So what gives kids the best chance for upward economic mobility? Raj Chetty’s celebrated Opportunity Insights research identifies four significant variables that increase the likelihood of upward economic mobility: good schools (who would’ve thought?!?), two-parent households, mixed-income neighborhoods, and social capital.

Fayetteville Public Schools already has terrific educators and great schools, and we are constantly working to improve student growth metrics and educational outcomes for all students. This is the only variable within our direct control. However, our school district and community can positively influence some of the other variables by coordinating our planning and implementation efforts more strategically with key community partners.

Household dynamics are nearly impossible to control, although they are highly correlated with poverty. Fayetteville Public Schools — particularly our teachers, social workers, administrators, counselors, and other staff — partner with dozens of local agencies to support families.

Mixed-income neighborhoods require subsidies and partnerships. These partnerships must be led by the private sector, local government, and philanthropy. Fayetteville Public Schools can play an important supporting role in this work.

What role can school districts play in partnerships to support mixed-income neighborhoods?

• We can invest in new/renovated facilities and highly sought-after programs within higher-poverty neighborhoods. Since we know that school facilities investments often spark and accelerate private sector development, investing in facilities in lower-income areas offers the benefits of proximity to lower-income families while prompting new market-rate development, helping to balance our school zones over time. The City of Fayetteville, the NWA Council’s Workforce Housing Center, and the private sector (for-profit and non-profit developers) have tools to help ensure that neighborhoods continue to offer a variety of housing options at varying price points over time by ensuring a portion of housing units have long-term affordability requirements.
• FPS could inventory our excess land as a part of our Facilities Master Planning process to consider allowing non-profit developers and other partners to build mixed-income and affordable housing on land currently owned by the district. It could be targeted to teachers, at-risk families, or the general public. This housing would not be built by the district — we would sell, or ground lease our excess land to a non-profit or for-profit developer. On-site housing for at-risk families would significantly improve attendance and reduce barriers to parent engagement, and on-site housing for teachers would equate to a significant raise due to reduced housing and transportation costs.
• If we determine that we own a significant amount of excess land at a particular location, I would propose contracting with a third party to create a master plan for the site. By minimizing the footprint of our K-12 facility (build up, not out), we could open up space for on-site supportive services operated by third parties, such as private pre-k, mental health, and health care services. I envision schools as neighborhood hubs surrounded by mixed-income housing and supportive services. This would put land back on the property tax rolls and allow the construction of buildings and services that otherwise would not exist, which would create significant recurring property tax revenue for the school district that could be used to support students and staff. It would also increase the number of students who can walk and bike to school while adding convenient supportive services. This approach maximizes the potential for our school facilities to act as social infrastructure, bringing children and families together to build relationships, networks, and community.

Where to begin?

I would like to see FPS work with the City of Fayetteville to identify shared goals and shared values, such as more balanced school zones, mixed-income neighborhoods, reduced concentration of poverty, and efficient use of existing infrastructure, and then work together with the private sector to identify barriers and opportunities to achieving those goals.

What role can school districts play to encourage the development of social capital?

Many of us are not familiar with the term social capital, but we all understand the phrase “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

While it has historically been hard to measure, new research from Chetty says that “social capital is the most significantly correlated variable for economic mobility.” Using Facebook data, he has mapped every high school and neighborhood in the US to understand where relationships are being formed across socioeconomic lines. Specifically, kids who grow up in families with incomes in the 25th percentile (in other words, 75% of families have higher incomes) are most likely to show positive economic mobility at age 35 if they have a significant number of higher-income friends and connections.

What can school districts do to impact social capital, especially for lower-income families?

We already work on this through Family Connection Nights, elementary classroom seating arrangements, clubs, sports, and enrichment programs. We have a phenomenal AVID program, a cohort group model that helps first-generation students and other college-bound students build study habits, note-taking skills, college readiness, and — most importantly — relationships with one another. This program has grown from 16 participants to over 400 in the 5 years it’s been offered. Our community is eager for opportunities to connect with one another and build relationships — let’s facilitate this every way we can.

Balancing school zones is a huge opportunity. Unbalanced school zones strain teachers and staff in higher-poverty schools and reduce opportunities for higher-income students to build cultural awareness and empathy. While we do redraw attendance zone boundaries from time to time, there is only so much we can do to balance our school zones when our community is economically segregated. Our bigger lever of power is our facilities investments and the strategies outlined above.

Internships, apprenticeships, and satellite facilities co-located with community partners (such as the Brightwater culinary program housed at the Fayetteville Public Library) can help build networking skills and social networks for students within the business community. Over the next 5 years, I hope we can grow the Brightwater program and take a close look at replicating it in other program areas, such as Health Care, Skilled Trades, Computer Science, and Engineering.

Another specific opportunity for Fayetteville Public Schools is to thoughtfully implement the new community service requirement in the LEARNS Act to help high school students build their social networks within the community.

I know that none of this is easy or simple. As I’ve attended family events at Washington Elementary this year, I’ve noticed that I tend to gravitate towards socializing with parents I already know — parents who tend to be in an economic position similar to our family. I myself have work to do to build deeper relationships with individuals of different races and different income levels. Building these relationships requires intentional program design. One successful model I’m aware of brings preschool families together in play groups — a program called Parenting Communities in Northern Michigan, where I grew up.

How can schools understand how successful we are in helping students realize the benefits of social capital?

This is the key. If social capital is critically important to creating opportunity for kids, how do we measure our progress, test our assumptions, and determine whether our efforts are truly helping kids flourish? What does success look like?

The Christensen Institute is tracking emerging best practices for implementing strategies to increase the size and quality of networks for K-12 networks. They are also creating a repository of surveys, metrics, and technology solutions that can help school districts on our journeys. Their research on the state of the current landscape — including survey methodologies, change management strategies, tech tools, and program design considerations — are highlighted in this webinar, and this report.

Building and maintaining schools in mixed-income neighborhoods where kids can walk and bike to school could help build social capital as parents meet and mingle on their way to and from school.

Designing facilities to create welcoming indoor and outdoor gathering spaces and programming those spaces to intentionally bring a variety of families together is something we already do and can expand on.

Working with community partners to utilize school facilities as neighborhood hubs that bring families together during the evenings, weekends, and summers is the cornerstone of the Community Schools model, which I would love to see Fayetteville Public Schools embrace as a core value.

I know that only a couple of these ideas are new. I’m far from an expert.

Many of these ideas are already implemented in different forms across Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas. But there is one thing I know to be true — achieving educational equity through the closure of opportunity gaps and other disparities will require a set of approaches that feature collaboration across systems and deep coordination between leaders of systems. Complex problems require collaborative solutions.

What are your thoughts on how to build social capital in schools? Comment here, or email me at keatonforfayetteville@gmail.com.

Want to learn more about social capital and economic mobility? Check out this overview of Raj Chetty’s research that maps “economic connectedness” — a core driver of economic mobility — for every high school, City, County, and neighborhood in the United States: https://www.youtube.com/live/-ViZ9YbhvcE?feature=share

When we examine the funding options that support Capital Expenses versus Operating Expenses, we will find that our funding options for Capital Expenses are very likely to grow over time, while our funding for Operating Expenses are at risk of growing more slowly than we’d like or even stagnating. Once we understand this fact, we should seek out opportunities to invest our Capital Expenses in ways that reduce our Operating Expenses. In other words, in the context of facilities and transportation decisions, it’s better to spend more money up front, on Capital Expenses, if those investments will help us save money over time, reducing our Operating Expenses. This preserves limited Operating Expenses for our core mission — serving students.

Let’s take a step back and quickly define these terms.

Capital expenses refer to the purchase of land, buildings, equipment, vehicles, and the construction of new facilities. In general, capital expenses are characterized by large upfront costs. These are fixed assets that require replacement from time to time, such as roofs, HVAC, and parking lots. We put money aside to address these in a timely fashion using a replacement cycle.

Operating expenses are the day to day costs of running a school district. Teacher and staff salaries, fuel, utilities, professional development, and supplies are examples of operating expenses, with the largest by far being staff salaries. In general, operating expenses recur every month.

Public schools are highly regulated organizations, and rightly so. Our primary funding streams — local, state, and federal taxpayer dollars — each have their own purpose, and the use of each type of funds comes with specific restrictions and limitations.

In general, Capital Expenses are funded with bond proceeds — loans backed by local property tax millage. In a growing community like Fayetteville, where new buildings are being built and property values are increasing, we expect this to grow over time. As we pay down our current bonds, we can refund those bonds without raising taxes, providing new dollars for facilities construction, purchase, and renovation. This is the mechanism we used to generate $113 million in 2020 to improve every building and build two new facilities without raising taxes. Bond funds can ONLY be used for land, new construction, renovation, and a small portion of a bond issuance can be used for busses and equipment.

Likewise, Operating Expenses are funded by a mix of local, state, and federal dollars. Federal dollars are a relatively small portion of the budget, and are almost always restricted to specific programs such as Special Education, support for English Language Learners, and food for students.

A substantial portion of our Operating Expenses are provided by Foundation Funding from the state, which for the 2022–23 school year is $7,413 per student. These are funded by local property tax millage, and supplemented by the state. This is the primary source of funds for teacher and staff salaries, enrichment programs, sports, the arts, career and technical education, and professional development. In other words, these are the dollars that we use to educate all of our children.

A couple of caveats to this.

• Curriculum materials are treated as operating expenses that we fund every few years on a rotating basis for each subject, so in some ways they could be considered capital expenses — but they cannot be funded by bonds.
• Busses and vehicles are capital expenses that are typically funded from the operating budget.

Of course, there are many more caveats and nuances to the complicated school budgeting process, but this is a basic overview.

While our community and school district will continue to grow, the growth of our operating budget could be stagnated by the recently signed into law Arkansas LEARNS Act, if a significant portion of our current and future students shift to private, charter, or home school.

However, given the strength of our local real estate market and the rapid growth and high quality of life we enjoy in Fayetteville, the property tax base that allows us to issue bonds (again, ideally without raising taxes) is VERY likely to grow. This is particularly true as the city continues to improve zoning and development rules with the goal of allowing more compact, mixed-use, and walkable development patterns, which generate significantly more taxes on a per-acre basis when compared to a more sprawling development pattern.

Once we accept these future funding expectations, we can understand that it would be wise to intentionally explore three opportunities:

• Net Zero facilities
• Electric busses
• School locations that reduce transportation costs

A Net Zero building is any facility (school or otherwise) that produces as much energy in a given year as it consumes. This is typically achieved through a mixture of smart design, energy efficient building technology, and solar power. They typically cost 5–10% more up front, and save energy costs over time, recouping the up front investment in roughly 5–10 years. As solar and other energy technologies have become both more efficient and more cost-effective over the past decade, these buildings are increasingly cost-effective for the private sector. If they are cost-effective for the private sector, which typically uses a 5–7 year investment horizon, then they are VERY cost-effective for school districts, as we plan to use our new construction facilities for 60+ years. By spending a little more money up front (when we have plenty of bond capacity) we save operating expenses over time, freeing up operating resources to support salaries and students.

In addition to cost savings, sustainable buildings improve occupant health through improved air quality. Studies show that they can improve attendance for students and teachers by reducing sick days, and improve teacher and staff retention. In addition to being a wise use of taxpayer resources, Net Zero buildings align with the current and future interests of our customers — our students. Students want us to grow our sustainability programs, and I believe we could develop educational programs that highlight sustainable building features, providing project-based learning opportunities in engineering, construction, data analysis, and other high-demand fields.

We can make the same case for electric busses. The typical range for an electric bus is 150 miles, and the typical school bus route is 40–60 miles, so we know the technology works. While there is an upfront cost for charging infrastructure, and the busses themselves are more expensive, fuel costs are significantly lower (and more easily predictable) over time. The large batteries in electric busses can serve as energy storage allowing the district to sell energy back to the electric utility, creating new revenue opportunities for the district and further improving the return on investment.

Lower-income students are more likely to ride the bus and more likely to have asthma, so the air quality benefits of electric versus diesel are particularly important for busses. And on top of that, there is a generous (but competitive) electric school bus grant program available through the federal government’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that would cover 80% of the cost of busses and charging infrastructure. This makes BOTH the capital and operating expenses lower for electric busses, if we submit a successful grant application. I am a strong advocate for applying for this grant to begin an electric bus pilot program.

Centrally located schools may be located on more expensive land, but they will reduce transportation costs for the district and our families while saving valuable time for families, students, and bus drivers. Thoughtfully designed, centrally located facilites are also more likely to increase the number of students who can walk and bike to school, which has been shown to improve outcomes for students.

More than any generation before them, Gen Z wants to know the “Why”. They are inspired by work and school projects that make the world a better place. I believe we will see improved student engagement as we continue to make thoughtful and cost-effective sustainability investments in our facilities and transportation systems, creating engaging internal internships and project-based learning opportunities for our students in the process. These investments are cost-effective, they are strategic in a post-LEARNS environment, they demonstrate to our community and our students that we are operating with their values in mind, and they’re simply the right thing to do.

So. You want to make a change?

If you’re reading this, the answer is probably yes.

We all do, and we all have different reasons and different goals. While the scale of our desired changes may vary widely, the process is surprisingly constant, at its core.

Real, substantive, structural change requires patience. Change happens slowly, then all at once, right? But how?

The point here is that change is hard, and requires the cultivation of unique circumstances. Unlikely combinations of skill sets and traits — something from your left brain AND your right brain. Unusual dichotomies of personality traits. Unexpected mashups of skills. Partnerships between strange bedfellows. Yin and Yang.

A few examples:

A world-class musician or artist must possess BOTH the innate ability to create completely original art our of thin air AND the discipline to practice their craft.

Elite athletes are BOTH strong, fast, super jocks AND humble, likable teammates.

The most impactful philanthropists are both greedy and generous.

The successful business owner knows their numbers inside and out, but also knows that every business is a people business, and acts like it when interacting with both employees and customers. Elon Musk has the rare combination of elite engineering acumen and adept communication skills.

The effective community organizer bears witness to the vast interconnectedness of all of society’s challenges with deep empathy, while maintaining laser focus on the execution of the next tangible action item that is uniquely theirs to tackle.

The politician must possess BOTH a strong sense of urgency to improve the lives of their constituents AND a full understanding that real change takes time.

The list goes on!

Creativity and focus. Charm and humility. Passion for your issue, and curiosity about everyone else’s. A sense of urgency and patience. Technical proficiency and social intelligence. Striving for a perfect world, while forgiving ourselves for falling short of perfection. Change makers are both aspirational and realistic.

The point is, change is hard. Particularly systemic, structural, scalable change. If we want to try new things, we have to be okay with some of those things not working out the first time. It has to be okay to fail, learn, and grow.

By acknowledging this fact, and acknowledging the very unique circumstances by which change does occur, we can simultaneously forgive ourselves of our failures, and cultivate the conditions that allow us to achieve our goals.

Reducing Climate Risk

It’s been a lively few days on Facebook, which have inspired this attempt to summarize my thoughts on the issue of Climate.

I am in the business of working with real estate investors and business owners to reduce uncertainty, mitigate risk, and facilitate growth.

Climate change is a risk to lives and livelihoods. When I think about the challenges that my 10-week-old daughter Cora will face during her lifetime, I think of boyfriends, high school cliques, loss, disappointment in all its forms…and the stability and health of the world she will inherit from our generation.

Details matter — a lot — but I think we spend too much time debating the specific outcomes of climate change. Exactly how much will oceans rise? I don’t know. Specifically which natural disasters were caused by climate change? Hard to prove. What percentage of the 1.5F degree observed increase in global temperature has been caused by humans? Scientists say the vast majority of it, but only with 95% certainty. How bad will it get? Well, it might not be too bad….or it could be catastrophic.

Instead of arguing semantics, we should approach climate risk just like we would approach any other risk — understand the potential negative outcomes, try to improve our chances for positive outcomes, and buy insurance to eliminate the risk of a total loss. We don’t know exactly what the climate will look like in 2050 or 2100, but we accept that there are a range of potential outcomes under a business as usual scenario:

Not so Bad

Bad

Very Bad

We need to hedge this risk — we need insurance.

We must also balance risk reduction with growth. We want to grow our economy, protect the working class from cost increases, and ensure that our businesses — particularly our manufacturers and other energy-intensive companies — remain competitive in the global marketplace. We don’t want to pick winners and losers. We do want to provide long-term certainty to the private sector, unleashing American innovation to create jobs and opportunity.

True certainty can only come from legislation passed by Congress — not an executive order. As we’ve seen with Obama’s Clean Power Plan, executive orders only last as long as a presidential term, and can always be challenged in court.

Therefore, the right solution must be supported by bipartisan groups of Senators and Representatives.

Carbon Dividends (aka Carbon Fee and Dividend) is a credible and transparent policy proposal with strong support from the Republican ‘Climate Leadership Council’, the libertarian Niskanen Center and the nonpartisan grassroots group ‘Citizens Climate Lobby’ (CCL).

The Carbon Dividends policy would place a small but steadily increasing fee on fossil fuels at the point of entry to our economy — typically the wellhead, the port, or the mine. These fees are refunded 100% to American families via a monthly or quarterly direct deposit or paper check. That’s right, the policy is revenue-neutral, does not grow government, and you get a monthly dividend check.

Economic models show that most people and families come out ahead. That is, energy costs increase slightly but the dividend check more than covers the increase and we end up with more spending power, which contributes to economic growth. https://citizensclimatelobby.org/remi-report/

But the market signal is the key. A small but steadily increasing price on carbon will allow companies to plan for the future costs of carbon-intensive goods and will incentivize investment in innovation and all low-carbon energy sources. Walmart, Exxon and many other Fortune 500 companies already factor carbon pricing into their plans for future investments, but they don’t know what the price of carbon will be or when it will be enacted. The market is craving certainty.

We cannot allow a price on carbon to put US industry at a competitive disadvantage. A border adjustment would be necessary to level the playing field for American importers and exporters who trade with countries who haven’t yet priced carbon. If implemented thoughtfully, a border adjustment would encourage other countries to enact a price on carbon, positioning the United States as a leader rising to meet this global challenge.

This policy has worked well in British Columbia, Canada. More info on Fee and Dividend can be found at its Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_and_dividend

Full disclosure — I’ve been volunteering with CCL for about 4 years. After attending their annual conference and lobby day in DC last year, I was inspired by knowledgeable volunteers, sound policy and a straightforward approach to bringing the American people and Congress together for sensible, transparent, market-based climate risk reduction.

CCL is hosting their national conference in Washington DC June 11–12, and over 1000 volunteer citizen lobbyists have meetings scheduled with their Members of Congress on Tuesday, June 13th as a part of CCL’s annual Lobby Day.

Great news. You guessed it. You can help.

You can call your member of Congress and Senators this Friday, June 9th. It will take less than 5 minutes, I promise. Just tell them your name, zip code, and that you could not make the trip to our nation’s capital, but that you are supportive of the Citizens Climate Lobby volunteers visiting their office on Tuesday the 13th. This is a way for you to support people taking time off from work to travel and advocate on your behalf. Follow the link to find your Senators’ and Congressman’s phone number plus a short script if you need one.

Call Congress to Act On Climate - June 9th

You can RSVP to the Facebook event HERE to show your support and give yourself a reminder on Friday.

Runaway global warming and weapons of mass destruction are likely the greatest extinction risks that our generation, our children and our grandchildren will face. Every day we choose not to act, the risks increase.

Thanks for hanging in there through the long post! Let’s continue the conversation and support our neighbors traveling to DC to advocate for transparent, effective, bipartisan, pro-growth Carbon Dividends.

#parisagreement

#putapriceonit

#actonclimate

#climate

#climatechange

#climatesolutions