'Best schools' decision might've waited a week

I just hung up from a phone call received here at the Herald during which a man asked if others realized that being a part of a TV show called “Best Schools in Michigan” was something that any school district that was willing to pay $25,000 dollars could do — schools like Lincoln, mentioned in an article on annarbor.com today. The Tecumseh School Board held a special meeting on Monday night to discuss the possibility of TPS being included on a March 24 edition of the show on WXYZ Channel 7 Detroit, and voted to do so.

“It’s a scam,” said the man on thephone. “And it looks like our school board has been duped again.” He said he did not want to be named and just wanted others to know that there was no real criteria to be considered one of “the best” except to pay the money.

Some of the Tecumseh School Board members appeared to be feeling a little pressure to decide quickly on Monday night. Jason Sines said outright that he would prefer to take a little more time to consider what all this package with marketers Sussman/Sikes would include, both for the airing and afterward. Sines is becoming known as the board member who sometimes sounds a warning, not necessarily to nix a plan, but to proceed with a little more caution. He wanted more time to consider all the options surrounding the athletic complex last year. Sines said he would have liked an opportunity to look at what other marketing firms might have to offer because it was an area in which he was not an expert and had nothing to judge whether the $25,000 for this particular package, designed to market the school’s positive assets and boost its image, was a good deal or not.

Lou Englund, who has, in the past, publicly asked that issues be discussed in detail before a vote was necessary, did state that he thought all the board members might be feeling a little pressure Monday night, due to having been told that a decision must be arrived at quickly in order to be on that March 24 show, a time that Board President Debbie Johnson-Berges said could be critical to attracting families yet this spring that might consider a move prior to next Fall’s start of school. Johnson-Berges and Karen Januszek, who met with the Sussman/Sikes representative just last Thursday, seemed to be passing along the urgency that the marketing company had passed on to them.

Jimmie Rice admitted that he wasn’t sure how he was going to vote, but as the board members discussed what might be done with the marketing materials that the district would own after the show was aired (DVDs of the show that could be passed to prospective families, realtors, etc. or be shown locally, and the right to put “Best Schools in Michigan” logo on school materials) he was more in favor of the investment.

In listening to the discussion and talking later with Supt. Mike McAran, it seems that one of the things that most attracted the board members to the idea was the opportunity to be able to use the materials in continuing marketing efforts, and to have links to thebestschoolsinmi.com website, which the marketing firms says will get over 3,000 hits a day right after the show, with people spending an average of almost 4 minutes on the site to check out the featured schools.

The Herald has received a number of comments just since the story of the board’s decision to spend the $25,000 for this TV spot. Most are not positive. The problem doesn’t seem to be that the district is taking some needed steps to try to showcase the good things Tecumseh Public Schools is doing, and according to some of the conversations I have heard, it isn’t even the spending of $25,000. It’s the haste with which the school board hurried into this agreement without taking time to check it out. There were unanswered questions, not the least of which was, “How does a school become one of Michigan’s ‘best’ schools? What is the criteria?” Now, just a couple of days later with the subject being on people’s minds and questions coming out and news stories about other Michigan schools that turned down the opportunity, some other questions are surfacing. Some are asking, would it have been so bad to have waited one more week until the February 8 school board meeting to allow just a little more time for some research on the issue to have been done?