|
May
09
2007
|
School Board: An Interview With Mike Cheatham |
|
|
|
by Dan Veaner
|
|
Wednesday, 09 May 2007 |
 Mike Cheatham threw his hat in the ring for a school board seat this week when Gina Lord Shattuck withdrew from the race, because he says the Lansing community deserves to have choices. Cheatham has attended and participated in school board meetings frequently over the 20 years he and wife Terri have lived here. Their three children Danny, Kelly, and Sean have attended all the Lansing schools. Danny is not at Syracuse University, and Kelly will be joining him after she graduates from Lansing High School this year. Sean will be starting high school next year.
Cheatham is a research specialist at Syracuse University, where he has worked for ten years. Before that he worked at Cornell for ten years, and prior to that Cheatham worked for NASA. In a whirlwind day Tuesday, he collected the signatures required, rearranged his commitments, and showed up prepared for the “Meet The Candidates” debate Tuesday evening. In the midst of all this he made time to talk to the Lansing Star for an interview in his home.
LS: Why are you running for the school board and why now?
MC: Well, I’ve always had an interest in being on the school board. I think it’s fair to say I’ve had an interest in school boards -- in having some role in how schools function -- probably since the time I was in high school myself in Massachusetts. When we first moved here, this was something I said to myself and I said to my wife, I really want to be involved in the school board. But at the time I was told by people that I had met here in town that not having been born here myself, my chance of getting elected to the school board wasn’t a very big chance at all.
What we’ve seen over the last five years is that a lot has changed. We have a current makeup of the school board, we have more and more people on the board who were not born here, who have moved into this town and into our school district. So I think it’s very fair to say that I’ve always had an interest in school boards. The question is why? Well, for me, the reason I’m running and my main interest is in academics. It’s the curriculum, what courses are offered and when, are they the best choices, can we improve? I think any time that question is asked I think the obvious answer is yes, we can always improve. We should never rest on our laurels.
It’s not to say that there is anything wrong, but there is always room for improvement. And not just in improvement in what we are currently offering, I would like to see additional courses offered in Lansing even though it is a small school district.
Why am I running now? By and large I’ve always had the interest and I think we need to be in a position where we actually have a true election, not just have two candidates for two positions and ending up being an appointment. I think the voters have a right to have choices.
LS: What are your qualifications either formal or just attributes that will make you a valuable school board member?
And one that I can think of the top of my head is you’ve attended plenty of school board meetings over the years.
MC: Yes, I have attended many, many school board meetings. I think I go all the way back to when Raymond Buckley was superintendent. So I think I attended one or two school board meetings at the tail end of his term as superintendent. I attended many, many school board meetings when John Barney was the president of the school board, when Andy Levine was the president of the school board, when Jim Tull was the president of the school board, right up to the present.
I can’t tell you how many I’ve attended but I have attended many school board meetings over the last probably 15 years I think would be a safe number to use.
I do work in academia. I have worked all my life in academia except for the first two years fresh out of grad school where I worked for NASA for two years before moving here to Lansing.
LS: What different point of view will you bring to the school board? It’s a two-part question -- the first part is that each board member comes with a unique point of view. I’m also asking in a way what the board is doing right or not doing right at the moment.
MC: If it’s a two-part question to me the answer really comes down to one answer to answer both. It is academics. I don’t think that we are offering the right number of courses, the right kind of courses to truly make our graduating seniors as competitive as they could be both in the college market and in the job market.
For instance, we offer a class in AP Music, a class in AP Art, AP Calculus, AP French, AP Spanish, AP US History, AP Statistics, AP English, AP Biology. That’s a lot of AP classes. For example if you look at Trumansburg they offer more AP classes than we do and their school district is of a very similar size to ours.
I would like us to offer more along the lines of AP classes.
LS: Are you talking about basics or just a wide variety?
MC: There has to be more variety in science. That’s my feeling. We do need more than AP Biology. We need either or both an AP Chemistry class and an AP Physics. Along the lines of calculus, mathematics, we offer the calculus AB class whereas I think we should be offering calculus BC either both or BC.
The reason for that is if we go and talk to any returning graduate who is now in college in Lansing, and I can go back four years from the current day to the class of 2003, 2004 right up to the present. Those students come back to Lansing and what we always hear from them is that they do extremely well relative to their peers in English language arts. They do very well in mathematics. They do very well in foreign languages. Where we do not compete as well is in the sciences and in engineering.
The reason for that is because they are not prepared as well relative to their peers in say an engineering school in their math skills, in their calculus skills. They may have done extremely well in AP Calculus AB class but their peers have had BC. They are that much further along.
And in maintaining our competitive edge I think these are the things we need to do—we need to offer more challenging classes to the student body.
LS: High School Principal Michelle Stone made it a point during the capital project process to say that the high school program is lean. You are talking about adding to the program to make it more competitive. That begs the question of balancing program with budget considerations.
MC: Well, let me not answer the budget part of that yet. Let me add to this issue of what Michelle Stone is talking about. If there is anything that we could cut, I think that maybe we should be looking at requirements of students who are taking physical education.
I know in the past, I don’t know if it’s still the case, but in the past Ithaca High School if a student was participating in a varsity or JV sport they did not have to take phys ed. So let’s look at that as an option to free up the student’s schedule so that they can then have time to take some other course. Is that possible? Especially in Lansing where we have the same student is going to be participating in a fall, winter, and a spring sport. They are active student athletes throughout the whole year. They are not couch potatoes. Do they really need to take an additional time period of physical education?
I know that what we offer in physical education in Lansing is not just a swimming program or a module in football, or a module in soccer, or a module in baseball, basketball, softball, the things that we participate in at the varsity level. They do talk about other things particularly programs that an adult can participate in for their entire life.
I do realize that that is very valuable. But can something be worked out to allow them to do both but without requiring them to be in the class?
Another thing I think we should be looking at is health. Do they really need to take health in a classroom in the Lansing High School or can they meet that requirement by taking it online through TC3, which a lot of our students do. My son Sean will probably take advantage of that because our plans for him and his curriculum over the next four years is pretty tight and to make it all work he needs to get health or some other classes taken online freeing up his schedule.
College requirements are getting more and more demanding. The requirements between Danny being accepted to Syracuse University and Kelly being accepted to Syracuse University is only two years but they added the requirement of having four full years of science between Danny and Kelly. That caught us a bit off guard.
LS: What was it before?
MC: Three. It’s now gone to four. So that’s really putting a bit of pressure on Sean coming up because if anything the requirements at the college level are going to get stricter they’re not going to loosen up.
So I agree 100% with Michelle Stone. There really isn’t any place to cut directly, but I think we need to be creative in allowing the students to meet the requirements but without being locked into the classroom to do it. We obviously are doing that. We have programs at the high school, New Visions, things like that where students can get off campus and still meet their high school requirements and excel in it at the same time.
LS: What are the top challenges that you believe the school board faces in the next three years?
MC: I still keep coming back to academics and curriculum. It is so obvious that we don’t talk about it. It’s the meat and potatoes of a student’s education in Lansing, but it’s never brought up as a major topic before the school board. Let’s look at the curriculum, let’s look at the course offerings that we have, and elementary school do they align with the middle school, do they align with the high school.
It’s kind of there under the surface. To me it’s like permafrost, it’s there all the time but you don’t see it exposed at the surface. I want to see this stuff come to the surface because again we’re doing a good job but we could do better and approve on it. That’s the difference, that’s what I’m hoping to accomplish in being a school board member is to bring this to the forefront, get it out in the open, let’s talk about it. Let’s work with the teachers, work with the staff, work with administration and move forward because I don’t think we’re moving forward, I think we’re slipping backwards.
LS: I think you’re right about that. I think they talk more about special education than they do about general education. And understandably because of all the mandates and so on and the onus of dealing with it that they deal with every day. However, I guess you could say Lansing has laurels to rest on.
MC: They do. Okay, the No Child Left Behind federal mandate involving academic intervention services. We have a very significant investment of time and money in the school district into this program. We have no choice, it has to be done based on mandates.
But, does every single child come in through the system that is now earmarked as requiring academic services? In the middle school for instance, could we have seen that coming and done something about that in the elementary school? Does every child have to be promoted with their class?
I know in some cases they are not, but in many cases they are and they shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t be promoted just because of their age. They should be promoted because they meet the academic requirements and that they are socially ready to be advanced. Not every kid is.
Can we reduce the number of students requiring academic intervention and services in the middle and high school by being proactive in the elementary school? I don’t know the answer to that yet. I’m not on the school board but I hope to find that out. And if it’s the case then let’s do something about that.
LS: Speaking of mandates all the data warehousing and mandated testing has been greatly expanding over the past few years. Our administration has been using those in positive ways to set benchmarks for the programs and see how well we are meeting them. Where do you stand on that?
MC: I like test scores. I track them. There’s a lot that I know about Lansing, I know a lot about our neighboring school districts by looking at New York State Department of Education web page and doing some data mining on my own to see how the various school districts are performing on their school report cards. I look at the test scores in 4th and 8th grade.
LS: You are talking about the report cards on the schools that the State publishes every year?
MC: Yes. I look at attendance rates, I look at enrollment rates, things like that. I have been doing that since the state first started to conduct those tests which would have affected my oldest son Danny when he was in I think 8th grade was the first time they started offering those tests. So I actually keep my own Excel spreadsheets tracking that stuff. Every year I add the data points in because I want to know how is Lansing doing relative to Trumansburg, Dryden, Groton and Ithaca.
I think that there has been improvement in the last year or two in test scores, but it’s okay, it’s adequate, but I still think we can do better. Do we hinge everything on those test scores? No, but I think they are very important to pay attention to.
So the data warehousing is mandated, we have to do it. No sense in whining about it, but I think we’ve also spent a lot of time spinning our wheels in mud on this issue with the school board, with the administration during this past year. Where we are today here in May, we should have been there in November if not earlier.
LS: Are you talking about hiring the data person?
MC: Yeah, this was a very simple decision but we spent an awful lot of time, effort, and money talking about it. It’s kind of ridiculous in my mind. We missed a lot of other opportunities on a lot of other fronts because we spent so much time worrying about this.
 Mike Cheatham
LS: Do you mean relative to having to fill in so much because of not having steady leadership at the top in the superintendent’s seat? Now that we have a permanent administration does the board micro-manage?
MC: I think I would actually like to separate them. Yes, the agendas are too long. I don’t think that’s related to not having steady management at the top and having to fill in and micromanage. I just think it’s too much for meeting every two weeks, there’s too much material to cover in a single night. They either need to cut it back which actually delays progress in the long run, or we have to meet more.
If that’s what it takes then that’s what we have to do. If we have to meet more, then let’s have shorter agendas. I’ve heard it said by many school board members that we’re getting to the real tough issues at the end of school board meetings when people are tired and we’re rushing through the really important stuff wasting a lot of time at the front end.
So I think maybe Robert’s Rules of Order needs to be enforced very strictly. But on the other hand in a small town like this it’s sometimes nice to actually hear input from the community, from the audience outside of their allotted community input time. There are some good things that have been said but if we strictly followed Robert’s Rules we couldn’t allow that.
One of my good friends, Tom Keane, has said school board meetings are meetings held in public, not public meetings. I’ve wrestled with that myself. I’ve sat in school board meetings and have wanted to say something, offer a commentary after the community input part, and I just sat there and bit my tongue because I knew that under the circumstances it wasn’t appropriate.
But in terms of micromanaging, I don’t think so. I think what has happened has been necessary. I’m hoping that we now have a very long future with our administration so we can in fact move forward. If we turn this administration over again we are definitely going backward.
LS: Well that answers my next question that is do you feel that the district’s difficulty in keeping a permanent superintendent and other administrators have been a serious problem?
MC: Yes.
LS: So what should school board members be doing about it?
MC: Well, I think it’s important that school board members don’t bring personal agendas to the meeting. If they have a problem with an individual that is either in the administration, teacher staff member, or even another board member, that stuff should be dealt with outside of school board meetings.
School board meetings should be reserved strictly for school board related issues and what I have seen happen, not just with the current sitting board, but over the last five, six, seven years has been there are too many agendas. I think that has to stop. We need to let the administration do their job and we’re not really allowing them to do their job.
LS: Population growth and the capital project. One of the criticisms of the capital project that didn’t pass was that it dealt with current issues but not future issues, and you can ask any two people what population growth is going to be in the schools in Lansing over the next 10 years and you will get at least two or three different answers.
So how do you plan for something like that? One of the things that really struck me was that when that capital budget went down, there wasn’t a Plan B. The issues are still there presumably but no fall back was really planned.
MC: I would like to treat this as two separate and non-related questions. Let’s deal with enrollment. You ask any two people you get two different answers, well you’re asking a third so I’ll give you a third answer. That is we shouldn’t be sitting back and just seeing how the cards lay on the floor like 52-card pickup or dice. We should be very proactive in Lansing in filling vacant seats in the elementary school and the middle school. We should be actively recruiting families to move to Lansing that have school age children. It should be our objective.
LS: I haven’t heard anyone say that before. Why?
MC: The buildings, we have what five or six buildings in addition to the elementary, middle, and high school we have a district office, a bus garage, and the grounds and maintenance building. Well let’s just look at the three buildings that have students in them. We have vacancies in the elementary school that range from 14% to 15%, thereabouts, relative to what the building was built to hold. We’ve seen from my own two older kids, actually all three of them coming through the system. When Danny and Kelly were in the elementary school their grade sizes were about 100, 110, 115 students. Big classes.
The building was built to handle that number. We’re still paying on that construction project. We still have to pay the bill to heat the building, still have to pay the bill to put the electricity in the building, still have to pay the water bill whether it’s full at 60% capacity or 100%. So let’s help the taxpayers in this regard by having that spread at 100% capacity not at 60% capacity.
Now I’ve had arguments with Chris Barret, you know, the Cornell professor. He’s an economist. I admit he knows a heck of a lot more about economics than I ever will. We debated about this issue of whether we need to put more bodies in Lansing to pay those bills or not. He maintains, and I may be paraphrasing this incorrectly on his part, that we’re okay whether we’re putting families in Lansing that have children or not. Again I’m not an expert in this, (Superintendent) Mark Lewis was a participant in this discussion one day while we were watching a varsity girl’s soccer game, and he said that’s not quite the case. There are state aid formulas that take into account the demographics of your population school age children, etc., and that we do need to be putting bodies into the building. It does in fact help the average taxpayer.
LS: I see. More town population without more school population could actually impact us negatively.
MC: Now part of this equation is the whole topic you need to look at our surrounding school districts, and this is where the whole data mining comes in. Tompkins County is shrinking so that families that are moving into our community, they are being drawn in by Cornell, Ithaca College, some of the biggest businesses here, we need to have these people move to Lansing. There are a lot of houses up for sale. We want families moving in here with school age children.
In addition to the bills for the heating and electricity, we’re not going to be laying off teachers unless it gets to the point where it’s ridiculous, we can’t be teaching just five students in your class, we have to consolidate and one of the teachers has to go.
You don’t fire teachers. They have a contract. So what we need to do is make sure they are actually utilizing their time by having a full classroom in front of them.
LS: The failed budget vote and the failed capital project vote…
MC: There wasn’t a Plan B. You’re right. We absolutely needed a Plan B. We needed an eight or nine million dollar budget to cover the deferred maintenance, the failed boilers. We needed to have that option. Perhaps that measure would have passed and at least we could have had, and I may be wrong on this, we weren’t paying to have new classrooms built maybe we wouldn’t have gotten state aid formula to pay for the maintenance. I don’t know the answer to that. It sure would have been nice if that could have been the case that state aid would have paid for new boilers, new roofs, new plumbing whatever it is with the state aid formula. That would have been a very nice option to look at.
LS: If the elementary school gets too close to capacity, that would exacerbate the overcrowding problem in the high school eventually, wouldn’t it?
MC: Not necessarily. I think whether there is truly overcrowding in the high school -- I know the arguments regarding the science classrooms, I’ve been well aware of that since before the previous capital project was undertaken. I think there were serious mistakes made in the high school in that we should have addressed science classrooms at that time, not this many years later.
I did a tour of the high school building with Bill Rankin, who was the high school principal at the time, and he showed me what the needs were. At the time we had a real problem with the swimming pool for instance. We definitely had a problem with safety in the science rooms and they should have been addressed then. That problem has not gone away, it still exists and we do need to do something.
We have been blessed, simply blessed, that there hasn’t been a major accident involving serious injury to a student this many years down the road. The students still have to do the experiments in order to meet the Regents requirements. They can’t get away with not doing them. We’re just lucky. How much longer can we remain lucky? That’s the problem.
LS: What other lessons do you think the school board can take from these failed votes?
MC: I think that we are in a mode right now of driving our budgets to meet certain tax rates as opposed to let’s look at the program offerings and see what the budget numbers are.
I think that’s a mode that we’ve been in the last couple to three years and I think we need to change that. We need to go back to the way it was. We need to establish what is needed and come up with a budget that will meet that.
I think the taxpayers are going to just have to foot the bill for it. If we keep cutting back, cutting back, then the quality of the program will eventually suffer. We may not see an immediate effect. It may not be…if we sink this particular budget coming up, forgetting the fact that our proposed tax rate is actually going to be lower than the contingency -- and that gets very confusing. But if this budget goes down at some point, it may not be in next year’s graduating class, but at some point we’re going to see a net negative effect on the quality of the education to the students and we can’t risk that.
LS: Well that goes to my next question, is high school taxes a real or perceived problem? Last year when the budget failed and everybody was saying our taxes are too high, we’re paying too much for schools, I went to the county website and I looked at the figures for the surrounding school districts. To my surprise we weren’t really out of line with our neighbors. So is this a real problem, is it perceived?
MC: Perception is reality. I think that it’s perceived. I think it’s made to look worse than it is because we are faced with a very controversial sewer district and on top of that right now we have an additional layer of government with the proposed library tax. Granted the library system what they are asking for is not very much money, but is this really the right time to throw that particular thing in?
I believe there is an awful lot that is perceived and not reality. I don’t think that our taxes are that much out of line with what we have been paying. Terri and I since we’ve lived here in Lansing -- yeah granted taxes have gone up and up and up, tax rates and assessments and everything. I think it’s an unfortunate situation that the town chose to pursue the sewer district now and the library organization is choosing now to throw the library tax equation at us.
That may have flown any other time but right now. I don’t know how the library thing is going to go. I just think the timing is poor. It hurts the library request, it hurts the school district having them at the same time and having them coupled in that the library tax is going to use the same tax base as the school district. And perception there is that oh, it’s another school tax but it isn’t, but perception, perception, perception.
LS: What is your position on class size? Do you think they are too big, too small, just right?
MC: I guess this is where I’m also a radical in this regard. I don’t see any problem with 20 students in an elementary school classroom. My kids went through that and I don’t think they suffered in their education. Well I’m talking of having 17 to 20, 21, 22 students in an elementary school class.
I don’t think it’s that big a deal. I do think it’s important that parents send their children to school ready to go to school. That they are toilet trained, they can tie their own shoes, that they can put their own coat on, the basic necessities of life. They should have as a skill set before they enter the building. It shouldn’t be put on to the elementary school teachers for their age to be doing those kinds of things. I think that is the parents’ responsibility.
Now if there are special needs, should they be in the general school population? That’s a question that needs to be raised and discussed. I don’t have the answer off the top of my head, I don’t know, but I think it needs to be raised.
So I don’t think having 20 students in the class at the elementary school is that deleterious to their education. Likewise, in the middle school. Here’s where I throw one out to you for consideration. I do think having small class sizes in the high school may adequately prepare students to go to very small liberal arts colleges, but it does not prepare them at all to go to major universities.
One of the things that I have been advocating since I moved into the school district and first became aware of our high school building is we have room 101 which is now used for the chorus. When I first moved into the school district, all of the tables and desks were there all the way down to the front. It was an underutilized, almost unused space.
What they should be doing even in our small school district -- they should be offering a class as an example, a class in humanities to seniors> The top achieving seniors in the class would be able to take this class and you take English, History, Music and Art, the four disciplines. You combine them, you have them tag team teach a course in humanities whether you cover some aspect of European History, some aspect of American, whatever it is, you design a course around it and you make it a complete integration.
When you’re reading, say, European History, when you’re reading Dickens, you should also be reading Emile Zola, a French author who was writing at the same time, who writes about the same human struggles and combine that with history of the time, bind it with the music, and combine it with the art of the time.
Have it completely integrated so they get a feel for exactly what was happening and not having four discretely dysjuncted subjects. Bring it together in one humanities class.
LS: And thus prepare them for what they are going to find…
MC: Prepare them for college environment.
LS: Where should the fifth grade be in elementary or the middle school?
MC: Well, if anybody buys into my argument that we should be actively recruiting students, then I guess you would have to leave it in the middle school. But if we worked then there is space in the elementary school. If the leading research says that’s where they should be, put them there. I know it’s a very emotional topic for parents of 4th grade, 3rd grade children. Where is my 5th grader going to be?
But I don’t have a problem with them being in either place, but I do want to see bodies in the classroom first and foremost.
LS: What else would you want voters to know about your Candidacy?
MC: Well, I’ve been very active with youth in this town since Danny, my oldest child, was actually four or five years old. I have been volunteering my time to coach through the rec program through Steve Colt coaching his baseball and soccer teams. At one point in time Steve Colt handed over the recreation soccer program to me to run, redesign it to better meet the needs of younger children rather than a kindergartener playing 11 via 11 on a full size soccer ball. We made changes to it and I have been, as my children have aged through that program, I am now for instance doing all the scheduling for the soccer programs at the field here in Lansing which is a travel league.
We are putting any where between 600 and 1,000 kids through that facility every weekend. That’s not just the Lansing facility, but our kids get to participate in it. So I’ve always been very active with the youth as a coach, as a mentor, as a friend. I will continue to do that at least until Sean graduates from high school. I enjoy it. I enjoy working with kids and doing whatever it takes to make their experience a fulfilling one.
|
|
Events Calendar
 |
November 2008 |
 |
|
|
|
News 
Post New Event
