Archive: News

David DittmanSchool Board Election

David Dittman and his wife Maureen have lived in Lansing for 16 years. His daughters Megan Kelly Dittman, and Carra Kathleen Dittman started school in Lansing in 1990. Dittman says that the year before moving here he paid tuition for them to attend, because of the school system’s good reputation. He is the Hubert E. Westfall Professor of Accounting at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, and is a past dean there.

Dittman says he is running to give back to a community that has been very good to him and his family. He came to the Lansing Star to talk about his candidacy and issues facing the Lansing School District.

Lansing Star: Why are you running for the school board?

David Dittman: Well, I became interested in the Lansing school system when I noticed that they had put forward the original $39 million capital budget. That got my interest so I started to pay attention more to what was going on in the Lansing school system and what the board of education was doing.

I joined the facilities committee and tried to work through that facilities budget. It became apparent then, with the facilities vote that the people in Lansing rejecting it, that the voters were having some issues with the amount of spending was going on in the system.

And then I started to attend some of the budget meetings that the school board had and kind of watched the way they engaged in the budget process. At the coaxing of several community members, I decided that I would offer my services to the people of Lansing and see if they want my services by electing me.

Lansing has been good to me. My daughters went to Lansing Middle School and High School. I thought that the schools were excellent. I thought that the teachers were fantastic. When they were in school all the budgets passed without any problem. Lansing has been good to me and if I have some abilities to help at a time when people are looking at the system with some questions, I felt it was time to offer my services to give back a little bit.

LS: What are your qualifications, either formal or experiential?

DD: Well I have an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Notre Dame. I then went to Ohio State and have a masters and Ph.D. in accounting from Ohio State University. I started teaching in 1969 so I have been an educator all of my life. I feel that I have some knowledge about education at least in higher education.

From 1985 to 1990 I was chairman of the accounting department at the University of Minnesota and then I was recruited to come to Cornell. I was dean at the Hotel School from 1990 to 2000. So I have administrative experience in higher education so I know how to do a budget, how to match academic programs to the resources that are spent, and I felt that that knowledge of budgeting, that knowledge of academic programs, and concept of accountability that we need to have as educators for the resources that we consume gives me at least a basic knowledge in entering into the school board at Lansing and hopefully helping them make rationale decisions from the standpoint of how to spend their money.

LS: What different point of view will you bring to the board, and is the current board doing a good job?

DD: I’m not one to judge whether the board is doing a good job or bad job. I think that the community needs to judge that, that’s what they do with their vote. They need to judge individual board members when they come up for re-election just as to the job they’ve done.

What I think I bring to the board is expertise in budgeting. I taught courses at Northwestern University in program budgeting, so I understand how to link program outcomes to inputs that are used. I know how to tie that to strategic plans. What I’m missing right now from a standpoint of the current administration and the way the school board looked at that budget -- at least from my standpoint, just as a casual observer -- I didn’t see the linkage between the resources being consumed and programs that are being presented. I don’t think the citizens of Lansing are seeing that and that’s why I think the budget had problems last year and why the capital budget had problems last spring also.

LS: What do you think the top challenges are going to be for the school board over the coming board member term?

DD: Well, I think that the citizens of Lansing are starting to feel the pinch from the standpoint of the taxes that they are paying. This is not a low tax environment that we are in both county and school system. It’s a total tax environment. You have to look at the total taxes that you pay. And I think that the current budget has some things built into it that are going to force the board to have higher tax increases in the future. These one-shot deals where they have spent down the reserves, where they have one-shot expenses or one-shot revenues in the budget which are then not made up by expense cuts in the next period, lead to increasing tax rates.

A perfect example is this year where we are looking at a 7.8% increase versus a 2.2% increase last year. The reason you have a 2.2% last year is because they spent down all of the reserves and this year you are paying all of the expenses that were increased last year being compounded into this year’s budget.

So the real question is how do you smooth that budget and at the same time deliver the excellent academic programs that Lansing has been known for.

LS: What would your top goals be?

DD: My goal would be to make sure that the board of education understands during the budgeting process their link between the resources that we are consuming, the amount of expenditures that we are having, and the academic programs and what the desired and planned outcome of those academic programs are. And then make sure we communicate that accurately to the citizens of Lansing so that they can make a decision as to what they want to have.

Right now we do not know from looking at the budget because it is a line budget item not a program budget, you do not know how much we spent on different academic programs. When one of the board members ask at the last meeting why are we having a 7.8% increase, let’s limit it to 4%, and one of the other board members asked her, well what program would you cut? That was somewhat of an unreasonable question because there is no way she could tell what program to cut. It wasn’t presented that way for her to make those kinds of decisions.

And without spending a lot of time which the board members should be spending. I am willing to spend that time in digging into the budget and making sure we understand what we are spending the money for. I think the board doesn’t understand nor do the citizens understand exactly what the money is being spent on.

LS: A couple of the board members have said that they don’t think it is their responsibility to know line items in that much detail. Do you think it is?

DD: I think it’s not only the responsibility; it’s their duty as an elected official to understand the line items in that budget. I have served on public boards. I have served on not-for-profit boards. While you may or may not, depending upon the circumstances, get into that amount of detail, there are certain activities as a board member that you need to understand. There are major laws for public companies in the United States right now that board members are responsible to their shareholders for the outcome and the operation of management. I believe the board members in a public environment are just as responsible to the citizens for the outcomes of the administrators that they hire to do the job.

LS: I want to talk about the data warehousing and benchmarks. Administrators have told the board the State is demanding more data warehousing, more data collecting, and someone has to do that. But also, I’ve noticed that they are taking advantage of that, as well as the detailed State testing results they get, in order to see if they are reaching benchmarks in terms of measuring the success of programs. So, I’m interested in what you think of that approach.

DD: Well, obviously it all revolves around the quality of the test. If the test is good and the test actually tests the content of the course, then testing is very good because it gives us a benchmark on how well our students are performing, whether they are achieving the goals that have been set out for them, the benchmarks that have been set out for them by the Board of Regents, and how well our teachers are doing communicating and instilling in the students the knowledge that they need to have in able to perform in the future.

If you think about it, life in academics is all about testing. Our students in order to go to college have to take the SATs, our college students in order to go to graduate school have to take the GREs or the GMATs, or MEDCATs, or LSATs so those are testing activities which show ability and performance.

I think it’s good because it forces people to teach the subject material that will be on the test. Now does it allow them to teach broader things? Certainly it does. Nobody has said you can only teach the things that are on the test. You can certainly broaden out, but if there is a minimum requirement that is mandated by the state and the test tests those minimum requirements then I think it is very far to test teachers on their ability to communicate those minimum requirements and to judge the administration of a school system on whether or not their students are meeting those standards.

LS: Do you mean a certification test for the teachers?

DD: Well I think that’s up to the Board of Regents, that’s not up to the school. Most of our teachers are already certified in the subject matter that they teach so I think that is very important because as we become more and more technical society it is very important that our students learn these specific subject materials in order to be able to perform in society whether it’s whether they go on to college or not.

LS: Do you feel the district’s difficulty in keeping a permanent superintendent and other administrators has been a serious problem for the district?

DD: Certainly leadership in any organization has its major advantages provided it’s good leadership. So the fact that no one has really been at the helm consistently for the last five or six years has left a void. I understand that the teacher’s have stepped in and have done an excellent job of maintaining quality standards, etc. that the school has. I think we should be very proud of our teachers in having done that.

They are certainly the strength of Lansing school system.

LS: What should school board members be doing to address the problem of keeping a superintendent?

DD: Well, our superintendent is very well paid so that’s one thing. You pay for quality administrative activities because there is a lot of responsibility for a superintendent and for the business managers to run the (school).

I think the school board should set goals for the superintendent, and if the superintendent meets the goals that he should be rewarded. And I believe that somebody that operates in an environment where they know what they are supposed to do and they are achievable results and they achieve those results and they are rewarded tents to be happy in their jobs and stay in their jobs.

LS: Do you think that the board is micromanaging? There may be a danger of that, because without steady leadership somebody had to fill in before the current superintendent was hired.

DD: It’s hard to say. I haven’t been to all the board meetings. I did go to the budget meetings and I can tell from the budget meeting that there is not micromanagement going on. They certainly weren’t into the budget in the detail that I believe they should have been, this round any way. I can’t speak about other rounds because it didn’t pique my attention until lately.

You know it’s not the board’s responsibility to manage the school system. It’s the board’s responsibility to set the goals and approve the budget for the school system. It’s the board’s responsibility to help the citizens, the voters, and the superintendent and administrators make hard resource allocation decisions.

There is never any difficulty if the administrators can have every program that they want and there is no budget constraint. But I believe in the future that we’re looking at a system that is going to be operating under a budget constraint and there is going to be some hard decisions that need to be made. I believe it’s the board’s responsibility to focus those decisions into specific cuts rather than general cuts.

As an educator I do not believe in 5% across the board type of government cuts or educational cuts. I believe what you do is you find out what you’re doing which is not required and then you make sure that the educational programs that are required by the state and needed by the students in order to be successful in life don’t get diluted by programs that individuals would like to have but we can’t afford to have.


LS: Does Lansing school board try to do too much?

DD: Again I just have the experience from attending a few meetings. I found it interesting, but I found it somewhat curious that we are going to have a major budget discussion but that took third place or fourth place to presentations about gifted programs etc. that took an hour of time, and then basically crunched down on the amount of time the board had for serious work.

Not that the board shouldn’t be finding out about this program, but I don’t believe we should be doing these kinds of things on the night when the board is having serious budget discussions and trying to make decisions. People get tired as the night goes on. The more tired you are, the less good you are at making decisions. So just don’t do it.

LS: What lessons, if any, should the school board take from last year’s failed budget vote and the failed capital budget vote?

DD: I think the school board should find out what the citizens of Lansing want. In order to do that you just don’t go out and say to the citizens ‘what do you want’ because citizens don’t think about this every day and they don’t have a frame of reference.

So you have to frame the questions and tell them why one is good and why some other alternative may not be as good from their perspective.

I think we need to do this before the (budget is presented) and requires a vote. In other words, we should be sharing with the citizens what the capital challenges are and what trade-offs there are, and have a discussion involving those trade offs ahead of time.

I didn’t feel that the capital facilities committee was a good discussion of those things. While we spent a lot of time -- and I attended every one but one of those meetings on a voluntary basis -- I didn’t find that those discussions to be completely insightful as to why we were spending capital dollars on the programs, in other words, what we were going to achieve.

The program committee that was supposed to be judging academic programs were basically... those numbers were very askew leading to one alternative only. So there was really no community input as to what the alternatives were.

LS: But wasn’t that precisely what they were trying to do by having the citizen committee?

DD: It was a mixed bag. It was hard to tell. You probably remember the question I asked about the music program. If all the music programs are in the choir and everybody is doing an excellent job and they have excellent performances, etc., then why did we rank them zero or very low? And only rank the alternative, which was spend millions of dollars on more rooms, very high? It isn’t as if we are doing a bad job now, the question is what to those millions of dollars get us in the future. What’s that delta change citizens are going to see?

I didn’t see anybody explaining that and I think that is why the citizens voted against…why the issue went down.

LS: Where do you stand on the differing opinions about the projected school population? What should Lansing be doing with this kind of uncertainty about it’s own growth?

DD: Well I think there are two issues there. One issue is trying to get a good projection of what the growth in the student population is going to be. With the projections that we had on the budget committee for the future, the actualizations seemed to be somewhat just a little bit below those projections. So those projections were going down, in other words the number of students was decreasing in the future, and I think the actual numbers have actually gone down a little bit more than the projections. But we have to check on that because I don’t have those exact numbers. So that’s one thing. We need to get good projections as to what is going to happen.

A lot of it depends upon if the sewer is passed and exactly what areas get the sewer and that obviously lead to development and lead to more families and therefore more children that would attend our school system and therefore put pressure on the school.

One of the problems with the capital budget at the time it was being proposed, and you will recall that I brought this up, is that we’re not really adding space with the capital budget. And if we do go into a period of growth, we will be pretty much bonded out at a time when we need to increase the facilities and consequently we may be too early on the capital budget from the standpoint until we know what kind of classroom needs we have in the future.

LS: You mean we’re not expanding space enough for future needs?

DD: We’re dealing with current programmatic issues which, when you look at the test results, are not failing grades. We have a large number of our students in the 95^th percentile on our high school students passing the Regents. We should be very proud of the job that our teachers are doing. When there is a particular grade that is not doing well, then we should concentrate our efforts on how to improve test scores in that grade.

But I’m worried about bonding out from the standpoint of the future needs we have. Does the school system have some capital needs? There are certainly capital needs. I think we all agreed that they were there. But it was difficult for us the way it was presented to us by the architects that were leading that operation to determine what the real needs were and what needs would be nice but aren’t necessary.

I am very much worried if they were right that the boilers are going to fail and there is going to be no reserves to replace the boiler because the reserves have been spent down in last year’s budget.

LS: Do you think that the board has been proactive or reactive and what should it be?

DD: I think the board should be proactive. They are there to set policy and to embrace a strategic plan that’s brought forward by the administration and to help the administration as representatives of the community think through that plan and then to assess what needs, what resource needs that plan invokes now and in the future and then put together a multi-year budget that indicates to the citizens how we are going to address those needs.

So it’s not like let’s wait until the second week in April and now approve the budget for next year. We should be looking out five years into the future understanding what our needs are going to be, projecting what the student population is going to be, looking to see what the proper student-teacher ratio is. And I didn’t see any of that projected in the last budget. I didn’t see 10 years of student-teacher ratios. Is it going up or going down? I don’t know, but I’ll find out.

LS: Do you think that high school taxes are a real or a perceived problem? About a year ago when we were dealing with the budget that eventually failed, I went to the county Web site and found the tax figures for all the surrounding communities. I thought I was going to find Lansing’s taxes were considerably higher than the surrounding communities, but I didn’t.

DD: Well it depends upon who you are and how you are looking at it. If you’re somebody moving here from Ohio, these are high school taxes. On a similar home here you’re going to be paying three or four times more in taxes. So the question is how does a small town in Ohio do it and have a school system that is operating, a similar type of school system, and why is it so expensive here in the State of New York? That’s the first question we have to ask.

That’s kind of a systemic problem in New York, but we probably have some of the highest property taxes in the country as well as high income tax on the state level as well as high sales taxes, etc. So we are paying a lot of taxes. So people are being taxed from a lot of different directions from that standpoint.

There seems to be growth. When you look at the percentage changes in the school taxes, the growth changes, there doesn’t seem to be that much. The part that is being hidden here is the appreciation of the property. While the rate doesn’t go up as much, the property values in some areas are going up 10-15% a year. So when the rate goes up that’s compounded on the 10% or 15% rate while the school tax rate doesn’t look like it went up much the person’s taxes went up quite a bit.

LS: You mean the actual dollar amount?

DD: The actual dollar amount went up quite a bit. I feel very sorry for people living in Lansing on fixed incomes who’s having their properties revalued and then having these high school taxes because they are starting to get to a position where they are don’t have the ability to pay and I think we need to be somewhat sensitive to that. We just can’t blow by that.

They are citizens, they are neighbors, and they are our friends, and we need to understand this burden falls on them as well as those of us who can afford to pay it.

LS: What is your position on class size? Too big, too small, or just right? And is keeping class size small more or less than lowering expenses?

DD: Well, let’s ask that question. I have been working on that right now. I’m trying to find the information on class sizes and I would like to see how class sizes have varied over the last 10 years because the school system has been a very good school system for a long period of time and our class size is maintaining the same size or are they increasing or are they decreasing?

We had a facilities committee matrix of the rooms being used and if you look at the matrix of the rooms being used by time of day it indicates what class size was. Some of those class sizes were very small. So the question becomes one of just how are we doing that and the other question is how are they determining the personnel budget to full-time equivalent teacher budget given the number of students decreasing. Is that decreasing or increasing? If it’s increasing then obviously class sizes are decreasing.

In a school budget, as in a university budget, our major costs are salaries and benefits, and so making sure you have the right teachers for the right programs is an important job of the school administration and an important job for the board of education.

So I don’t know what the right size is right off hand, but I think you look at peer groups, you look at trends. I don’t have that information right now so I can’t make a judgment. Then you ask yourself the question, how does it affect a young man or a young woman that’s a senior in high school that walks out of a class of say 20 people and they go to Cornell and they walk into a freshman accounting class that I would teach that has 75 people in it? And that’s considered a small class.

So should they have some classes that are a little bit larger starting to get them used to a 2,000 student psychology course taught by Jim Moss or taught in the SUNY system by a famous professor? It’s not the size, it’s the quality of instruction.

LS: Should the fifth grade be in the elementary or middle school?

DD: I think the fifth grade should be where there is room for it.

LS: As a small district High School Principal Michelle Stone has said that there’s no fat to cut in the programs if we are to keep our students competitive with those from larger districts. Do you think our programs are adequate, too much, not enough and how would you address that as a school board member?

DD: Well, I think you have to question the premise. Are we to be competitive with larger districts? And if the answer to that is yes, then it’s going to be very, very costly for a small school system to be competitive with a large school system because large school systems have more resources.

LS: I want to qualify this, because I’m not talking about the system competing with other systems as much as our students having the ability to compete to get into college or whatever professions they want to pursue.

DD: I think that then you need to look and see what the college requirements are. Our students over the years have done very well in getting into colleges because they have had very good foundations in English and writing, very good foundations in mathematics and in science, and very good foundations in social studies. That’s what gets children into college because they have the ability to do the analytical ability to do the math, they have the ability to do the reading comprehension, they have the ability to interpret and they have the ability then to score well on the SAT exams. So if they do well in high school and do well on the SAT exams they are competitive.

We see a lot of young men and young ladies coming to Cornell with AP courses. They come from big systems where there are a lot of AP courses. I don’t believe that a small system can offer all of those AP courses, but we can certainly offer AP courses in mathematics, in English, and in history and the basic courses. It’s kind of a back to basics routine. Let’s make sure we do the basics well and if we educate the students well in the basics, we will have a well-educated student who will compete extremely well with others when they go to college.

LS: Presumably the problems that motivated the capital project didn’t go away even though the capital project went away. What should the board do next to address these issues?

DD: Well I think the board needs to sit down and put together a list of items that are capital budget items that are absolutely necessary. We ought to find out, is the boiler faulty? It was alleged that a 30-year life boiler was ready to go at 15. If that’s the case then the board should ask two questions: Is it ready to go at 15 and why is it ready to go at 15?

Because if we have only got half life out of a 30 year boiler then the question is why did that happen, and we want to make sure if the citizens of Lansing buy another 30 year boiler it lasts 30 years instead of 15 years. So I think we need to have somebody that is a boiler expert come in and take a look at it and really determine whether the leakage we see is just some leakage or something that’s in the boiler, and if it’s a 15 year old boiler do we need to have the manufacturer come in and take a look at it and see why the boiler is leaking at 15.

These are the types of things that if I owned it, I would do and I think the board of education has to act like owners and ask those questions. If you were doing this for your house wouldn’t you call to find out if you have a warranty and then have the manufacturer come in and take a look at it and tell you why this thing is failing at half life?

LS: What would you like voters to know about your candidacy that we haven’t discussed?

DD: What I want the voters to know that I’m interested in being a member of the board of education because I want to give back to the community. I think I have some talent from the accounting standpoint, the academic standpoint, my experience as an educator, my experience as an accountant, my experience as a former board member to bring to this board, to help it focus on the business of education in Lansing so that we get the most effective education system for the least cost that we can.

I feel that Lansing has been good to me. I’ve enjoyed living here. I’ve enjoyed the people that I have met in Lansing. I know that my children got quality education at Lansing so I’ve received a lot from Lansing. If the voters want me to be on the board I think it’s my time to give back to Lansing some of these benefits that I’ve received.


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