Karen’s Letter to the Cedar Rapids Community

Karen Gorsh ~ putting children first for a change

Write-in candidate for Cedar Rapids School Board, District One

Dear Cedar Rapids Citizen:

I’ve lived in the Taylor school district for 13 years, my husband has lived in the Taylor neighborhood all of his life. Our home suffered damages in the flood, but the children of our neighborhood are losing even more. Without Taylor school, they have lost their teachers, their friends, their community.

It is my feeling that if Taylor Elementary were in a higher income area of the city, the school board would not be closing it. I am concerned about academic success for all of our students, but especially students from working families. These children often need consistent, quality educational programs and benefit by having schools close to home. Taylor Elementary is that school – a year round, multi-faceted educational environment.

I do have the background to step up to the job of representing all the students and families in the First District:

9 years on the board of the Taylor Area Neighborhood Association, five years as President of the Board working on projects such as development of the Tenth Square Park and the initiation and development of Taylor Elementary before and after school program.

5 years on the Community Development Block Grant Citizen Advisory Committee advising the Cedar Rapids City Council on millions of dollars in grant applications.

5 years serving on the Linn County Empowerment Board with experience as the subcommittee chair for parent education and family support programs.

7 years with the Linn County Partnership for Safe Families, three years on the Linn County Partnership board and national experience as a conference presenter on the partnership model.

2 years on the Weed and Seed Steering Committee, collaboration among law enforcement, education and human service organizations to improve low-income communities.

17 years in health care working with patients.

11 years as a group facilitator for Young Parents Network.

10 years as a Share Iowa organizer for the Taylor neighborhood.

2004 recipient of a ‘9 Who Cares’ Jefferson Award for Volunteerism.

As we know from experience, neglected schools and neighborhoods create urban blight and that lowers the entire tax base of a city, increases the potential for crime and generally destroys a community. Research done after Katrina indicates that in neighborhoods where schools are not rebuilt, neighborhoods disappear. Can the Cedar Rapids’ property tax base afford to have miles of blighted neighborhoods on the west side of town?

I’ve learned that the Cedar Rapids School District was offered options, such as classroom trailers, but the School Board and Superintendent Markward refused the FEMA classrooms. This mistake will hurt the rebuilding efforts and the future quality of life on the west side of Cedar Rapids. By closing Taylor school this year without public discussion and serious consideration, the Cedar Rapids School Board is working against the current and ongoing rebuilding efforts.

I apologize for the necessity of a write-in vote, but the school board and Dr. Markward did not clearly spell out their plans for Taylor Elementary until the week of the July 31st deadline for submitting nomination papers.

If you have read this far, I have to assume you also care about what is happening in the Cedar Rapids School District and I encourage you to consider writing in Karen Gorsh (spelling counts: K-A-R-E-N G-O-R-S-H) on your ballot in the September 9th school board election.

I feel very strongly about the importance of maintaining and improving our schools and city. I realize times are difficult, but I know with creative thinking and a welcoming school board we can educate our children, work with families and help our teachers while striving to balance the budget within the current tax base and state funding constraints.

Thank you so much for your time and considering my candidacy.

Sincerely,

Karen Gorsh

‘Customer Satisfaction’ is a core value in the Cedar Rapids School District’s strategic plan. This core value requires school board members to listen when citizens of all backgrounds have concerns and then act in the best interest of every child. If elected, I will be accountable and accessible to the families that depend on our schools.

Mary Meisterling often supports Superintendent Markward’s agenda

“He’s very serious about all of his goals,” she [Meisterling] said. “He’ll say, `Which child do you want to leave behind? Point to that child for me.’-” Mary Meisterling commenting on Superintendent Markward in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, June 17, 2005.

Today’s Cedar Rapids Gazette includes a short interview with Karen Gorsh, District One write-in candidate for the Cedar Rapids School Board. It’s impossible for Karen to go into all the reasons she is running for school board in one short article, but it is safe to say that the lack of interest in the Taylor families, and other working-class neighborhoods, demonstrated by current school board members inspired her to jump in the race.

Meisterling has been a strong supporter of Markward’s performance over the years. What makes anyone think she disagrees with Markward’s agenda when Meisterling’s first words about the Taylor families comes has she faces a challenge to her political future.

The article includes the first public comments Mary Meisterling has made about the Taylor school situation. She attended one meeting with Superintendent Markward and Taylor families but has not crossed the Cedar river to attend any of the Taylor neighborhood meetings.

Actions often speak louder than words.

It’s also important to remember that Mary Meisterling was President of the Cedar Rapids School Board and lead the efforts to hire David Markward back in December of 2003.

Taylor issue drives woman’s write-in bid

By Kristina Andino
The Gazette
CEDAR RAPIDS — What may be the first write-in campaign for a seat on the Cedar Rapids school board in at least a decade has begun.
Karen Gorsh, 50, of 921 Eighth St. SW, unhappy with decisions made about Taylor School after the flood, is running for the three-year District 1 seat in the Sept. 9 election, challenging incumbent Mary Meisterling.
Laurel Day, school board secretary, could not recall another write-in campaign in the school district since she started that role in 1998.
“I feel very strongly about the fact that the Taylor neighborhood and the other working class neighborhoods recovering from the flood don’t seem to have much of a voice on the Cedar Rapids school board,” said Gorsh. She is running to ensure Taylor reopens as a school.
Gorsh has thought about running for school board before, but did not think about it this year until after the July 31 filing deadline.
Here is why: On July 17, she attended a neighborhood meeting during which Superintendent Dave Markward said Taylor may or may not open as a grade school next year. It could also reopen as an early childhood center or administrative offices, he said.
Then a Gazette story said on July 27 that district officials had yanked government trailers the Army Corps of Engineers had included for Taylor from its plans for Kingston Stadium, which now hosts administrative offices.
“The combination of finding out those two things, quite frankly, was a shock,” said Gorsh. “By the time I had processed it … it was too late to get on the ballot.” Meisterling said she also wants Taylor to reopen as an elementary school, but said the students are better served in established schools this year than in trailers.
She noted that it was school administrators — not the school board — who made the quick, short-term decision to close Taylor for 2007-08 in the wake of the flood. “In my mind, Taylor is temporarily suspending their services” for the school year, Meisterling added, and will be back next fall. “Neither (administrators) nor the board can arbitrarily close a school” without a legal process that involves lots of community input, she added.
“For anyone to run for a school board with one issue is really not in the best interest of the community,” she added.

Flood impacts those who relied on Taylor’s community programs

A reprint from the August 25, 2008 Cedar Rapids Gazette. To sum up the article, families losing their homes and school are losing much more than bricks and books. We are losing our sense of community and still the voices on our Cedar Rapids School Board remain almost silent.

By Kristina Andino
The Gazette

(Liz Martin/The Gazette) Trinity Cooper, 7, left, puts her arm around her sister Madison, 5, as they tour Madison’s kindergarten classroom at Harrison Elementary School during open house on Friday, August 22, 2008, with their parents Robin Cooper, back left, and Stacey Cooper, right. The Coopers attended Taylor Elementary and were displaced by the flood, so Madison will be attending kindergarten and Trinity will be in second grade at Harrison this fall.

CEDAR RAPIDS – Stacey Cooper will have to take college classes part time this term because a Taylor Elementary School organization her family relied on cannot operate there this year.The Coopers relied on the TANA (Taylor Area Neighborhood Association) Tiger Cub Club, a before- and after-school program where her two daughters who attended Taylor could go for free. This freed up time and money for Cooper and her husband, Robin, to both work and attend Kirkwood Community College.

But with Taylor closed this school year because of the June flood, connections among its students, families and nearly 20 community organizations that met at the school, 720 Seventh St. SW, have been broken. Many of the organizations’ leaders are trying to match up with those children again. Others have to wait and see what happens with the school, whose students are scattered throughout the city.

About 85 percent of Taylor’s students were from low-income families last year and many relied upon the school-based community organizations. The groups fed and clothed students, offered medical care for the uninsured, and mentored kids. Some helped students, but others, such as the TANA Tiger Cub Club, were aimed at entire families.

That club offered recreational activities to keep children safe and engaged in a positive environment while allowing parents to pursue opportunities to better themselves.

Cooper, 29, said she hoped the club would reopen somewhere quickly and that officials figure out a way to help her get her children — Trinity, 7, and Madisen, 5 — to and from school. Meantime, she said Tuesday, she will take six hours of college classes on the Internet instead of 12 hours on campus.

“We (have been) afraid to lose all of the benefits of having this great, resourceful school and community place under one roof,” Cooper said.

“We’re not going to be able to open on the first day of school,” Karen Gorsh, neighborhood association vice president, said this week. “We’re looking for another home and we hope to be opening very soon.”

School leaders want to hear the Cedar Rapids’ long-term flood plan before deciding if Taylor reopens next year. For now, they are trying to salvage, where possible, the ties Taylor students and families had with groups that served them at school.

Four groups flooded out are on their way to being fully functional elsewhere, Taylor Principal Brian Christoffersen said. Besides the TANA Tiger Cub Club they are Metro Care Connection, the Taylor Family Resource Center and Taylor WIC.

A few other programs will continue but through other schools while about seven are on hold without a building this year, Christoffersen said. Groups on hold include area businesses whose workers volunteered there and provided donations.

Metro Care Connection, for example, is a school-based health center that had six rooms at Taylor — its main hub serving students across the district. The whole Taylor operation is being squeezed into a former teachers’ lounge at Grant Wood school. It has small clinics at Metro and Jefferson high schools, and Wilson school.

“We’ll make it work,” Kim Rimmer, program assistant, said. “We’ve always done a little outreach but will probably expand that this year.”

A state grant of nearly $200,000 used for instruction last year will be shifted to things Taylor students need where they attend now. Examples of what it will be used for could include hiring a community liaison, funding a reading specialist to track Taylor students and producing a newsletter that connects families.

Jay Knight, Taylor parent interventionist, will still be paid from that grant. “There’s not a center right now for things to happen,” Knight said. “At some point, we have to have a place to operate from … in (the Taylor) area.”

Flood Zone — We need to save our neighborhoods…

…And that starts by saving our schools.

All of Cedar Rapids must work together to save the communities devastated by the June Floods. Local and state businesses, our City Council, county government, non-profit agencies have all been working to help our community. But what about our elected representatives on the Cedar Rapids School Board?

The First Step: Disregard ‘Customer Service’

Superintendent Markward issued this press release — Modulars not an Option for Taylor — on August first indicating that FEMA sponsored modular classrooms were not going to be used to rebuild Taylor Elementary during the 2008-2009 school year. On the same day, Markward was quoted in the Des Moines Register discussing options for Taylor school.

Cedar Rapids school officials acknowledge they are looking at other options for Taylor. One of them is putting an administrative office there, said Superintendent Dave Markward.

“Those questions aren’t as simple as they seem,” he said. “Just trying to put everything back together the way it was may not be the best idea for us in the long term.”

It’s hard to know what to believe when Superintendent Markward rejects FEMA help for Taylor school, and indirectly the Taylor school neighborhood, and then floats the idea of reconfiguring an important community asset into administrative space.

All the while Taylor families are struggling to recover from the floods and are now faced with having to send their children to assigned schools (not selected, assigned schools) all across the district. In some cases, Taylor families are being split up and children from the same family are being sent to two or three different elementary schools.

Customer Service is listed as a core value on the Cedar Rapids School District’s 2005-2010 strategic plan, and yet our voices for that customer service, school board members, are staying silent. When will we have a formal response from Cedar Rapids School Board members, like our current District One board member Mary Meisterling, about this arrogant disregard for the low-income and working class families struggling to get back into their Taylor neighborhood homes?

Katrina’s Children

Take a look at the new documentary trailer for the movie Katrina’s Children. We must make sure that Cedar Rapids and our schools work harder to make the lives of our children better than before the floods.