If you watched the live stream of the special called Wayne County Board of Education meeting Wednesday, you know that the board’s top budget priority — other than keeping the district’s budget balanced — is coming up with a way to increase and stabilize pay for its classified employees.
In an increasingly competitive labor market, board members said during their budget work session, keeping maintenance staff, bus drivers and teaching assistants, as well as other non-certified employees, is simply not possible without addressing salary schedules.
And they are right.
The district is facing competition from other entities — the Wayne County government is one of them — and losing the best employees or not having enough to get the jobs done affects how well schools work.
If we want the best schools, we have to think like that, while being respectful of the taxpayers who have to pay the bills.
But Wayne County still has a financial hill to climb — the district just clawed its way out of a multi-million-dollar budget crater.
There is no wiggle room. There is no “fun” money. There is no signing a purchase order just because a salesperson is a smooth talker.
There is no messing with bids, or giving a relative a job just because.
And there are still bills to pay — many bills to pay — many of which involve big expenses like much-needed school repairs.
Spending wildly will get us back to that deficit. So will not prioritizing where money is spent.
And ignoring the problems — the big stuff — won’t move Wayne County Public Schools forward.
And if our schools don’t move forward, if we aren’t ready, progress will pass us by.
So, focusing on the money and where it is going — it matters. And there is no one who can take their eye off the ball — and no one whose work should not be watched closely.
There should be no questions left unanswered. And there should be no room for glossing over or dodging the truth — or transparent answers.
Board members promised they got that. And for a while, it seemed like they did.
But then something curious happened.
The board rehired its attorney, Richard Schwartz, quickly, rushing into a vote to renew his contact.
Questions about cost, about whether the board should perhaps seek some bids and concerns that were raised about the fact that the district had also received notice from Schwartz’s former staff saying they were leaving the firm and striking out on their own were disregarded. And a contract was penned quickly with no guarantee what continuing with Schwartz would look like.
This is after lots of public scrutiny over the large amounts of money paid to Schwartz and his firm — a shockingly large amount of money.
And that brings us to an exchange that occurred during that budget work session Wednesday.
Board member Len Henderson brought up a question during that meeting — a reiteration of a request to see copies of Schwartz’s firm’s bills since 2017.
He asked months ago, he said. He still has not received them.
We understand his frustration. We have asked, too — and have been put off for months, despite a formal public records request.
There have been all kinds of excuses — the need to redact sensitive information, the amount of information to be collected, etc. — but the request was reasonable and should have absolutely been fulfilled long ago.
But even that was not the most interesting part of the meeting.
Just before adjournment, Chairman Chris West paused to make a statement.
“I have heard this multiple times, so I am going to address it,” he said.
And then, he defended Schwartz and the bills — again — putting the blame for the high-dollar payments in the laps of the board members themselves.
He said that Schwartz’s retainer was “reasonable” and said that additional requests from staff members and board members were what was creating the high bills.
West said that Schwartz had offered to educate board members on ways to cut their legal costs.
It was uncomfortable to sit through. And surprising.
We have wondered for a while what is behind the chairman’s staunch defense of Schwartz — and why he so quickly dismissed calls to entertain hiring another attorney or at least looking at other bids, possibly from someone locally. Or why more questions about expectations and answers about Schwartz’s services moving forward were not asked and answered.
We have wondered when the discussion of Schwartz’s past billing and the board’s future expectations was going to happen in a public meeting.
But it didn’t.
And next thing we knew, there was a contract.
Now we are talking about finding money for critical positions. If you are a WCPS parent or educator, you know how desperately this district needs people to drive buses and keep the heat on in local schools.
So now is absolutely the time to scrutinize every other contract.
That includes Schwartz.
It is time to see the attorney’s invoices, past and present billing totals, where the money is going.
And that brings us to the last point, another subject that came up Wednesday — communication.
It is important to get the district’s message and good news out to the community, board members said.
The community needs to be educated, too, about the special concerns that go along with running a school district — and funding it.
And the first lesson?
A school district’s funding process is not its own. It comes from a variety of sources. And lobbying for more includes other players — the county for the local portion as well as state and federal entities for programs and mandates.
It is a valid point, but there is another, one that was made crystal clear when the news first surfaced about the district’s financial issues.
Improving a district’s image in a community is about more than just “PR” and sunshiney Instagram posts.
You can’t manifest trust or pixie dust the truth. You earn it by proving that things are different.
And “transparency” is not just a self-produced account of a school board meeting — even if it is on the front page of your website — or talking yourself into believing that the community is watching your board meetings.
By the way, Henderson’s comments about Schwartz didn’t appear in the latest edition of “From the Boardroom.” Shocker.
It is not about show, saying the right things or parroting what you think the community wants to hear.
And it is not about taking yourselves too seriously.
It is about real transparency, not looking for ways to keep discussion that should be public away from the public. It is not about backroom deals or thinking that you know better than the people whom you represent.
No one can get away with that anymore. The pandemic taught us that.
Share the good, the bad and the ugly — and some stuff that might be hard for the community to hear. We can’t make any of it better if we do not understand the problems.
But don’t pull the wool over our eyes either.
No one is going to be distracted from the fact that we are STILL paying a boutique attorney while we are losing quality personnel to other counties and building maintenance costs mount.
No spin will fix that.
There is no more COVID money to save the day. We know that, too.
And we would be remiss if we did not mention that, finally, there is a financial plan in place and qualified personnel in charge of executing it. A lot of work has gone into getting the district to live within its means. And the new superintendent keeps reminding everyone what it will take to stay there.
Release the bills. Sooner rather than later.
That’s a start.
