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Canfield, Poland board members typify school-policymaking divide
By Robert Guttersohn
Canfield Board of Education member Renee Gessner was the lone vote against charging band and choir students activity fees.
Before the board’s May 25 vote, she read nervously from a letter: “I would have preferred to see the board of education make cuts rather than raise fees. Adding fees gives the impression that this is just a different way to raise taxes.”
As Ohio school boards have had to trim budgets due to cuts in state funding and dwindling property taxes, the Ohio School Boards Association has noticed an increase in diverging fiscal ideologies among board members.
“I would say there are more members who have very much different philosophies,” said Cheryl Ryan, board services consultant from OSBA. “That’s truer now more than it was when budgets weren’t as tight, for sure.”
Robert Shovlin started attending Poland board meetings in 2003. “I went to more school board meetings than some of the members did,” he recalled.
Saying he was motivated by students and taxpayers, Shovlin decided he would seek election. After losing in 2005, he ran again in 2007 and won.
Gessner and Shovlin have found themselves lone voters in their respective districts against raising fees and taxes. But although they have similar fiscal philosophies, they are social and professional contrasts.
Gessner, 53, is shy and recalled feeling embarrassed after seeing her picture in The Vindicator upon winning her election in November 2007. When she’s not at board meetings, she keeps in order the financial side of her husband Larry’s dental office.
Shovlin, 51 and a carpenter by day, is bold without apprehension at Poland board meetings.
“Money doesn’t drive school success,” Shovlin said. “If it did, Youngstown should be the No. 1 school in the state.”
His stance against increased taxes began at the board’s Nov. 22 meeting. Voters defeated the 3.9-mill emergency levy in the 2010 midterm election. At that meeting, the board voted to put a 4.9-mill emergency levy on the May 3 ballot and later in April, voted for the same levy to be placed on an August special-election ballot.
Shovlin, who was not against a levy but against the increased millage, questioned where the extra $400,000 annually would go. He believed by placing it on the ballot, the board went against voters who had just defeated a smaller levy. But the board called the August issue a “fail-safe.”
“We put it on there knowing we could rescind it,” Larry Dinopoulos, board vice president, said the day after the vote.
Shovlin was the lone vote against the 4.9-mill emergency that voters defeated May 3 and the board dropped from the August ballot at its May 23 meeting.
In Canfield after the 6.8-mill emergency levy failed May 3, the administration said it needed to cut $1.8 million from the budget. To offset costs, the board voted to charge fees for activities. When Gessner read her letter to the board and to those in attendance, it was a big step for the passive board member.
“I actually hate going against the grain,” she said days later.
She credits the reason she ran for the board in 2007 to her time spent with the Junior League of Youngstown saying it “really teaches women to want to give back to the community.” When she ran, she had no idea how large cuts to state funding would be but felt districts should explore new creative avenues for funding.
Rather than raising fees, she felt the burden of off-setting cuts should have fallen to the boosters. If not, sports and other activities will suffer as parents and students are forced to pick and choose, she said.
“It seems to be pay to participate and fees are the trend,” she said. “Why not try something else?”
But Gessner feels further and further removed from the district that educated both her children and where she graduated from in 1976. For this, she called another run for school board “unlikely.”
“It’s a thankless, tough job,” the OSBA’s Ryan said of being a school board member. “In general, it has a large amount of turnovers.”
Despite this, she said there are an increase in first-timers interested in running for school board. In July, the OSBA has its pre-candidacy workshop in Columbus. It has 15 people registered for it and, at that rate, Ryan said it will likely surpass the average up to 25 attendees.
“They think they could help fix this, whether that’s right or not,” Ryan said.