Analysis: Lewis saves MCSD $1M after adding three region chiefs to central office

Superintendent David Lewis has kept his pledge that his reorganization of the Muscogee County School District's central office -- including the addition of three region chiefs with six-figure salaries -- wouldn't cost the system more money.

In fact, according to data district officials supplied at the Ledger-Enquirer's request, the plan Lewis implemented last year has saved more than $1 million.

And that has allowed more funds to be allocated toward the classrooms, where teachers are trying to help students meet the state's standards for academic achievement, which have recently become more rigorous.

In July 2013, after the Muscogee County School Board hired Lewis from Polk County, Fla., where he was an associate superintendent, Lewis studied the Columbus system's strengths and weaknesses during his first 120 days and then presented the board a 32-page report outlining and detailing his assessment and recommendations.

Lewis called for "deliberate urgency," with immediate and near-term goals, but he also made it clear he intends to be here for the long haul, stretching the initiatives as far as 10 years out.

Amid the proposed changes the board ultimately approved was the reorganization of the central office. The transformation's motivation comes from Lewis connecting the dots and seeing the Georgia Department of Education's change train coming.

While the state continued its budget cuts during the recovery from the Great Recession, school districts were directed to increase performance with decreased resources. The state scrapped its Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests in favor of the Georgia Milestones, accountability exams better aligned with the higher standards. The first Georgia Milestones results were announced on the state level in September. The scores for each district and its individual schools are expected to be released this month.

With the district limited by a property tax freeze, and the sales tax that funds capital projects unavailable to pay for daily operations or personnel, Lewis wondered, "How can we drive more dollars to the classroom in the form of curriculum or instructional support and coaching?"

His two-part answer: Reduce central office personnel expenses by eliminating and consolidating jobs, and divide the district into three regions to devote more staff to more schools.

All of which led to his reorganization plan. During the March 2014 meeting, Cathy Williams, then the nine-member board's lone county-wide representative, asked the superintendent to confirm that his plan would be "budget neutral." Lewis replied, "Yes, it is."

Now, 20 months later, the Ledger-Enquirer sought to determine whether the superintendent backed up his guarantee. And district figures show the reorganization's impact was even better than budget-neutral; it actually created a windfall for the system's $268 million budget.

From fiscal year 2014 to 2015, by cutting 122 central office positions (from 1,103 to 987), the administration saved $1,132,749 in salaries (from $27,289,907 to 26,157,158). That includes the addition of three region chiefs at $120,540 each.

'Not my job'

So how did the administration do it? Lewis, assistant superintendent Rebecca Braaten and human resources chief Kathy Tessin explained.

"As people either retired or attritioned out," Lewis said, "sometimes they were high-paid people and we consolidated positions or eliminated positions. We did a flow analysis to see what could be done. Maybe we didn't need a clerical person for every position. We could split and share."

Some other positions also were put on hold, Braaten said, to learn whether the district could do without them.

"We will probably put some back over time," Lewis said, "depending on how things grow."

The eliminated jobs include positions in plant services, transportation, nutrition and central administration. Out of the 122 cuts, 80 of them were open positions "due to promotion, transfer, retirement or resignation and subsequently not replaced," Tessin said.

So 42 central office positions had people in them when they were cut, but only one was laid off, a nutrition worker who wasn't qualified to fill any available position in the district, Tessin said.

Others moved into different jobs, Tessin said, three to school-based positions, seven to regional positions and the rest to vacancies within their department or division.

These numbers don't include the 151 teaching positions eliminated in the 2014 Reduction in Force, which resulted in 29 teachers being laid off. All but nine of them, Tessin said, "either had the opportunity for rehire in later vacancies or retired."

The largest reduction in central office staff came in the Plant Services Department, where 92 jobs were cut (from 377 to 285), which saved $359,367 in budgeted salaries (from $7,300,137 to $6,940,770). Most of the eliminated plant services positions, 72, were school-based custodians, reducing the total number of custodians to 144, Tessin said.

"Either they retired and we just eliminated the position," Lewis said, "or we combined it with other positions to make it more multidimensional."

"We're working toward a general maintenance helper," Tessin said, "so someone can't say, 'It's not my job.'"

Instructional technology

Beyond the numbers, Lewis emphasized that "right-sizing" the district involves changing how it works. Instructional technology is a prime example.

Previously, when a technician would visit a school in response to a work order and diagnose a different problem, Braaten said, somebody else would need to fix it.

"We had plenty of silos all over," Lewis said, "not unlike most districts."

Now, in addition to instructional technology specialists teaching teachers how to operate devices, they are showing them how to use the technology in their lessons to teach the new state standards. So the specialists are educators as well as technicians.

Making the instructional technology specialists more multidimensional enabled the 13 positions to be reduced to six, Braaten said, and to move the other seven jobs from the Information Services Division to the Academics Division.

"We have more tech-savvy teachers now," Tessin said.

So now MCSD has three technology integration specialists, one per region. Four other technology specialists work on the district level. One of those four is a media support specialist. The other six retired or were reassigned.

The technology specialists were all certified teachers. "We could have found them all jobs, but some of them chose to retire," Braaten said. "Some of them said, 'I don't want to go back in the classroom.'"

The district also is using its school-based academic coaches to help teachers utilize technology.

"They might go model a lesson and may actually use the Smart Board during the instruction so the teacher sees how that technology can be used," Braaten said.

"No one's fault," Lewis said, "but when we started using all the Smart Boards, it became really like an overhead projector in a lot of respects. Now, we're trying to help them understand the power of the Smart Board and how they can really integrate that and infuse that into instruction in a meaningful way."

Redeployed

While cutting those 122 positions in the central office overall, Lewis redeployed other staff members to enable him to add three cabinet-level positions called region chiefs. These three six-figure salaried administrators report to Lewis and are responsible for the performance of their 18 schools, giving principals a more direct link to the central office and making top-level staff more accountable. So although Lewis shaved the Academics Division by only one position (from 33 to 32) the budgeted salaries increased by $358,473 (from $1,948,368 to $2,306,841).

The Property and Risk Management Department, which includes staff responsible for workman's compensation cases, had its six positions totaling $210,483 shifted from the Finance Division to the Human Resources Division, which cut six positions to absorb the move.

"Dr. Lewis' vision is that it aligns better with HR," Tessin said. "In the private sector, that is something that's been done, so we just aligned the people management better. It's not just a money-management issue, it's also behavior management."

All the personnel cuts freed up money to help pay for the following curriculum enhancements:

EnVisionMATH for grades K-5, costing $960,815 over two fiscal years. In return, the district receives $3,899,718 in free materials.

Reading Wonders for grades K-5, costing $1,755,022 over two fiscal years. In return, the district receives $5,126,230 in free materials

Achieve3000 for the district's 10 "challenge schools" on the state's perpetually failing list, plus three more schools on the bubble, costing $630,000 over three fiscal years. Achieve3000 is a Web-based system that delivers differentiated instruction in nonfiction reading and writing. Given articles from the Associated Press and National Geographic, students read the content on their reading level, called a Lexile. Students on 12 separate Lexiles can read the same article but at different degrees of complexity.

Milestones

District officials are girding themselves for the Georgia Milestones results. Based on the state-level scores, they expect their results to drop because last school year was the first time students took these tougher tests, based on the national Common Core.

"We know we're going to see huge, dramatic drops in performance across the state and in our district," Lewis said. "We know we're going to be significantly below where we want to be. We're probably going to have only 25 to 30 percent of our kids being proficient, and that's probably going to be below the state level. Every time new standards are implemented, Muscogee County has, as far as I can tell from our research, always dropped below the state average, and then we catch back up."

Lewis predicted the largest drops will be in science and social studies "because so much emphasis has been on math and reading."

Asked when his reorganization of the district should translate into improved academic achievement, Lewis said, "We're just beginning our third year here. It takes about five years, whether it's curriculum or changes like this, to really take hold, because you're changing the culture."

Lewis added, "Ultimately, everything comes down to performance. I had to put the structure in place. Now, the curriculum is getting in place. As we move forward, we have a little bit more to go, like adopting curriculum for the secondary program (the middle schools and high schools). It's a 10-year plan for a reason. This isn't going to happen in three years."

Mark Rice, 706-576-6272. Follow him on Twitter

SCHOOL DISTRICT'S CENTRAL OFFICE

FY2014 - Staff 1,109; Salaries $27,289,907

FY2015 - Staff 987; Salaries $26,157,158

This story was originally published November 7, 2015 at 10:22 PM with the headline "Analysis: Lewis saves MCSD $1M after adding three region chiefs to central office ."