Spending money or spending time

Jimmy Biblarz, a student in the humanities magnet at Hamilton High School, writes:

I was recently elected to Hamilton High School's School Site Council. Most schools have SSCs, which are made up of parents, teachers, students, and other community members. The goal of the Council is to increase neighborhood involvement in schools, and to give all groups concerned about education (including students) a voice. The councils control schoolwide budgets, Title I funding, and various other issues relating to money and overall school well-being.

I was very excited to join School Site Council. I like that there is a body in which students are of just as much importance as teachers and administrators; where my vote counts just as much as my AP chemistry teacher's does! As I sat down at the first meeting, with my school-provided water bottle and turkey sandwich in hand, I began to read over the agenda. Hamilton recently received a $130,000 block grant, a special type of grant with fewer restrictions than other money schools receive. The only issue was that we had to spend the money by the end of the '08 school year (in all reality, April).

The assistant principal at the meeting told us that we should spend the money by December, worried that the national financial disaster could cause the district to renege on the grant. The principal had provided us with a list of things he thought were vital to improving Hamilton, and every item on the list resonated with me.

From supplemental textbooks to beautification efforts, the principal had provided us with an excellent list. I was so excited, as were the two other student representatives.

But instead of immediately spending the money, we had to take care of all the necessary administrative items. Elections of officers, formal introductions, etc., etc. And then we got to approval of the by-laws.

The district provides all SSCs with a by-laws template which I found to be perfectly reasonable. But some people did not. We spent the entire meeting (a meeting scheduled to be one hour that went on for
three) talking about the difference between an "alternate" and a "proxy," and whether alternates should have voting power or not.

While I can appreciate the importance of following Robert's Rules of Order and the necessity of having by-laws, I felt that our time would have been much better spent spending our Block Grant. This is the reason more parents and students and teachers don't get involved in things like School Site Council. They get so tied up in bureaucratic messes that the most important things take a backseat. SSC meets only once a month, meaning we have only two more meetings before we are ideally supposed to have spent the $130,000. Is it really necessary to debate for hours whether alternates should have voting privileges when there are teachers teaching without books and we have the power to stop that? Of course not -- it's ridiculous.

Comments

[another SSC member in LAUSD]

If spending the block grant is that important, your SSC can hold an emergency meeting to begin to allocate the funds. At minimum your council has to meet at least once a month, there is no maximum (just make sure you follow the rest of paperwork - agendas, notification, etc...)

[Angel]

Hi Jimmy,

It can be frustrating when you want to get to the "meat and potatoes" of voting, but without the rules in place, how would you have felt losing say 12-11?

Policy and procedure isn't my idea of fun, but as you no doubt learned (or will learn) in Civics 101, you have to set the rules up before you start a representative government. Don't kid yourself, it does get better from there, and most of us have been through it to know the beginning is somewhat bureaucratic, and then you get to make decisions.

Hang in there. SSC is where the money gets spent, and if you have grants coming in, all the better.