Thank you to everyone who has contributed their experiences with the biased push poll that they received from the "school district." As previously noted, the district did not authorize this poll.
So before we take a look at this poll, let's review some of the bias that the phrasing of the questions and the recording of the answers can cause. A great sample of this bias comes from the Non Sequitir comic from Sunday.
A quote that has been attributed to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin goes like this: Those who cast the Votes, they decide nothing. Those who count the votes, they decide everything. A variant translation is: The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. **Please note: Hold the hate mail. Despite the dictatorial similarities between the Emperor and Stalin, I am not comparing them. Stalin is still far more autocratic than a local school board president.**
So in this case, we answer a biased poll and the desired answers are pulled from the loaded questions already asked. Check out this short video on how to make a biased poll.
For those of you who were not blessed by the postal fairy with a survey, TA-DA! Here it is. The sound you just heard was a million English teachers crying out in unison in great pain and torment.
Among the misspellings and grammatical errors are "INFARSTRUCTURE" in the title (should be "INFRASTRUCTURE") and return no later "that" 3/17/2008 rather than "than." Question 4 references "formally" rather than "formerly", and also does not capitalize "high school" as in "Morrisville high school."
That's the easy stuff that probably lowers this by at least one grade level. Now for the advanced errors in presentation.
Question 1 sets up the idea that *gasp* we might need a single school to service the approximately 1000 students.
Question 2 addresses the urgent need for plumbing, HVAC, electric and window infrastructure upgrades, as well as an opportunity to determine which one is more important, of if we should do them all together. This sounds like one of those triage scenes from M*A*S*H where Hawkeye and BJ decide who gets to be operated on first and then get into a fight over the diagnosis. The patient is terminal. Almost no amount of renovation will be a cost-effective life saver.
Question 3 goes to the heart of the screaming from the people so concerned that their little 4 year old pre-schoolers would be subjected to 18 year old seniors in the same school building. Do we need one, two, or three buildings in town. For everyone who missed it, the defeated new high school was specifically designed to keep the grades separated in different wings. Now we'll reverse engineer the process on the fly.
Question 4 is the payoff question that you were led to from the first three questions. You already agreed to renovate the high school for 1000 students. You agreed that one or more of the critical systems are failing, and you agreed to fix at least one building. So you are committed to answering yes. You are further committed to closing the two elementary schools OR closing 75% of MHS. How? To "continue as usual" is a ridiculous answer because you already said that we cannot continue along the same path.
You also unknowingly agreed to the fallacious argument that a reduction of 75% in the number of students means that 75% of the school is unused. With this same logic, since we had nine school board members for 4000 students, we should now reduce the board down by 75% and eliminate 6.75 members. Ouch! Sounds like it might be painful to be the designated 1/4 member.
What about the heating costs? We're using oil heat in inefficient boilers with antiquated single pane window glass. Both are well past their useful life and need to be replaced. Just doing the boilers and windows would reduce the heating costs. I'd even like to see floor plans of just what 75% you want to shut off. With the hallway configurations available, show us what is superfluous.
Question 5. My, oh my. There was an audit done in 2008? Perhaps you are referring to the I'll take "Cover The Emperor's Butt" for $2500, Alex hastily prepared defeasement report? If that is an audit, then I want these people working at the IRS for my next audit. You have an RFP out for a real audit that includes poking and prodding into critical systems.
In fairness, we pretty much already know what the audit will find. That we were getting off easily with a $32 million dollar new school. We'll probably find that even with cost overruns, we were getting off easily with a $37 million dollar new school.
There's another issue here as well. Have you ever heard about the the five phases of any project: “Enthusiasm, trouble, search for a scapegoat, punishment of the innocent, and praise and reward for all non-participants”? It looks like the board is setting up one or more scapegoats to accept punishment for the condition of the schools. Maybe they should keep in mind that the political side (the board itself) sets priorities and spending limits and the operational side (the people who actually do the work) work within those limits.
So you want to hire a "skilled facilities director"? With what money? What rich uncle died and left money to the district? Maybe we can ask the secretary to give back her (so far) under-earned stipend to help defray part of the cost. I see a lot of spending going on ($2500 for the Hellman building report, $2.4 million to return the bond money, for example) but I am unclear on the savings that have been achieved so far.
Final thoughts: Where are replies sent? Where is anything identifying this as a product of the MSD? Well, maybe that was a saving grace, because this is an embarrassing contribution to this contentious battle. Is there no one else out there who can obtain the information in a reasonably fair and unbiased way without embarrassing us all?
