Area lawmakers ‘troubled’ by Russell allegations

Community members feel school unfairly targeted for closure

By MARK NEWMAN Courier staff writer

RUSSELL — Penny Stouwie said she was ready to prove once and for all her community was being unfairly targeted by the Iowa Department of Education.

The Iowa Department of Education, through Director Judy Jeffrey, says they discovered Russell school district — which has had a shrinking enrollment over the past 20 years — was $300,000 in debt and not in compliance with certain administrative regulations.

Most of those accusations of “non-compliance” are false, insisted Stouwie, a resident of Russell, member of the school advisory board and parent of a Russell student. And the debt could have been fixed, as they showed the DOE in a budget plan they submitted.

Jeffrey had commented on the subject in a recent Courier interview.

“They had four years to fix the situation. This is not something that arose overnight,” said Director Jeffrey. “They were given a corrective action plan.”

Whenever Russell requested funding in the past few years, the state looked at the district’s progress.

The Department of Education alleges Russell did not follow their corrective plan, and when the final progress inspection was done, the decision was voted on by the state board of education to close the district.

Though some residents of Russell have said they aren’t concerned, many more have said they won’t take the closure lying down.

About 100 people attended a town hall meeting at Russell High School Saturday. The two attendees who seemed to be the focus of attention by supporters of the district, though, were two legislators: Sen. Paul McKinley, R-Chariton and Rep. Rich Arnold, R-Russell.

To McKinley and Arnold, Stouwie said from the podium, “You will find ... why we as citizens feel our school is being wrongly and quite possibly illegally closed..”

She also asked, on behalf of the district, that the legislators “request an investigation and delay the matter of closing our school... pending an investigation of the Department of Education by an unbiased party.”

She said she believed that Russell school district was a “target long before the [DOE] accredidation committee arrived — and the decision had already been made [to close Russell].”

“It certainly sounds like they weren’t being treated fairly. If everything we’ve heard here is accurate, the DE had their minds made up,” said Sen. McKinley. “This is of concern. We’ll want to talk to the Department of Education and have some questions for them.”

“I am troubled by what I’ve heard here,” added Arnold.

For one thing, Stouwie said, the Russell district was not — and is not — in any financial trouble that it couldn’t climb out of.

She showed slides of a budget deficit of more than $300,000 which would have been fixed in a few short years, yet the Department of Education insists on Russell shutting down anyway.

“The last budget we submitted to them [had] a deficit of $7,108 for 2009. But in 2010, there’s a positive of $85,074! But because it wasn’t going to be fixed this year, it’s not good enough,” she said, sounding frustrated.

But one of the biggest problems for the district, Jeffrey said, was the spending of money from the wrong district accounts. For example, SILO one-cent sales tax money cannot be used to buy textbooks for children. It can be used to fix a toilet.

If they run out of textbook money but have millions in leftover maintenance money, they still can’t just decide to use that money to buy books.

“It’s federal and state law,” said Jeffrey.

“I can’t stand here and tell you everything we did was 100 percent right. But we weren’t 100 percent wrong, either,” said Stouwie during her presentation.

She went through each of the Department of Education’s complaints, and argued against each, showing supporting documents as proof of her claims.

Some complaints by the DOE were just plain false, she said.

Further, she alleges, the Department of Education may have hurt the students chances on this year’s Iowa Test of Basic Skills because of the announcement of plans for a more intense inspection of the Russell district which could lead to closure.

“They did in fact interfere with the ITBS,” she claimed, “since this announcement was made during the week of those tests. We are told to keep our children well-rested and stress-free.... how can they be stress free when they are told they will no longer have a school at the end of this year?”

Russell school board President Ken Burger said he tried to approach the challenges from the state with a positive attitude. But that became hard to maintain as he began to suspect the DOE was working to undermine the board’s efforts.

He claims nothing they could come up with pleased Jeffrey, and idea after idea was shot down by her.

“It became clear to me their goal was to shut us down. At one meeting, I turned to Judy Jeffrey and said, ‘Is there anything we can do?’ and she said, no and I was surprised she said that because there were other people around. I started to think to myself that this was a sham. I think that was their agenda from the beginning: Shut us down.”

Unfortunately, said Andrea Bedford, it appears her own daughter, Alexa, age 2, won’t be going to Russell schools as she and her husband had planned.

“After college, I moved here so she could go to Russell school,” Bedford said. “I’m all for small schools. I like the morals and values I learned in a small school, Lineville-Clio. I graduated in a class of seven girls. It was like a family.”

“It’s a great school,” said Alex Bear, 17, an RHS junior. “I love it here.”

He said he’s not the only one who actually enjoys going to school; the majority of his classmates, he claimed, feel the same way.

“If you’re having trouble in class, [the teacher] just comes over,” he said as he helped store folding chairs after the forum. “It’s more one on one. And it’s not just academics. There are a lot more sports opportunities here.”

He said he wonders about next year: where he’ll go, what he’ll do for transportation and if there will be any athletics open to him.

“I wish they could at least keep it open another year or two,” he said.

Mark Newman can be reached at 683-5358 or by e-mail at mgnewman@mchsi.com.

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