Public Service is an Honor
In 2014, the New Albany-Plain Local Schools failed an operating levy that left the district in severe financial distress and resulted in the dismissal of one hundred faculty and staff members. It was a painful episode for our community schools that was the product of many years of rapid growth and the excesses that often accompany such growth.
After that levy failure, the New Albany Community Foundation led a community task force to identify the causes of the district’s financial problems and recommend solutions to resolve them. Because of my nearly four decades of business experience leading a rapidly growing organization with twice the number of employees as our school district, I was selected to serve on that task force. When the task force recommendations weren’t implemented by the school district, I knew I had to take the next step to serve our community further by standing for election to our Board of Education. I was elected in November 2015 and re-elected four years later.
Working in partnership with my fellow Board members, we immediately set to work to refocus the district on academic achievement and stabilize our long-term expense growth to avoid the historical “boom and bust” cycles where a new tax levy led to new employee contract terms that heralded the need for another new levy. Our students, faculty, staff, and taxpayers deserved better. Most importantly, the children of our community deserved the promise of our focus on academic outcomes that would open opportunities for them.
Just as troublesome, our district too often drifted from it’s core academic mission, implementing “flavor of the day” programming and bending to the demands of small groups of activists.
In one of our first meetings to decide the qualifications we believed were important for a new superintendent, my Board colleagues and I started by defining the outcome we expected the superintendent to achieve. That became our Statement of Purpose, which anyone who follows the district will instantly recognize as:
“To Create a Culture of Accountability that Achieves the Best
Academic and Developmental Outcomes for Each Student”
To make clear our intent and avoid the inevitable dilution of this now ubiquitous statement, we further defined each of the key words. Here’s a link to the Statement of Purpose, Defined.
With our Purpose clarified, we set out to find a leader committed to implementing it. We found him in our own backyard in our then assistant superintendent, Michael Sawyers. He is one of the finest leaders I have ever known or worked with in either the private or public sectors.
With our Purpose and leader in place, our new administration, my fellow Board members and I got to work to implement the changes necessary. We worked in collaboration with our employee associations to negotiate new contracts that provided an important path for professional and financial growth while avoiding the boom and bust cycles of the past. In the process, we also made clear the Purpose of the district by incorporating an academic achievement performance bonus into the contracts of every single district employee, including the Board. We are the only district in the state to have done so. Our Board did what all the experts said couldn’t be done.
Our Board’s direction and the exceptional work of our administration extended the life of our last levy that passed in 2012 from it’s original five year expectation to now its tenth year and kept our budget forecast in the black for next five years too. The two permanent improvement levies voters approved to maintain our aging infrastructure during my tenure were both done in concert with expiring school building bond issues and so resulted in no new tax millage burden to taxpayers.
The results of all this work speak for themselves. In my first 3 years, we increased student academic achievement that had languished below the top 10% of Ohio public schools for years, moving us from 63rd to 17th place among Ohio’s 608 districts — from the 89th to the 97th percentile. And we accomplished that outcome while spending less per student each year to do so. Money doesn’t drive educational outcomes, focus does.
We were well on our way to the Top 10 when Covid arrived. I have and will continue to write and speak of the profound harm to children our public health and political leaders imposed but this is not the place for it. My most recent commentary on the topic can be found here.
While our Board couldn’t prevent all of the unnecessary and evidence-free burden on our students, I am proud that we pushed back where the law allowed. As a result, we had more real in-person school with fewer restrictions than any other public school district under the jurisdiction of our county health director. Despite the sometimes angry meetings, the proof we were correct in our decisions is that none of the experts’ predictions of certain failure came true. We had less illness, less learning loss, and better outcomes for students than districts that didn’t follow our lead.
Even the latest drama over our Board’s policies making parental primacy clear in the development of their children is worth it because it is rooted both in the objective evidence of what’s best for kids and in recognizing the limits of the role of a public school. Public schools err profoundly when they usurp the role of parents in guiding the development of their children. I’ve written about this topic in a response to activists here and in a recent OpEd here.
Throughout my service, I have been guided by the belief that public education is important and the fact that educational time and taxpayer money are limited resources and, therefore; every minute and every dollar not spent focused on achieving the best academic and developmental outcomes is time and money we shouldn’t be spending. Because of this focus and in collaboration with my colleagues, and the incredibly hard work of our administration, faculty, and staff, the New Albany-Plain Local School District is in a much better place academically and financially than it was when I was first elected.
I accomplished everything I set out to do in my Board service. With my retirement from my business two years ago, my wife and I are both eager to embark on a much more active travel schedule and continue our philanthropic activities. That will make it difficult for me to be fully engaged on the Board for the next four years. As such, I will not be seeking re-election to a third term and will leave the Board when my term expires at the end of this year. I will be fully engaged until then. I wish only the best for our students and our district and will trust our community to vote for Board members who will continue to put the interests of students first.
People would often comment that school board service was a thankless job. I alway replied that as much as I loved my work in my business, working on our school board is the best job I’ve ever had. It has been my honor to serve the students, parents, taxpayers, faculty, and staff of the New Albany-Plain Local School District.
Sincerely and Respectfully,
Phil
Philip Derrow
Member of the New Albany-Plain Local Board of Education