- By Dan Veaner
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Often controversial, she frequently challenges administrators and fellow board members in school board meetings. Iacobucci is wary of identifying herself or her family on the Internet, so she asked the Star not to use a picture of her for this interview. The Lansing Star caught up with her in Macmillan Hall at Wells College last Tuesday.
Christine Iacobucci: I think that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done and quite honestly, it was a very difficult decision for me to make. I was 99% sure that I was not going to do it any longer, mostly because my children were telling me that they wanted to see me more often. And Joe commutes back and forth to Buffalo, and I was feeling like the time that we did have together was limited because I would have to go off to meetings or work. So I thought I had put in six years and that was going to be my service to the community. As the deadline drew closer, people kept approaching me asking me if I would consider running again. A petition was put forth on my behalf so I thought that was a clear message that I should run again.
LS: I heard you were surprised to learn you were running.
CI: I haven’t even seen the signature list, so I’m not sure who all signed it.
LS: What made you originally run for the board?
CI: I think that was 2001 and over the summer…I went to a Catholic school so we didn’t have school boards. I had seen on the marquee that there was a school board meeting and I thought I should see what this is all about. I went to a school board meeting and I found what they were talking about was very interesting, I found the dynamics of what was happening in the room was very interesting, and I had some questions that were answered a little peculiarly. So I walked out of the room sort of scratching my head, and then other people tried to help me make sense out of what just happened in there.
I thought well, this is something I might want to participate in. I thought my background might be beneficial to the other people on the board and there was a spot open so I thought I would run.
LS: What are your qualifications to be a school board member, either formal or attributes that make you a valuable addition?
CI: Well, I’ve been in education my entire life. Of course first as a student, then professionally my whole adult life has been dedicated to education. I have a degree in sociology. In fact this next semester I will have taught Sociology in Education three times. It’s an area that I find very fascinating, full of challenges, and social problems and solutions. So I care very much about it and care deeply.
LS: What different point of view do you bring to the board? In some ways I’m asking what does the board do right and what does the board do wrong, but what I’m mostly asking is that every board members comes with a specific point of view or interest. What do you consider yours to be?
CI: I think my number one responsibility is to the Lansing community. I think that board members are the voice of the people and it’s very important for me to make sure that there’s a strong open connection between the community and the school district. I think that’s my number one issue that I bring forth on the board.
LS: You’ve missed a lot of board meetings this year. I know you’ve had some schedule conflicts that were not anticipated when you ran last time. Is that going to continue making it difficult for you?
CI: I don’t believe I’ve missed a lot of board meetings. In fact I know that I’ve made 70% of the regularly scheduled board meetings. Two of the board meetings I missed happened to occur over the summer while my family and I were on vacation. So if you look at those quantitatively I believe I’ve been there fairly regularly.
You know it’s one of those things where face time can be misleading. There are other preparatory kinds of work that board members do behind the scenes for preparation for any of the issues that are going on in the district that are sort of behind the scenes. So I really believe that I am definitely 100% in this role as board member.
LS: Those are subcommittees and representing Lansing at BOCES?
CI: Yes I do. Yes I’m the TST BOCES representative for that executive committee.
LS: What do you think the top challenges are that the school board faces over the next three years?
CI: Definitely one of the biggest issues is going to be facing the need of a capital project. It’s very clear -- I think the whole community would agree that there is a need for a capital project. The question is going to be what will it look like? What is it supposed to be?
I also think that the school district needs to rebuild its credibility with the public as well as trust. I think those are three key challenges we face over the next couple of years.
LS: This brings me to another question I had for you because you have appeared hostile to administrators over the past year. This business of trust, are you talking about the administration or the school board or the whole district?
CI: The trust issue and credibility for me has to be rebuilt in terms of the board and built in terms of top administration. Not with the whole district. I think that faculty and staff is doing their job. They are wonderfully dedicated and talented. I don’t think there are any issues there.
I do think that there is a disconnect between administration and most of the board in the community that needs to be addressed.
LS: The district has had a terrible time keeping somebody in the superintendent’s chair. Do you think that the lack of steady leadership there has been a serious problem for the district?
CI: I would rephrase what the issue is. I don’t think the stability is an issue of getting somebody to stay. I think the stability issue is getting the right person in the first place.
LS: So how would the school board address the problem? I think some school board members would say it has been addressed but it seems you don’t agree with that.
CI: Well, I don’t think that my job is to just go along. As I said before, I consider myself to be the representative of others in the district and it is my job to hold the administration accountable and sometimes that doesn’t come off as being very pleasant. It’s not always pleasant to raise questions either. It’s very difficult to do yet I do think that’s my duty.
LS: Should the school board be doing anything specific, then, to keep people?
CI: Who’s leaving?
LS: No one is leaving now, and actually we just got our last interim replaced, which I see as a very positive step. Do you agree with that?
CI: This hiring of this person for principal?
LS: I mean not her personally but just having all of the positions filled now, which we haven’t had for years.
CI: Of course. The positions getting filled is very important. I think just as important is that you find people who match the district.
LS: What are your top goals as a school board member for the coming term?
CI: I think that a lot of times people think individual board members have some sort of power over what happens in the district and I really view myself as one of seven. We are a group. Oftentimes the school board is referred to as a body corporate so I think we need to establish goals on what our community is saying is needed and the expertise of our administration. That’s a balance we have to use when we have to make decisions.
LS: What you think about the increased state mandates for data warehousing and data collection, and do you think that’s a good thing or whether it’s an onerous mandate? And also what value it can have to the district -- because the superintendent was talking about taking data from testing for example and using it in a positive way to strengthen the program. So it’s not all black and white. Where do you stand on that?
CI: I think that the state’s standards are detailed and complex and they are quite excellent. However, I believe that standardized tests are a weak measure of high standards if you look at how to assess the performance of students and if you want to be assessing higher thinking the standardized tests don’t do that.
Oftentimes when people want to measure a goal, they create an instrument to do that measurement. Unfortunately, oftentimes that instrument becomes the goal and I believe that’s what’s happened to standardized tests. That instead of saying that our goal is to accomplish these various things in terms of education for our students, we are looking at the test scores as a goal and I think that’s unfortunate.
LS: I think that there have been bumps in the first year with the superintendent. One of the things I’ve heard people talk about is that when there wasn’t a permanent superintendent the board, the faculty and staff and so on were kind of forced to fill in that gap. So do you think that kind of baggage leads to the board micromanaging or trying to do too much?
CI: I don’t think that this board this last term with this superintendent has done any micromanaging at all. If anything, there hasn’t been sufficient oversight.
LS: In general, do you think the school board tries to do too much?
CI: The school board meetings are set by -- I don’t really know how they are actually set -- but when I was vice-president when they were set the agenda was set by the superintendent, the board president, and the board vice-president. And through board workshops the board itself can determine the nature of board meetings.
So for instance we’ve gone back and forth about whether or not we should have some meetings be business meetings in which case the agenda would be very short, some meetings be work sessions in which case we would focus on only one issue for instance the budget. We have work sessions, workshops so we’ve gone back and forth with this and it has a lot to do with personal style and how democratic or autocratic the administration is.
When Tiffany Phillips came I believe she was the one, it may have been Bob Service now I’m not sure who introduced the idea of having student highlights. And then we went back and forth on…and that should only be about five minutes because that’s just to get the board to see this is why we’re all here for the students. So we all said great and somehow that got extended to 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes. Then there was some discussion about what role do the principals have at board meetings? Is it PR in which case they talk about all the nice things that are happening, or do we ask them for specific reports? So we went back and forth on this.
So every year it seems that that gets renegotiated by the board itself. I believe that at one of our last workshops I may have mentioned that a couple of the other districts they keep their board meetings to only two hours long and everybody’s done by 10pm. And that takes a lot of organization. If you don’t have that organization you’re going to have a longer board meeting I think.
LS: That’s occurred to me too. As much as the student highlights is my favorite part of it, it pushes the meeting to as much as an hour later and then when the key decisions are being made people are tired.
CI: Yes, it has occurred to me many times that I would like to be talking about the hard issues right off the bat when everybody’s fresh and everybody’s energetic instead of at the very end of a meeting where people have just come in from their day jobs and they have had family obligations to deal with and then they sit through a long meeting and you get tired both physically and mentally so that has occurred to me as well.
LS: Population growth. Everybody seems to have a different idea about what school population growth is going to be like? One of the things that really struck me when the capital project went down was that there was no plan B. The plan B was to put it on hold, work on the budget, then we’ll talk about it.
But those problems that were to be addressed, as you said, didn’t go away. And those problems range from everything from a leaky roof to overcrowded classrooms. Do you think of the board as proactive or reactive on this and other issues?
CI: It’s not really the board’s duty to be proactive in terms of something like that. That’s why we have the superintendent who is the CEO and expert about what should be happening. You have a relationship where the superintendent proposes and the board either approves or says please head in a different direction.
The board can say these are the things we think our community needs and then I’ve heard it characterized as the superintendent is like your Sherpa. He or she is the one that leads you but you have to have a sense of where you want to go. So it definitely is an interdependent relationship so you can’t say, ‘Well it’s the board or the superintendent.’ Those two parties have to be working in sync.
LS: What lessons if any should the board take from last year’s failed budget and/or this year’s failed capital project?
CI: I think last year was the year of having some really difficult questions emerge and this is the year where we have to find answers to those questions. I think part of the problem was a disconnect between board and superintendent’s perceptions and what the community’s perceptions are. And I think we really need to sincerely actually listen to what people are saying, all stack holders what they are saying has to be a real discourse which isn’t necessarily neat and pleasant. There has to be some messiness to democracy but I really believe in democracy.
LS: Let me ask you a follow-up on that. Is high school taxes a real or perceived problem? Last year when the budget failed I went to the county website to look at what the neighboring towns like Trumansburg and Dryden all pay for school taxes. I was very surprised that we were more or less in line with our neighbors, at least tax levy-wise. I know that in some ways it’s comparing apples to oranges because we have a different size district and a different makeup of community and so on, but that’s why I’m asking is the problem of high school taxes a real one or a perception?
CI: This year it is absolutely real. If you look across the state, if you look at the state average and if you look at the counties around us and then if you look at the counties at any geographical area in New York State, Lansing’s school tax levy is much larger than any one else’s.
LS: Even though the budget itself is not.
CI: That’s right. So it’s real.
LS: What’s your position on class size? Too large, too small, or just right? Is keeping class size more or less important than cost considerations?
CI: I don’t have those figures right in the forefront of my mind. Lansing has always prided itself on its small class sizes and I think that has served our students very well. But ask any elementary school teacher, and I know it will change depending upon what level we are talking about, will tell you it depends largely on the composition of the class. How many kids do you have that have IEPs? What are the social dynamics of the class?
But I would defer to teacher judgment because they are there and when those elementary school teachers have opinions about class size and how it affects their day, the students’ day, and the quality of instruction, I have to listen to them because they are there and they know what they are talking about.
So I defer to teachers on this issue.
LS: Should the fifth grade be in the elementary school or the middle school?
CI: Again, I think that’s a community all stake holders decision. I might have my own personal opinion but that’s irrelevant. I think what was relevant is what our educators say, what our parents say they want, what the students say what they would like, so we have to listen to everybody and it has to be an inclusive decision.
LS: As a small district, Michelle Stone has said that there is no fat to cut in programs if we are to keep our students competitive with those from larger school. Do you feel our programs are adequate, too much, not enough? How would you address that as a school board member and especially relative to budget concerns?
CI: I don’t think that any of our programs have been evaluated. We haven’t been able to put a dollar amount to any programs so how would we know if there is no fat? We’ve never been presented to those data as a board. I don’t know what those data are. At the last board meeting I think those data was asked for and it was told to us that they haven’t been broken out in that way. John Delaney is the former superintendent of Trumansburg and about two years ago he was telling the TST board group about how Trumansburg works on a cycle and programs are presented to the board in terms of what it does, how it efficiently it does it, how it effectively it does it, and what the cost is.
Then the board can make a determination about if there is fat in it or not, but I don’t feel as though I personally been presented with those kind of data to make any kind of determination.
LS: What should the board do next to address the capital budget?
CI: I think we need to figure out ways to connect with the community.
LS: What else would you want voters to know about your candidacy that we haven’t discussed?
CI: Well, I guess to know that I’m not afraid to ask tough questions if that’s what needs to be done even if that makes me an unpopular person. If I wanted to be popular I would have been a firefighter but I’m not. But I will have the -- you know, I don’t know if you want to call it courage but -- I feel a strong sense of duty to represent the Lansing community and even if that means I’m the least popular person in the room I will do that.
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