It gives me no joy to write this, but McKeesport Area School District (MASD) is a raging dumpster fire.
School directors reneged on a teachers contract. Their business manager ran for the hills. And at the last board meeting two school directors had their dirty laundry aired during public comments prompting one to call a White Oak Councilperson a homophobic slur.
Our finances have been given over to an accounting firm paid for by Dick’s Sporting Goods. An $86 million district budget (2023-24) at the mercy of the place where you go to buy new sneakers and fishing tackle.
This is pretty low – even for schools as historically dysfunctional as McKeesport.
As a local reporter in Pennsylvania’s Mon-valley area in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I saw a lot of crazy things happen at local government meetings throughout the western corner of the state.
But McKeesport School Board meetings were legendary. The nepotism, incompetence, ignorance, glad-handing and focus on anything but education was something my colleagues and I would marvel at when we had time to compare notes.
Now the running of district schools threatens to grind to a halt by a prospective teachers strike! If we want to get things back into some semblance of order, I think we need to do a few things.
As a lifelong resident of the district, an alumni and father of a child who currently goes to school there – not to mention a public school teacher at a neighboring district with more than two decades in the classroom – I think school directors need to focus on these four things first.
They are:
4) Pass a Code of Conduct for Board Members and Administrators
I am sympathetic to School Board members Jim Brown and LaToya Wright. At the last board meeting several people trolled the pair with questions about their marriage. Since school board members have to live in the district, these folks wanted Wright removed if she were separated from her husband and had relocated outside of the district.
While it’s fair to require school directors to provide proof of residency, this kind of Jerry Springer style questioning is not appropriate for a public meeting. If I had to constantly answer questions like this while volunteering to help guide the community’s schools, I might also find it hard to keep my composure.
However, that does not excuse using slurs of any kind at a public meeting – not racial, religious, sexual or otherwise.
Brown has apologized on-line for his indiscretion and should do so again at the next school board meeting. But his actions highlight a glaring problem within our district.
We need a code of conduct for our school board members and administrators.
The previous Superintendent Dr. Mark Holtzman was frequently sarcastic, flippant and rude to members of the public who asked questions he did not like at board meetings – myself included. It has been pretty standard procedure for board members to ridicule each other, make threats and/or stifle public comments.
These are the people who run our schools. They make the decisions that impact all of us as taxpayers and citizens – decisions that impact those of us with family enrolled in the school even more.
They should have to abide by a certain minimum level of civility – especially that hate speech of any kind not be tolerated.
Given the circumstances, I do not think Brown should be removed from the board. However, he should be given the chance to publicly apologize at the next board meeting. If he does not, he should be censured by his fellow board members.
It should be entirely clear what kind of behavior would bring censure, removal and/or impeachment.
School directors often act like being on the board gives them the right to hand out jobs to unqualified relatives and acquaintances, to seek revenge for supposed wrongs done to family or friends, and an excuse to enrich themselves on the public dime.
This needs to stop.
We need to draw a line in the sand to show what behavior is appropriate not just as a model for our children who we are supposed to be serving here, but also so that despite our differences we can finally work together in the best interests of everyone in the community. That’s why these people are supposed to be there in the first place.
3) Start Streaming Council Meetings Again
During the Covid pandemic, MASD would routinely video and stream its school board meetings on-line. About a year ago, the school board voted to stop.
Why?
These are public meetings. We are a working class district. Most people don’t have the time to physically attend every meeting.
This isn’t 1973. It’s not even 2003. We have the technology to cheaply and easily tape and share the meetings. We should absolutely do so. There is no possible excuse not to comply.
My middle school students have the know how to do this – and could do it in better quality than the district used to provide.
In the past, the board was indifferently microphoned so it was incredibly difficult to make out what they were saying – especially if they didn’t want to be heard. The camera was so far away, you couldn’t see anything except a few blurs behind a table.
That showed indifference to the public. Not streaming the meetings at all shows downright hostility.
Board members are afraid of spectacles like that which happened at the last board meeting becoming a video part of the public record. With the relative lack of almost any reliable newspaper to cover the area, it is often the case that board meetings aren’t even reported in the local paper and if they are, it may be in the most rudimentary terms possible or behind a paywall.
The school board should absolutely reverse itself on this point and renew taping the meetings and release them on-line. They could even invite a high school video club to do the work and probably greatly increase the quality of the product. The board should be proud of what it’s doing – not cower in the shadows. If the results are embarrassing, the public has a right to see it. What better inducement for board members and administrators NOT to behave badly?
And if the board won’t do this, some enterprising members of the public should. The teachers union or others could easily do this. These are public meetings. We have every right to tape them and put them on-line.
And any district who wants any kind of control over that should provide it as a free service, itself.
2) Hire a New Reputable Business Manager
Business Manager Scott Domowicz left the district over controversy about the board’s rejection of the teachers contract (more on that below).
The board accepted Domowicz’s resignation at its September meeting, but it won’t go into effect until the beginning of November. The board passed a motion to advertise the open position.
Meanwhile, accounting firm Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG) is ensuring the district’s finances are in order.
The board voted 5-4 to allow Dicks Sporting Goods to pay for 50 hours of accounting services by the firm, one of the big four in the industry.
Personally, I don’t like our schools being beholden to the largest sporting goods retailer in the country even if they are based in nearby Coraopolis. Our district already is too focused on its athletics program to the detriment of academics. I may just be cynical, but I don’t believe in corporate philanthropy – only philanthrocapitalism. I wonder what Dicks is going to ask MASD to do to repay this debt or what backroom deals may have already been made along these lines.
The district needs to hire a new business manager ASAP – and this time it needs to be someone with experience and a good reputation.
Domowicz originally had been hired in late February 2022 at an annual salary of $100,000. He had been the business manager at Spectrum Charter School in Monroeville for about a year. Before that he was Senior Management Consultant for two decades at Great Lakes Management Consulting, a firm offering accounting and tax preparation services to customers and small business owners in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
Spectrum Charter School is much smaller than MASD. The privatized school employs 11-20 people and has $1 million to $5 million in annual revenue. MASD has roughly 3,000 students and 300 teachers with a proposed budget of $86 million next year.
The previous Business Manager Joan Wehner had more experience in the education field. She was assistant to the business manager at Penn-Trafford School District for 10 years before coming to McKeesport. She left the district to become business manager at Greensburg Salem School District.
It would be beneficial to get a replacement with a demonstrated track record in education – but it may be difficult to entice someone like that to come to a place as toxic as McKeesport. However, we need to do whatever we can to make it so.
1 ) Pass a Teachers Contract with No Tax Increase
School directors and the teachers had agreed to a tentative new contract in June, but the board tabled it after concerns that the district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises.
Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting. But had no answers when they came back in August or September.
They just heaped blame on Domowicz, so he resigned.
Meanwhile, the teachers current contract expired at the end of August and the 266 teachers and professional education staff become so fed up, they voted unanimously to authorize a strike. This does not mean an immediately work stoppage, but it is the first step toward one.
The union has agreed to one more 30-day extension to contract negotiations. However, union President Gerald McGrew said that this is the final extension the union will grant. So the board needs to make this right by the end of October.
I think the teachers are being fair. The proposed raises in the contract rejected by the school board are moderate and well below what some educators in neighboring districts make.
Over five years, the proposed pay increases are: 6.11% in 2023-24, 6.59% in 2024-25, 6.03% in 2025-26, 4.38% in 2026-27, and 3.26% in 2027-28.
If they can afford relatively similar pay scales at West Mifflin, Steel Valley and other neighboring districts, MASD should be able to do so, too. The school board needs to make this work.
The district should be open about its finances. How much exactly would this cost? What cost saving measures can be conducted to reach this goal? And no ridiculous speculation about how much this might cost from board members with no financial background. These numbers should come from the experts. Facts not politics.
Obviously this should be done without a tax increase. I think it is entirely realistic to expect such an outcome without further information to the contrary. However, let’s be real. Ensuring fair pay for our teachers needs to be done even if that means raising taxes.
The heart of a school is its teachers. You can’t have a great school without great educators and you won’t have them without fair pay.
We are already being eaten alive by charter schools. Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away money that would have gone to fund MASD. The district paid $14 million toward charter school tuition in 2022-23, according to Domowicz. He budgeted $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.
If MASD doesn’t have quality teachers and a quality academic program, we’ll lose even more to these privatized schools. The only way to reverse the trend is to provide the best education and get the word out.
If we leave schooling to the competing piranha charter schools, they will gobble up our taxes while we have no say whether they are raised or not since most charter schools have no elected school boards.
McKeesport School Directors may be dysfunctional, but at least they’re elected representatives. At least they are members of the community who are required to listen to the public and conduct business in an open forum.
They could do their jobs better, but at least they’re ours. And we can replace them.
The only way we get MASD back on course is to pass a fair teachers contract. And to do that we need a reputable, reliable business manager. We need to video and stream school board meetings so everyone can see them easily. And we need to cut the crap and start conducting those meetings civilly and respectfully in the spirit of cooperation and the good of the community at large.
The way I see it, these are the first steps to get there.
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