By Brenda Fullick brenda@dmcityview.com

Angry Des Moines citizens use a petition to show how the school district is spending its money

Caleb Murray may be just 10 years old, but that's old enough to be righteously angry over the Des Moines School Board's plan to close Adams School on the city's East Side.

"I think it's stupid," Caleb says. "They say they're just going to close Adams and move our kids to Garton."

The school board doesn't care what families think, he says. "Adams is our neighborhood school. They just act like it means nothing to us. That's where all the kids in this neighborhood have gone, and their parents. And it's a really good school."

The board's decision to close Adams and four other neighborhood schools is turning Caleb into a young activist who's been going door-to-door with his mom Gayle and younger brother, Cobey. They've been circulating a petition that would let voters decide whether the school district should be forced to sell the Federal Home Loan Bank building downtown.

Petitioners argue that the district had no business buying the FHLB building when it didn't have enough money to fix up the neighborhood schools.

If all goes according to the school administration's plan, Caleb's class will be the last to graduate from the Adams elementary building. Caleb thinks it's wrong that other kids in his neighborhood would have to travel to a school in another part of town when Adams is a good building.

In fairness, Caleb has had a little help stoking his political fires: His parents have been involved in the ongoing legal actions to keep the neighborhood schools open. However, Caleb has also been known to push his mom to keep collecting petition signatures, even after she's been exhausted and wanted to call it a day. "He was like, 'We've got to keep going, Mom,'" Murray says.

The petition

Residents have been circulating a petition asking that the following question be placed on the Sept. 12 ballot:

"Shall the Des Moines Independent Community School District sell the property located at 907 Walnut St., formerly known as the Federal Home Loan Bank Building, and apply the proceeds of such sale to the uses originally approved by the voters of this school district in 1999 in voting for the approval of the special school infrastructure local option 1-cent sales tax?"

Voters approved the 1-cent local-option sales tax for school construction in 1999 because they were promised that the money would be used a certain way - specifically, that all of the existing schools would be repaired, says Laurance Tovrea, president of Tech High's Blue and Gold Alumni Association, which is active in the petition drive.

"The voters of Des Moines and the surround communities were sold a bill of goods," Tovrea says. He argues that the Des Moines School Board "went out and they purchased other items that were not in the plan, thereby lying to the citizens." The district claims to be saving $52 million by not repairing the five elementary schools and closing Central Campus, he says. Yet the district plans to spend an additional $52 million on a technical/vocational high school, a Pappajohn addition and other projects.

Murray has a DVD of the commercials that the district ran to pitch the sales tax to voters. "How it's been spent since then is very, very different," she says.

Voters had turned down school requests for more money twice before the sales tax was finally approved in 1999. Murray maintains the district's research showed that voters didn't want to write the district a blank check because they didn't trust that the money would be spent properly, and that's why the district came up with the specific 10-year plan to repair every school. When the district put the sales tax on the ballot in 1999, the ballot question made a specific reference to that 10-year renovation plan.

And now that plan is not being followed, with the argument that the district doesn't have enough money.

Tovrea suggests that the district is positioning itself as cash-strapped so it can ask for a renewal of the sales tax in 2009.

People who are circulating the petition contend that the school district had no business buying either the FHLB building or the Colonial Bread building.

The citizens needed to collect 3,441 signatures - 30 percent of the number of the district's residents who voted in the last regular election - and deliver them to the school district's secretary by June 28. They weren't sure if they could meet the deadline, but Murray thinks it's still a worthwhile undertaking. "Even if we don't get it on [the ballot], we are educating hundreds and hundreds of voters, and getting the word out," she says.

Fun with numbers

The board is spending $25 million between the FMHL building (now called the Walnut Street School because it housed kindergartners this year) and the controversial central kitchen in the old Colonial Bread building.

Originally, Superintendent Eric Witherspoon presented the FHLB building as a virtually free building, saying the purchase costs would be offset by rent payments from the businesses that would continue to use office space there. The Federal Home Loan Bank and National Byproducts wanted to keep offices open in that building.

However, those businesses' rent payments legally must go into the district's general fund, which means that money is spent out of one fund but returned to another, Tovrea says. The upshot is that "you don't have control of the money. Accountability goes out the window. The big thing I have a problem with is accountability. Nobody is being accountable for what they have done."

Tovrea argues that there should be an audit of all the sales tax money that's come in so far, and how it's been spent. "Nobody can keep track of the numbers - the absolute numbers - of spending at the district level," he says. And while the school board members say they're just following the administration's lead, the administration says it's following the school board's dictates.

One of the people gathering petition signatures is retired Tech High and Central teacher Jim Patch, who actually voted to buy the FHLB building when he was on the school board. At the time, he agreed with the argument that a second downtown elementary school was justified because the first one has a waiting list.

However, Patch says he changed his mind when the district started talking about school mergers and school closings. "I started to think about where all those kids [for a second downtown school] are going to come from."

The district projects that 12 to 20 percent of the students in the FHLB building will be children of commuters who are transferring in from suburban schools, since parents working downtown can be close to their kids, Patch says. The rest of the students - possibly 500 children - would be shifted from Des Moines neighborhood schools.
"It's more important to have neighborhood schools out where they are," Patch says now. There are some advantages to being downtown, he says, "but really, the smaller grade schools are better for kids."

Patch worries that a downtown school would be harder for both children and parents to get to, adding the frustrations of commuting and finding parking spaces. "Who's going to go down there for a neighborhood meeting? Who's going to want to go down there ... for their Cub Scout get-togethers and things like that?"
If the district is going to close neighborhood schools and put the children in a downtown school, Patch argues, the community should be allowed to make that decision.

Other agendas?

Graham Gillette remembers that when he was on the school board, Witherspoon said publicly that the FHLB would never be used for the administration's office space.
Yet just last week, the district announced plans to move its administrative offices there. Gillette thinks that had been the plan all along. He remembers when the district bought that building in the spring of 2002, and facilities manager Duane Van Hemert was leading the board on a tour of the building. "He stuck his head in and said, 'This'll make a nice new board room,' and he kind of chuckled."

Gillette doesn't understand why the district would spend the money to convert office space to classroom space. And now it turns out that the administration and board offices will be moved there next year. He's not entirely clear on the rationale. "It'll get them rubbing shoulders with the downtown people," Gillette speculates.

Gillette is frustrated that the board is planning to close schools in neighborhoods that tend not to flex a lot of political muscle.

"It's yet another reason why people distrust government," Gillette says. "They're told one thing, and time goes by and something else happens."

However, even by government standards, the Des Moines School District gets a prize for its level of taxpayer deception, Gillette contends. "They are not straight with the public." CV

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