Keota-Washington sharing agreements upheld

WASHINGTON — A pair of operational sharing agreements that provide funding and shared staff members to Washington and Keota school districts will continue, after a school board member last month moved to dissolve the arrangement.

The spat arose over a one-minute advertisement encouraging moviegoers at Washington’s State Theatre to “Open-enroll now, and be a part of our family,” which ran from July of last year through February, before it was taken off the theater’s ad reel. Washington school board member Troy Suchan in March framed the advertisement as an effort to steal students and enrollment-based state funding from Washington’s schools.

“There’s nothing about this agreement that is good for the students of the Washington Community School District, to be partners with somebody who is actively trying to take money away from our district,” he said at a meeting last month.

Washington school board members and Superintendent Willie Stone have since met with Keota district officials to discuss the ad, and the fact that it continued to run for several weeks after Washington contacted its neighbor to the west, asking them to suspend it.

That meeting went well, according to Washington school board Vice President Mike Liska.

“They were very sorry, very apologetic,” she said. “They tried to stop it, they had no malice, they had no intention of hurting our district, they just simply wanted their Keota-district kids back, that had open-enrolled here or other places.”

Superintendent Stone said he agreed, and believed the advertisement was a result of miscommunications. He added that board members of the Keota district seemed to not have considered the potential trade off for Washington if their message convinced students to open-enroll.

“The board members reactions were, ‘We did not think about that at all,’” Stone said. “I don’t believe that even crossed their minds.”

Keota Superintendent Lisa Brenneman told The Union last month that the advertisement’s messaging about open-enrollment was unintentional, but not caught when district officials screened the ad before it started running in Washington.

She also detailed the lengthy effort of calling a string of hard-to-reach staff at Fridley Theatres, which owns Washington’s single-screen film venue.

“No one would call us back,” she said. “And then finally, we got the right person, so we got it off … Whoever we were supposed to call, they weren’t in Washington. It was Fridley Theatres, they’re everywhere, so there was a lot of red tape.”

Washington’s vote to maintain the sharing agreements earlier this month was 5-1, with board member Brendan DeLong absent and Suchan voting no, saying he remained skeptical of the other district’s priorities.

“I don’t understand why they would think, as a partner of ours, why they would sneak around behind and do that to us … they’re trying to take kids from us,” he said. “They got caught, so now all of a sudden they’re sorry, but they’re doing it to us in the first place.”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com