The Howell Public Schools Board of Education took one step closer Monday to privatizing three administrators’ positions by approving a vendor for the service. Also Monday, the board delayed a decision revising board policies that made headlines — sacred music in choral concerts and appropriate reading for advanced English students — after Trustee Wendy Day suggested numerous changes. The board approved, 5-0, a resolution approving Caledonia-based Professional Educational Services Group as a third-party contractor for administrative services.
The board is expected next to have its attorney review the company’s proposed contract and will meet 6 p.m. Oct.
22 in a work session to discuss the issue more thoroughly. As it stands, school retirees can retire from the district and collect their pension. The employee, if privatized, is then hired by a management company and leased back to the district at an agreed-upon salary.
The practice saves school districts about 17.5 percent per privatized position because they do not contribute to the retirement fund or health-care costs for those employees. In Howell’s case, the move could save upward of $130,000 if all four eligible administrators opt to go along with it.
State Rep. Lorence Wenke calls the approach “double-dipping” and his House Bill 4799 would prohibit the practice. Wenke has said he believes districts who privatize do so at the expense of other Michigan school districts.
Board members said that was OK with them because they were elected to serve Howell school district and the move could save the district tens of thousands of dollars in an economically tough time. Meanwhile, the board tabled any action on revising its curriculum policy. The school district has had a 10-year-old policy that limited the performance of sacred music in choral concerts to 30 percent of the program, which school administrators said stemmed from parents’ complaints about the proliferation of religious music in programs.
The district made headlines in September 2006 when Voices of Heaven, a 62-member youth choir from Germany, performed a concert at Howell High School through an exchange program of the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Twin Lake, and was reportedly told to scale back their performance, eliminating spiritual or religious numbers. Day also said she wanted to add a statement to the curriculum requirements that teachers label — at parents’ requests — any books or movies used in the classroom that have sexual content, profanity, violence, drug use or racial slurs. In January, Howell schools again made headlines when parents and community members objected to “The Freedom Writers Diary” by Erin Gruwell as well as “Black Boy” by Richard Wright and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, both of later which are taught in 11th grade.
Vicki Fyke, founder of Livingston Organization for Values in Education and who is currently seeking one of the open seats, asked county, state and federal prosecutors to investigate whether distribution of the books violates the state law against distribution of pornography to minors. The prosecutors declined to pursue charges. LOVE lost its fight to get the books pulled from high school classrooms when the board voted in January to include the books in its curriculum.
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