The great divide: behind the School Board anger

The Rochester School Board entered the new year with
one of the deepest — and angriest — divisions in recent history. And while
to outsiders the rancor may seem rooted in personality differences and power
struggles, the division is more significant than that.

            All seven
School Board members are Democrats, but some of them disagree sharply on
substantive issues, including the role of the board, the board’s relationship
with the superintendent, and the district’s budget.

            The latest
conflict centered on seemingly esoteric subjects: how often the board should
elect a president and what powers the president should have. Previously, the
board has chosen officers every two years. In December, in the middle of
President Joanne Giuffrida’s two-year term, the board voted to amend its bylaws
and hold the election every year, effective this January.

            And last
week, in a 4-3 vote, the board elected Vice President Shirley Thompson to
replace Giuffrida. The board also weakened the power of the president,
requiring majority approval of many actions, such as committee appointments.

            Giuffrida
and her supporters on the board — Darrell Porter and Jim Bowers — were
furious. The move, Giuffrida said in a City interview later in the week, was “an act of violence.”

            The changes
have fueled the open hostility between the board’s two factions. And that may
make it harder for the board to deal with the tough issues it faces: hiring a
new superintendent, raising student achievement, considering middle-school
restructuring, and passing a new budget.

            The rancor
couldalso make it harder to attract
a new superintendent and to get adequate funding from the city and the state.

            Given its
challenges, why can’t the board get along? Was last week’s election simply a
destructive personality contest? For the school district — its students, its
faculty, its parents — does it matter whether the president serves for one
year or two? Does it matter who is president?

To the members of
the two factions, it matters a lot. Giuffrida says having elections every year
will be disruptive, that board members interested in being president will spend
too much time every year trying to line up supporters. Rob Brown, who was
elected vice president last week, insists that the shorter term will force the
president “to maintain the confidence of a majority of the board.”

            There may
be value in each position. And as with other areas of government, a structure
that works well with one set of elected officials may be a mess with another.
But in terms of the impact on the public, bylaws and presidential terms are
probably not the most important issue.

            Who is
president, on the other hand, matters under any structure. Temperament,
leadership ability, talent for creating consensus: All affect the School Board
and the school district.

            In
addition, the outcome of a board election is a reflection of the strength of
one faction over another. If it holds together, the board’s current majority
— Thompson, Brown, Bolgen Vargas, and Dwight Cook — will set budget
priorities. It will determine how the board interacts with the superintendent.

            How closely
should the board oversee the superintendent, for example? What some board
members believe is prudent oversight, is to others interference: “whipping the
superintendent around,” in Brown’s words.

            Giuffrida
is convinced that the board was too hands-off during the years preceding her
presidency, when Vargas was president and Brown was vice president. Under their
leadership, Giuffrida said in an interview last week, “the board was
emasculated.”

            “We did not
receive relevant information from the superintendent and his staff,” she said.
“We did not conduct any serious business in our board meetings, and the
committees were not very active.”

            “We now
have Mr. Brown as the vice president again,” said Giuffrida, “and I think we
have to all be careful that this board is not emasculated again. But the
likelihood of that happening with me and Bowers [on the board] is not too
great. We have much more access to information and to the media and are willing
to speak up about things. I don’t think they’ll be able to pull off what they
pulled off for four years previous.”

            Brown said
last week that he wouldn’t get into a he-said/she-said argument in the media.
It’s clear, however, that both he and Thompson felt Giuffrida sometimes acted
on her own, disregarding the opinions of at least some other board members.

            The board
has to operate out of a consensus, Brown said last week. “What we became
painfully aware of in the last year,” he said, is that a term of two years gave
presidents “essentially an insulated period” of more than a year. During that
time, presidents don’t have to seek re-election, and “you can be completely
insensitive to the views of the majority of the board members,” he said. “You
can go off on your own tune.”

            Thompson
said the board’s actions don’t reflect a vendetta against Giuffrida. But, she
said, the board members who voted for change were concerned about leadership.

            “There are
a couple of important roles that the leader of the board should play,” she
said. “One is to give a balanced representation of the board. We’ve got seven
people. At any given time, we have at least two perspectives on any issue. It’s
important for board leadership to make sure those perspectives are out there.
Which is not to say that anyone needs to suppress their personal opinion, but
neither should one promote that as being the final and correct position, if you
will.”

            Under
Giuffrida, Thompson said, the board president’s opinion was sometimes presented
as a directive, “and anyone who disagrees with it is an obstructionist.”

            Under the
new bylaws, the president will be more a facilitator than “some kind of elected
quasi-executive,” said Brown. “There’s a substantive difference between the
chief executive officer of, say, the city, who is elected, or the chief
executive officer of the county, and the president of the County Legislature,
the president of the City Council.”

            The board
needs to function in a way that the president is “the equivalent of the
president of City Council,” said Brown. “The chief executive officer is the
superintendent.”

A major point of
contention for the board has been the record — and the settlement package
— of former Superintendent Clifford Janey. Giuffrida describes Janey as “an
ineffective superintendent who spent his time here building a national
reputation for himself while performance in our Rochester schools
deteriorated.”

            “In many
categories of student achievement,” she said, “we are at the bottom of the Big
Five, and there’s no excuse for that — in a community with our resources —
that we’re doing worse than New York City or Buffalo. But we are,
statistically.”

            Brown says
Janey was a strong superintendent whose record warranted the board’s support,
not its wrath. “There are no examples in the United States of America of
successful urban school districts,” he said. “When you see that kind of
phenomena, I think you have to look at the root causes of the problems, so that
you can step outside the box of traditional tricks and solutions, all of which
have been tried in some place or another.”

            “We haven’t
had an inventive way to deal with this problem in years,” Brown said. The
board, he said, needs to reach a consensus with the superintendent “and
ultimately, the entire metropolitan community, or key players in the community”
on “how we beat the traditional problems of urban schools in the City of
Rochester, given the fact that our resources are limited.”

            And there,
too, there may be dissension. While all board members are dedicated to
improving student achievement, there is disagreement over the district’s
resources and programs. Giuffrida, like Mayor Bill Johnson, insists that the
district has to do a better job with the resources it has. Brown insists that
the district must have more resources to do a better job.

            That
disagreement became crystallized last winter in discussions about the
district’s budget. In interviews with this newspaper, Brown argued that the
district needed to be able to provide a good education for its poorest students
— and must be “a viable district for middle-class people.”

            The test,
he said, should be “whether we’re delivering a Brighton-quality education for
all children.”

            Giuffrida
disagreed. The district may not be able to offer a Brighton-quality education,
she said. “We have to start with what we can afford. What in the school program
is essential? And then we look at how much money we have left and what we can
add on.”

            To
Giuffrida, that could mean funding small class sizes and pre-school programs,
but cutting back funding for such things as magnet schools.

            Substantive
differences aren’t unusual in elected bodies like school boards. And for
Rochester, an open discussion of them, however heated, could engage the public
in a discussion on the future of the school district. The personal animosity on
the board, however, could overshadow such discussion, and it could turn city
residents and important elected officials against the district itself. That
personal animosity, unfortunately, seems to be growing.

This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2003.