'Promise' supporters seeking answers
This new year most likely will not bring about one opportunity some in Davenport’s graduating class were hoping for: a free college education.
Last month Ed Winborn, outgoing Davenport mayor, told the city's 12th-graders during an assembly that he would ask the City Council to approve placing the Davenport Promise scholarship program on a ballot referendum for a spring vote "just in time for the class of 2008."
However, days later, a committee of aldermen unanimously voted down his proposal that would have asked voters to reallocate money raised by the city's 1-cent sales tax to pay for the scholarship program. The reason? Too many unanswered questions, aldermen said.
Now, incoming Mayor Bill Gluba is putting a priority on finding answers to those questions so the program can move forward. But doing so will take time, he said.
Gluba hopes to get support from the new City Council to form a new “blue ribbon” committee of appointed community members during its goal-setting meeting later this month, he said. They will be charged with finding answers to questions such as what other funding options exist, who will administer and oversee the program, how it will affect the city’s budget and whether private donors exist, among others.
“These questions need to be addressed, answered and evaluated so the public is fully aware of what we want to do in the future,” Gluba said. “This amounts to one of the biggest undertakings of the City of Davenport. It has to be done right, and it has to be done objectively, and it has to be done with the best information we can obtain.”
A task force of school and community leaders has spent more than seven months sketching out how a Promise program would work here. Their efforts created the following proposal: the city would provide scholarships to college-bound Davenport graduates to cover all or part of their tuition and fees, depending on how long they had lived in the city.
Students could go to any accredited college in the country, but would only receive funding that covered the cost of two years at Scott Community College and two years at the University of Iowa. In addition, they could opt to enroll in a vocational or trade program and receive up to $7,500 to cover costs. In return, students would have to spend 100 hours each year they were in high school doing community service.
The task force recommended the city reallocate the money generated by a local-option 1-cent sales tax to fund the Promise, which they expected to cost $12 million once four classes of graduates are enrolled in college.
But they failed to address other areas. The group talked little about who would administer the program and oversee hundreds of student accounts, task force members said. There were few conversations held regarding how the Davenport School District would get students ready who weren’t prepared for college and how area colleges would support them so they wouldn’t drop out, they said.
“The biggest tasks that are left are the tasks people don’t see,” said Julio Almanza, Davenport superintendent. “If this becomes a reality, we have to prepare kids to go to college. But before I do anything else, I need to know if the city is going to move forward.”
Their proposal made mention of seeking out private donors to pay for part or all of the Promise, but they did little legwork to find potential benefactors.
Davenport aldermen also wanted to know what other funding options the group had considered and how reallocating money generated from a 1-cent sales tax would affect their ability to move forward with capital improvement projects, which the tax currently funds.
“We have two-year term cycles, and it’s hard to move something this transformative in that amount of time,” Craig Malin, Davenport city administrator, said in response to why it was rushed to the City Council for a vote.
“The task force has tried to make this apolitical, especially in the middle of an election year,” he said.
Gluba said if aldermen decide to create a formal committee, members will use the previous task force’s work as a starting point. But, he said, there is no guarantee that their work will end in a promise to Davenport graduates. Unlike its predecessors, the new committee will provide objective, unbiased information, he said.
“We are not locked into their proposal,” Gluba said. “This group would be free to look at every option.”
Sheena Dooley can be contacted at (563) 383-2363 or sdooley@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.