Iowa City school board to consider rescinding diversity policy

The Iowa City school board on Tuesday will consider rescinding its diversity policy, which late last year was deemed non-compliant with federal law by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Board president Chris Lynch said Wednesday the board needs to rescind the policy in order to comply with a Jan. 31 state deadline for a decision on the issue.

'Short-term, we're really going to have to rescind the current policy,” Lynch said at a meeting of The Gazette's editorial board.

The policy, passed by the school board in February 2013, is designed to balance poverty levels in Iowa City schools, using the numbers of students with free and reduced-price lunch at each school to measure poverty.

School officials would have used 'heat maps” of poverty in the district to redraw school boundaries.

But the USDA in November confirmed that the district cannot use the data in that way, saying it could publicly identify the students in the lunch program.

The Iowa Department of Education, which has acted as a mediator of sorts in the legal disagreement between the district and USDA, gave the district until Jan. 31 to correct or rescind the policy.

Correcting the policy - in other words, no longer using the lunch program data - would make it ineffective, school officials have said.

Instead, Lynch said Wednesday, the board is likely to replace the policy with something 'at a higher level,” setting goals and leaving district administrators to work out how to achieve them.

That reflects an overall shift in focus for the board, Lynch and board vice president Brian Kirschling said, one that is part of a district strategic plan due in April.

'We need to get out of the details to some degree,” Lynch said, adding that that does not mean the board will be a 'rubber stamp.”

To that end, school officials already have begun meeting with city and Johnson County officials to address housing policies, which superintendent Stephen Murley said are just as important in balancing poverty levels as school boundaries.

'This is more where the board needs to play,” Lynch said. 'That should be our job - to go work the politics.”

The class-size goals the board set for the district in 2013, Murley said, are one example of how a board focus on broad goals can work.

In terms of the data the district will use to balance poverty levels instead of free and reduced-price lunch participation, Murley said there are several options, including the number of English language learners in each school and a state measure for students at risk of dropping out of school.

'We've been in dialogue with the (Iowa) Department of Education as recently as today about what are other districts doing,” Murley said.

State officials first told the school district in January 2013 that the policy likely would not comply with federal law. School officials previously have said that other measures of poverty, such as census data, would be problematic if they were used to balance poverty levels.

An Iowa City board committee is scheduled to discuss the policy tonight.

Notes:

Also Wednesday, Murley said it likely will be difficult for the district to obtain a waiver from a newly enforced state law that school should start no earlier than the week of Sept. 1.

Iowa City schools, like many others in Iowa, traditionally have started in mid-August after being automatically granted waivers from the 1983 law. Brad Buck, the director of the state Department of Education, informed districts last month that the state now will only grant waivers in cases where starting school earlier would have 'a significant negative educational impact.”

Many of the reasons Iowa City schools prefer to start in mid-August - including aligning with a university schedule and athletics schedules - are not unique to the district, Murley said.

'They can't approve our (waiver) without approving a bunch of others with the same issue,” he said.

Further guidance from the state on what constitutes a negative impact will be issued soon, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education said Wednesday.

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