most of the district heard the news: On the Friday before Memorial Day, students at the fated schools were sent home with notes in their backpacks informing parents of the closures. School staff and parents were stunned; although the school board had alluded vaguely to the possibility of closures at undisclosed schools, there had been no specific prior warning for the pupils and parents at the five schools.

An ad-hoc group of parents and community members immediately convened a series of protest meetings. These gatherings were intense and emotional; parents felt blindsided and accused the district of playing favorites, of abandoning small and low-income neighborhood schools in favor of new construction.

This group eventually solidified into Save Our Schools, and later obtained legal status as a nonprofit. Nan Stillians became the group's coordinator, and soon emerged as the most visible figure in the campaign.

"These were people who were upset for a variety of reasons and who, for the most part, did not know one another," says Marc Wallace, an attorney and a founding member of SOS, whose children attend Cowles. "From the first meeting in June, the board leadership treated us with disdain and treated us as one, although we had all turned out for the meeting individually and independently. It was not orchestrated and calculated, but some of us saw the need to collaborate with each other to get anything done at all.
"People were powerfully angry. We have attempted to calm, channel and direct that anger into something positive."

Two months after its first meetings, SOS filed a pair of legal actions against the Des Moines School Board. The first was the one that failed last Thursday in the Grimes State Office Building, when State Board of Ed members sided with the Des Moines School Board.

In this particular case, SOS had accused the Des Moines School Board of failing to adequately involve the public during the buildup to what SOS dubbed "the Memorial Weekend Bombshell" - the school closure announcements. But a judge for the state opined that while the Des Moines School Board might be guilty of "public relations and political" problems, it didn't break the law.

Still pending is a separate lawsuit that SOS filed in Polk County District Court, alleging that the board reallocated LOSST funding without voter approval. Essentially, SOS maintains that the district cannot change its school construction plans without first getting the go-ahead from taxpayers. One of the group's main beefs here was the purchase and massive renovation of the Central Kitchen, the old Colonial Bread building that the board opted to purchase in order to streamline food preparation district-wide. SOS gathered extensive documentation claiming that the then-outmoded building was a money pit, and would siphon valuable LOSST dollars from existing neighborhood schools.

"The magnitude of departures from the 10-year plan literally boggle the mind," wrote SOS legal team member Nelda Mickle, a former Des Moines city attorney who has grandkids at Edmunds Elementary, in a March SOS newsletter. "It is not an exaggeration to say the deviations from the approved [local option sales tax] language exist in amounts of many millions of dollars."

For their part, the Board of Education and administration are unflagging in their faith in the Schools First project. In his State of the Schools speech last fall, outgoing Superintendent Eric Witherspoon called Schools First a "terrific success story" and an "awesome investment." And he didn't pass up the chance to toss a barb at SOS: "Don't let the controversy over the necessary changes to our Schools First plan obscure the facts about our school construction record... Every project on time, on budget."

SOS is a tricky group to classify. According to Stillians, there are 81 "insider members," or anonymous members employed by the school district, who don't want their names revealed for fear of retaliation.

Wallace believes this is one of the group's strengths - "sharing information and the developing network of contacts within the DMPS [Des Moines Public Schools] who want change, but who are unable to speak for a variety of reasons."

However, it also pushes many of SOS' operations "underground," as Stillians puts it. Citing anonymity concerns, SOS communicates primarily through e-mails, which are legion. Stillians has become known, among both friends and foes, for the sheer volume of e-mails she pumps out each day ("I get more emails from Nan than I do from Viagra," one source told Cityview.) Stillians says 600 people are signed up to receive these missives, including one group classified as "Media Intelligentsia," which includes Cityview and other local news outlets.

SOS also religiously documents nearly every move the school board makes. It maintains an exhaustive archive of newspaper clippings and recorded TV segments, audio and videotapes of board meetings, and binders full of information about the Schools First construction contracts.

While many other visible members of SOS have outside jobs (they are practicing or retired attorneys, real estate agents, former teachers or one-time media personalities), Save Our Schools amounts to a full-time, unpaid post for Stillians, a retired public-school teacher and university professor, who has no children of her own. With a triple major from Drake University, a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University in New York City and additional coursework at the University of Hawaii and the University of Iowa, Stillians is an extremely educated woman. For eight years, she served as programs director for the Iowa State Arts Council. Now, technically retired, her resume categorizes her current employment as "Research & advocacy: educational, community,
environmental groups."

Her vitae also chronicles her participation in no fewer than 12 local activism groups, although she got her first taste of community activism while she was living in Hawaii in 1969. Ralph Nader's "Nader's Raiders" came to town and conducted a workshop on grassroots organizing, and Stillians was hooked.

In short, if Nan Stillians is on your side, you have one of the city's most passionate and relentless soldiers batting for you; the woman has taken on some of the heaviest hitters in Des Moines, from the Greater Des Moines Partnership to downtown developers. If you're in her crosshairs, though, you'll likely see her in your dreams, as well as your inbox, your voicemail and at your meetings.

In addition to their frequency and verbosity, Stillians' e-mails are eloquent. In writing and in speech, she employs words like "skullduggery," "cockemamy," "chistlers" and "sycophants" - a delightful exercise in a bygone era of the English language, unless you happen to be the target of the invective. Such adjectives haven't exactly endeared Stillians, or SOS, to school board members and district administrators like Eric Witherspoon and Facility Management Director Duane Von Hemert, the point man on the Schools First construction project.

School Board President Phil Roeder points to Stillians' sometimes-incendiary e-mails, as well as other SOS tactics, as examples that group is no more than a "name-calling" campaign. He says communication between the board and SOS has never existed in any significant form, and he doesn't expect that to change.

"That type of tone, that type of accusation is ineffective, no matter who you're talking to," he says. "If they want to be effective in the process, they're going to have go through some wholesale changes and figure out a way to work with people, even if they do disagree with them.

"I think a lot of the ineffectiveness comes from being so clouded by seeing a conspiracy behind everything that they think they disagree with. When you start from that vantage point - that the people you disagree with are unethical, corrupt, criminal, all of this - your voice just becomes meaningless. They personalize and attack so many people that I think most people have since tuned it out."

Marc Ward agrees. As the only school board member who was also on the board when the local option sales tax passed in 1999, he defends the Schools First project - and the controversial changes being made to it. He also says the school board is willing to negotiate with parties that agree to civil discourse.

"They say we don't listen... but we do listen - to reasonable arguments," Ward says, adding that when Howe Elementary was on the gangplank for closure, "neighbors and parents came to us with very good reasons why we should not close the school. We listened and agreed with them." In the case of Edmunds Elementary, he continues, parents convinced the board to amend its stance and delay closure for a year.

"So we made changes in the construction plans to meet those concerns... You can't anticipate exactly what is going to happen. That will require you to be prudent, smart public officials and make changes when those things arise. That is exactly what we did: We came up with better ideas. It all goes back to [SOS'] view of the world - 1955 forever."
SOS and the school board also openly accuse one another of wasting taxpayer money. Roeder says the money spent to fight SOS' legal actions - $48,000 so far, according to the district's business office - is a drain on an already budget-challenged district. Stillians retorts that the entire "Schools First construction scam" has robbed Des Moines schools of $78 million over the past five years in order to fund frivolous and biased projects.
Although Graham Gillette, a former school board member, admits he agrees with SOS' arguments more often than not, he says the current impasse in communication between SOS and the board is detrimental to everyone involved. Elected district officials, he adds, shouldn't be so quick to write off SOS' concerns, some of which have merit.
"Their complaints about [infrastructure problems at] the Central Kitchen have been proven valid time and time again..." he says. "Nan and a lot of those folks can be difficult to deal with. I can say that because I've been difficult to deal with from time to time, but it doesn't mean you should write them off."

(District officials disagree. They maintain the $11.4 million spent to remodel the Central Kitchen was a wise venture. "The purchase of the Colonial Bakery building for use as a Central Kitchen facility was a sound investment and has begun to show dividends in several ways..." Van Hemert says. "The building was totally renovated and other than the exterior, it does not even resemble its previous use.")

At the very least, Gillette believes SOS' dogged pursuit of school board transparency and accountability is healthy for the district, and, especially for the board itself.

"I've spent many hours talking to Nan. She is a passionate person. Does she go off on tangents sometimes? Yes. Does her message get muddled in the way she delivers it? Absolutely. But I think it's shortsighted of the district to discount Nan and any of those other folks as a band of crazies, because they might be right sometimes. If you want them to stop showing up at meetings, at some point, you have to take where they are right and join arms with them, and disagree when you don't."

At Cafè Barata's, overlooking downtown from the top of the State Historical Building, several members of Save Our Schools are meeting to devise a response to the State Board of Education's ruling, and map the agenda for the year ahead. In a month, the group will turn one year old. They face the same challenges as many small nonprofits and community groups; chief among them are fundraising and public outreach.

Despite the setbacks of the last year - a disappointing legal appeal; a failed attempt to change the way school board members are elected; and seeing a candidate many SOS members supported lose his bid at a board position - Wallace says the group has effected noticeable and positive change against daunting odds.

"I certainly do not agree that the various efforts to bring attention to the board have been ineffective," he says. "Board membership has begun to spread beyond the confines of one neighborhood," and the board's recent efforts to increase public involvement are a direct result of SOS pressure, he believes.

"Getting the board to abide by the plan set out with the Schools First ballot initiative is a big step..."

As for Stillians, who says her opthamologist recently warned her that if she continued to spend up to 10 hours a day in front of a computer screen, she'd be at risk for cataracts, she shows no sign of slowing. True to form, she characterizes SOS a different way: "Such a reform-oriented network working against a huge, powerful, manipulative regime is not the same as some charitable organization where membership is a social feather in one's cap and activities are convivial and upscale..." she says. "From the beginning, we have been in an unequal struggle. We are like the founding fathers revolting against a tyrannical force, or the Boston Tea Partyers." CV

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