The Government Operations and Audit Committee has a lot more on its plate today (and probably tomorrow) at its meeting at Carnegie Town Hall in Sioux Falls (starting at 1 p.m.!). Cyber security, the Obligation Recovery Center, the Building South Dakota Fund, some confusion about the Napa-Platte rail line… oh yeah, and the Tri-Valley enrollment scheme.
Tri-Valley superintendent Dr. Mike Lodmel has said the school district’s lawyer saw nothing illegal in offering homeschool families free laptops to come attend school for just one day, the final fall headcount day, to boost Tri-Valley’s enrollment and the state funding based thereupon. Tri-Valley’s lawyer may have missed a statute pointed out by one of my sharp-eyed commenters, SDCL 13-28-34:
Rebates and refunds to induce attendance at school as misdemeanor. A school district board, administrator, or school employee may not give or promise to give, either directly or indirectly, any rebate or refund of any transportation or any other thing of value as an inducement for attending school in a district. Any person violating the provisions of this section is guilty of a Class 2 misdemeanor [SDCL 13-28-34].
The grammar may be tricky here: if we read “or any other thing of value” as part of a compound object of the preposition “of”, then the statute appears to restrict only what its title mentions, rebates and refunds. Tri-Valley wasn’t offering to give homeschool parents a rebate or refund on computers that the parents bought; Tri-Valley offered to buy and hand out computers. But this statute appears to establish the Legislature’s intent to prohibit schools from offering goodies to get kids to enroll in their district.
GOAC legislators, spend a little time today discussing the intent and extent of this no-inducements-for-attendance statute. And if Dr. Lodmel attends, ask him if the district lawyer considered this statute when he advised that the laptops-for-one-day-attendance scheme was perfectly legal.
Update 06:35 CDT: Someone at the Department of Education thinks that statute is relevant to the discussion. SDCL 13-28-34 is included in a DOE brief submitted to GOAC this week on how it calculates state aid fall enrollment.
If you look at the legislative history of that statute, it was amended through the years. The original intent has probably been long-buried in the verbiage, which, as you point out, makes little sense, and certainly not in the modern world where Republicans insist school districts “compete” for students. South Dakota’s Legislature think all the intent you need is in the Title and the actual text of the bill. Well, good luck with that.
So, it doesn’t matter much what the intent was. It matters what the words mean, and the clowns in the legislature have never wanted to be straight forward and honest about their words. Teachers, principles and districts regularly spend money on parties, trophies, etc., all meant to encourage kids to attend school. They buy great curriculum meant to engage kids in learning, all meant to get kids to attend school. They hire well-qualified and engaging teachers to get kids to attend. Unless, those aren’t “things of value,” all districts violate this statute every second of every school day. Education itself could be considered a “thing of value,” and outlawed in school. Really!!!
There is a difference, also, between enrolling and attending. It also doesn’t say to whom the “thing of value” can’t be given. You could argue that giving a coat to a poor child so he or she can walk to school in the winter would be forbidden under this statute. The perfect Republican world is not far away where we kick kids off the ladder of success because a teacher gives the kid a coat.
Back in the 1990s I went through the title on driver licenses to show how inconsistent the language was. It had been amended over and over again and nothing hung together. Somebody needs to axe this language or make it actually workable.
There’s probably no glory in promoting that kind of clean-up work, so no one will do it. Plus it would require a deep a thorough understanding of the statutes, which (I imagine) very few legislators happen to have.
“Thing of value”—the schools offer free breakfast and other activities to get the kids to come to class and perform well on the days of the standardized tests. Could that be a problem? ;-)
Free education.