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Warsaw School Board voted 6-1 Wednesday on a resolution to increase member term limits from two to four, though there’s a couple more steps in the process.
A term is four years.
Timothy S. Shelly, attorney with Warrick & Boyn LLP, attorneys at law, said 3½ years ago he asked the board to consider extending its members’ term limits.
He said there were 289 school districts in Indiana, and approximately 10 of them have some type of term limit. No other school board has a two-term limit such as Warsaw’s.
Changing the term limits would be the first substantive change the school board has had in 27 years, he said.
“You lose a lot of expertise when board members are only able to serve for eight years,” Shelly said. “Part of the problem with only serving eight years is that laws have changed for things like school construction, school funding, even the process that you use for hiring a superintendent could be affected by the timeframe you work with and the term limits that you have now.”
Unfortunately, he said, that makes the school board more reliant on advisers such as himself, insurance representatives and referendum consultants, which isn’t fair to the board’s electorate. The professionals may know the law, insurance and school financing, “but we don’t know your community and the pulse of your community like you all,” he said.
The professionals also charge for their time, so the less knowledge board members have on a particular issue, the more money has to be paid to professionals to explain or handle an issue.
Shelly said a selfish reason for the members to increase the term limits was so that if they have a child in the school corporation, they can see that child go “through the full scope of education, kindergarten to high school and graduation” instead of just eight years of their educational careers.
Christopher T. Pottratz, also with Warrick Boyn LLP, explained the process of changing the term limits.
He said a notice will be published Friday that the board voted on the term limits resolution. Voters have 120 days to file a petition objecting to the plan or proposing their own. If no objections are filed, the new plan is submitted to the State Board of Education for approval.
Contesting the plan requires obtaining 500 signatures from registered voters, Shelly said. If remonstrators obtain 500 signatures, a special election to choose a plan would be held in the spring.
Shelly said the State Board of Education would have final review of the plan, but he didn’t expect any issue with the term limit change.
Voting against the resolution to increase term limits was board member Dan Metzger.
The school board also approved the 2018-19 school year calendar.
The first student day will be Aug. 14. Fall break will be Oct. 24-28; Thanksgiving break is Nov. 21-23; Christmas break, Dec. 24, 2018, to Jan. 6, 2019; and spring break will be April 1-7, 2019.
Last student day will be May 24, 2019, with the high school graduation set for June 7. In case of excessive snow days, the alternate date for graduation will be June 14, 2019.
