2025-07-08

July 8, 2025

The July general meeting was held on July 8, 2025.  This was our annual reorganization meeting, and we got President Monica Moriak and Vice President Y.F. Lou.  We slowly began our march toward effectiveness, actually focusing on student outcomes for at least a few minutes out of the meeting.

Agenda Item 4: Reorganization of the Board

Motion 1: Appoint the superintendent as the executive secretary (passed; my vote: yes)

This is a formality, as it is required by Delaware law.

Motion 2: Elect Shannon Troncoso as president (defeated; my vote: no)

As I stated on Highlands Bunker earlier, I endorsed Monica Moriak for president, and I voted no for Troncoso.

Those in favor: Baqir, Patton, Troncoso.  Those opposed: Lou, Manley, Moriak, Trauth.

Motion 3: Elect Monica Moriak as president (passed; my vote: yes)

Monica Moriak was elected president.  Congratulations!

Those in favor: Lou, Manley, Moriak, Trauth.  Those opposed: Baqir, Patton, Troncoso.

Motion 4: Elect Y.F. Lou as vice president (passed; my vote: yes)

I nominated Y.F. Lou to serve as vice president under Moriak.  I think that it'll be good for him to have a seat at the table, see how things operate, and work with Moriak to transform us into an effective school board.

Following this, President Moriak reappointed me to CBOC and reappointed Lou to run the policy committee.

Agenda Item 5: Approval of the Agenda

There were two items on the consent agenda that weren't ready (12.08, Alternative School Services for Elementary School Students, and 12.09, Therapeutic Classrooms), so they were pulled.

Agenda Item 9: CBOC Report

At the last CBOC meeting, we dedicated a large portion of the time to discussing the tax warrant that we would be issuing.  The tax warrant is the percentage that we send to New Castle County telling them how much to tax for our school taxes on everyone's property taxes.  As I've discussed previously, the county's property reassessment (for the first time in 40 years) has been the big focus, since it will Make Number Go Down for the actual tax rate (since property values went up 4x, the tax rate basically has to come down 4x; there's wiggle room, and that was discussed under item 13.02, FY2026 Tax Warrant).

Agenda Item 11.02: Changes to the Consent Agenda

In addition to the two items that were pulled at the beginning of the meeting, we pulled 12.06, the ChristianaCare contract (at the superintendent's request), and 12.20 (the SRO contract renewal).

I made a mistake here; I had written down that 12.06 was "Returning Graduation and Back-to-School Kickoff back to UD", but that was actually item 12.19, so that didn't get removed from the consent agenda.  Thus, the board approved returning to UD for its opening and closing events.  It obviously would have passed anyway, but I wanted to point out that we need some kind of actual protection for our students from the UD cops who arrested one of our graduating students 2 years ago.  Also, the item was written as two proposals, so it really should have been clearer which one the district wanted, but the title kind of covers that.

Agenda Item 13.01: Superintendent Evaluation Process

Starting us off on our way to being effective as a board, we discussed some options for the superintendent's potential "temporary" goals.  Temporary here means that they'll do for a year, but starting next year, we'll give her a few official 3-5-year goals that we'll measure her performance against.  Since we had structured Shelton's student-related goals on reading and math, she did some analysis of the data and gave us some potential options for more targeted goals (our goals for the district in 2023 were very broad and general; the Effective School Boards methodology would have us target a narrower "high need, high leverage" subset of the population instead of all students.  Her analysis found that non-English-speakers had really low English scores (at like 5%), and if we could get those up, we'd be able to improve our overall percentage significantly.

She wasn't ready with the data yet, so we'll be targeting a workshop next month to try to lock down a meaningful target population and target metric for the next year.  We'll probably do one or two temporary goals and save the big stuff for when it's time to do the official goals next year.

Agenda Item 13.02: FY2026 Tax Warrant

As we've discussed previously, every year, the district has to send the county a tax rate (what percentage of all property values are we going to tax?).  That tax rate is constant for every property in the district.  It's composed of 4 parts: operating tax, debt service, match tax, and tuition tax.  Everything except operating tax is basically constrained by other laws and restrictions.  Debt service goes to paying down our debts from previous referendums; the amount that we need every year decreases as our debt goes down, and that schedule is known years in advance.  Match tax is a tax that we can levy to receive matching funds for various things granted by the match tax programs; that amount is fixed in terms of what dollar amount is available.  Tuition tax is a tax that we can levy to cover needs-based services (special ed); that amount is also fixed based on the needs-based students that we have.  Thus, the only tax bucket that we can really play with is the operating tax, which is great, because that's where our "unrestricted local funds" live.  We can use that money for anything; we can pay anything in any of the other buckets; we can hire teachers; we can do building repair; we can do anything.  The problem is that that money is precious and almost completely spent before we even get started.

Anyway, the total value of all of the properties combined in our district went up about 4x.  We need the same amount of money, so our tax rate compared to last year will go down about 4x.  I say "about" because state law allows a school district a 10% wiggle room every time there's a referendum (this year, which is the first time in 40 years, and presumably every 5 years going forward).  That 10% wiggle room lets a district raise taxes by 10% compared to the previous year, no questions asked, and we're going to do that.  It's one of the few mechanisms that we have to combat inflation, salary increases, etc.

Because of the uncertainty around reassessment (especially the years-long appeals process), we don't know if we'll get all 10%; we may end up with 7 or 8% when it all comes out.  But that's part of the reason that the state gave us that power.

Anyway, our new tax rate will be 0.7997%.  So yes, your property value went up, but your tax rate went from 3.224% to 0.7997%.

Math note: if we increased our portion of the property taxes by 10% every 5 years (when we can because that's how often reassessments will happen), it would take 35 years for the effective tax rate to double.  A 10% increase every 5 years isn't all that much; it doesn't even keep up with inflation.

Agenda Item 13.03: FY2026 Preliminary Budget

The final budget isn't due for a while, but this is the preliminary version.  We expect to receive $464M, and we expect to spend $446M, so we should have good wiggle room.  As I mentioned before, there are a lot of unknowns with regard to reassessment and the county, but we don't expect any major issues.

Note that the teacher raises are scheduled to start in November once we receive the main chunk of our property tax money.  As long as everything comes in the way that we expect, we should be fine to cover the increases.  The unions are set up to be able to renegotiate next year once we know exactly how reassessment shook out.

Agenda Item 14: Items Removed From the Consent Agenda

Motion 1: Renew the SRO contracts (passed; my vote: no)

Same as last year, Amy brought some solid studies to the table stating that uniformed police officers don't make our schools safer or our students better off.  Same as last year, I noted that the main way that guns get into our schools is on the hips of cops, and the main reason that anyone is going to get shot at school is going to be from one of those guns.  The others were either very much in favor of cops in schools or against a sudden change in policy; Moriak would like a transition plan of some kind so that the district can be properly staffed with constables before canning the cop contracts.

As a reminder: cops are actual cops who report to their police unit; they are entirely unaccountable (at all) in the state of Delaware, and certainly unaccountable to Christina School District.  Constables, on the other hand, are technically sworn law enforcement officers, but they are normal employees of the district, report to the district, and are not subject to the law enforcement officer's bill of rights.  Constables are thus accountable.

Anyway, Amy and I voted no; everyone else voted yes.