A response to the uninformed musings of Wholean, Powers, and Shultz.

by Kevin 

I think it is important to know what is behind these numbers before coming to any conclusions. I understand that it is normal that when people don’t know the context of something they tend to make one up. I do happen to have some visibility into these items so I thought I’d put a little context around them.

As I understand it the $62.50 was for the administration changing a student’s grade that they thought was incorrect against the wishes of a teacher. In such a case they really have two choices; 1) they can leave it alone but that’s problematic when they feel it is to the student’s detriment (our raison d’etre) 2) attempt to change it against the teacher’s wishes. As I understand it discussion had already happened and the administration wanted to move forward with the second option because that’s what they believed was in the student’s best interest (I have no visibility into the facts behind the grade so I have no way to know who was “right” or “wrong” so please don’t read that in).

If you look through the legal bills they pulled you will see what even a relatively inexpensive union grievance can cost in legal bills, not to mention time and focus of the administrative staff. Spending $62.50 up front so both sides understand the legal authority granted to each group is comparatively minor insurance to preempt a possible grievance.

This gets back to what I’ve been talking about quite a lot lately. The difference between understanding long term vs. short term costs. I’m going to explain a little of the math behind this using some admittedly arbitrary numbers. I’m not suggesting that the administration is making decision trees for all of their decisions but this does illustrate to importance of considering the full costs of the decisions we make in many different contexts.

For the sake of argument let’s say that the cost of an average union grievance is $5000 in legal bills, time and energy (the opportunity cost of what we could be doing other than a union grievance, this is much more costly than the obvious legal bills). Let’s also say for the sake of argument that the average legal consultation is $100.

If we believe in this case that by not backing up our decision with legal consultation that there is a 10% chance that a grievance will be filed through misunderstanding of the legal authority of the involved parties then the expected cost of not calling for legal council is $500 (10% * $5000; a 10% chance of having a $5000 grievance). Alternatively if we believe that there is only a 2% chance that a grievance will be filed if we back up the decision to the other party with a legal opinion then the expected cost of calling legal council is $200 ($100 for the consultation + (2% * $5000) for the possibility that a grievance could still be filed anyway). The expected cost is clearly lower to call legal counsel than to not call them (remember these are not real numbers, I’m only using them for the sake of illustrating the concept).

As I said I’m not implying that the administration is going off and formally doing such decision trees. However, most people who think through the long term costs of their actions informally do these types of calculations, even if unconsciously.

I know I’ve beaten this horse to death before but I think it is important for people to understand. This isn’t a case of comparing $62.50 vs. $0 for not calling the lawyer. That type of short term thinking can very likely end up costing more in the long run. Sure in my example above 9 out of 10 times you will get lucky. However, it’s that 1 out of 10 where you don’t that makes is less expensive to have called legal counsel for all ten of those instances.

I also believe they had called out a $62 item for “Legal Authority for PAC contributions”. As I understand it this was something that was done on behalf of the WAT, not any of the local town PACs (in the interest of full disclosure I am the member of one). If I wanted to donate money to the school, I would do it directly and encourage others to do the same. No reason to use a PAC for that. But as I said before, when people don’t know the context of something they tend to make one up.

Thanks,

Kevin

This post represents my personal opinions and in no way should be considered an official act of the BoE or that I am speaking on behalf of the BoE in any way.