May 30 Letter to LCS Board of Education

7/31/2019 May 30 Letter to LCS Board of Education

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May 30 Letter to LCS Board of Education

Hello all and hope that you all had a great holiday with family and friends. I am writing this todaybecause it has become apparent that over the years, we have not all been given the same information. I

am sure that some of you who I have not had the chance to talk to have been a little concerned about mychange of tone at Board Meetings in the last year, but especially in the last few months. I believe that Ihave an explanation that you will understand and ask you to take a look and judge for yourself on whetheror not we could have done better.

This all started for me years ago when Attica was being closed. At one of the board meetings, the boardwas given a set of projections. It was given to the board in the board packet. I contacted Loren Grinellwho was the person at that time who handled all FOIA information. I learned that these numbers werefrom projections that our district had paid a consulting firm to produce and requested the full report. Overthe coarse of time, I have received projections from 2003, 2004, and 2005. I never asked for the summarythat our board was given because I had the full reports and I assumed that our board members weregiven access to them. It seems I might have been very mistaken.

After Attica closed, I tried to step up and make a difference for our kids. As many of you know, I waspretty busy trying to help where I could in our buildings. I got away from constantly hounding our

Administration. That was until last year, when we had to take money from our fund balance in amountsthat we had never had to do. At that time, I started trying to get a handle on just what had been done overthe last few years. I learned that we had done projections in 2006, 2010, and a comparison of just howaccurate our projections were in 2011, and subsequently requested copies of those documents. While Irealize that these are only very educated guesses, they have been fairly good guides as to where ournumbers were going to be. This is why I have not been able to understand how our LCS Board hascontinued to make decisions that seemed totally wrong for where our numbers were going.

What upset me the most was at a recent East PAC meeting, where Mr. Wandrie and Mrs. Becker werein attendance. One of our East parents asked both of them directly if the district didn't see our numbersfalling before we put all of the money into our buildings. Mr. Wandrie said yes, that we did have some"preliminary data" suggesting they were going down. Mrs. Becker said that we had no idea that thisplunge was coming. I was very upset that she as a board member would say that we had no idea. Ithought "how can a long standing member of our board of education NOT know how bad it was going toget?

This is why I said what I said and did what I did at the board meetings. Well, I now believe that I oweMrs. Becker an apology. After speaking to a few of you about this subject, I was told thatthe information that the board was given was a one page document which "summarized" the projections. Ihave never seen a "summary" in any of these projections, so I was not sure what it was that you hadbeen given.

So with this information I asked Karen Rowden for a FOIA for all projection information that our boardhas been given. Below is my request and the districts response:

William GavetteMay 17 (13 days ago)

to Karen, Matt

Hi Karen. I understand from communications with some of the board members that with regards to thestudent projections, that the board members were given a "summary". Since no summary was given inany of the assessments that I have from Stanfest, and you had told me that I have all the projections, Iam assuming that this "summary" was something that was put together by the district. Can you pleasesend me any summaries that the board members might have been given? It would greatly help myunderstanding of things if I can see exactly what our school board was seeing and what information they


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had to make decisions on with regards to the bond money that was spent in the elementaries. Thanks,Bill Gavette

Karen [email protected] 22 (8 days ago)

to me

Bill, By doing a search of Board packets I found the attached document presented to the Board on

October 19, 2006.

Karen Rowden810-538-1604Secretary to the Board of Education andAdministrative Assistant to the Superintendent

What Karen had found was the original one page sheet that I had learned about at a board meetingthat caused me to ask for the FOIA for the full document. It now appears that you as board memberswere never given all of the projection to evaluate for yourselves and judge how relevant or irrelevant itmight be.

We can't change where we are. I very much believe that had you been made aware of just how bleakthese numbers were, you might have been able to make different decisions, but that is sheer speculationon my part. What we can do is to make sure that in the future, the LCS Administration must be compelledto include the board fully on any matters pertaining to future enrollment. This must include FULL copies ofANY reports or projections. I believe that this MUST be made a binding policy of the board andadministration. Otherwise, this lack of information being passed to you as board members could happenagain.

Since we are currently funded by the amount of students we have, you must make sure that you arearmed with ALL the information you can possibly have, so that moving forward you can make the most

informed decisions possible for our kids.I am sending the projections that the district sent me for 2005, 2006, 2010, and the comparison done in2011. I am also including the original 1 page chart that was in the board packet in Oct. 2006. By the way,that chart was based off the 2005 projections and not the ones 2006. We didn't get the updatedprojections until December of 2006. The chart from the district was in the Oct, 2006 board packet. I havespoken to Dr. Fred Ignatovich, of Stanfred Consulting, the one who does the projections to make surethat the dates were correct and that I could better understand how to read the numbers. Lastly, is theamount of money that our district has put into now closed elementary buildings. You should also knowthat the costs to the people of LCS that I read to you at the meetings of $2,458,285 to $2,843,380 werelooked at by Kevin Rose who agreed that they were very close to the correct numbers.

While Mr. Wandrie is a good man and he has my full support, I believe that most of the same team thatworked for our previous Superintendent are a part of Matt's team. In my view, the only difference betweenthen and now is the person in the lead chair. While I respect Matt, we need to treat this as the multi-million dollar business that it is. In my opinion, you were either purposefully not given vital information or itwas not felt that you needed to see it, or it was simply a huge oversight. Whatever the case, it was wrongand we need to adjust our tactics as to not repeat it.

Again, I must apologize to Mrs. Becker in particular. In my wildest imaginings, I would never havethought that our LCS Board of education would not have been given all of the information relating to ourfuture student numbers. As I handle most of the communications for a number of groups that I aminvolved in, (websites, group emails and such), I am by most accounts very cynical and always insist onusing original documentation. Please accept my apologies as you were not made aware of the samefacts that I had to look at. Lets work together to make things better and make sure this doesn't happenagain. If any of you have a question or would like any further information that I have, either email me or
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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call me at(810)417-1559.

Thank you for your time as I know this was a long email.Respectfully, Bill Gavette

6 attachmentsDownload all attachments

2005 Student Projections.pdf300K View DownloadEnrollment Proj Dec 2006 (1).pdf736K View DownloadEnrollment Proj Sept 2010..pdf724K View DownloadEnrollment comparison.pdf468K View DownloadEnrollment projection October 2006 from board packet.pdf42K View DownloadGavette, Bill Bond Summaries March 2012.pdf

342K View Download
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May 30 Letter to LCS Board of Education

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